Panicos Michaelides doctor, artist, citizen of the world passed away May 21, 2005 at the age of eighty. He led a full life with rich experiences and dreams fulfilled.

 

We ask his friends to join us to celebrate his life as a professional orthopedist, surgeon, artist and as a loving husband, father and grandfather.

 

Until a year before his passing Panicos was active in electronic communication. We would like to thank all his friends and fellow enamelist his family Maroula, Dimis, Evis, Susan, Marios for supporting and encouraging his work

 

 

Below, an obituary by journalist Vivienne Ladommatou.

 

World-renowned enamellist Dr Panicos Michaelides (1924 – 2005)

 

There are but a celebrated few Cypriot artists with the international stature of world-renowned enamelist Panicos Michaelides. Dr. Michaelides’ death last week in Limassol leaves Cyprus with one less original thinker, one less brilliant craftsman, and one less charming gentleman of the old school.

 

I first saw Dr Michaelides' work in the late eighties when I interviewed him at his Limassol studio on his return from Japan where he had received an important international award for a piece of enamel jewelry. He was both a technician and an artist and brilliant at both. His ability to be so clinically precise and artistically liberated in the same moment was his signature in his work and in his life; he was on every level the expression of science and art as a unified whole.

 

Panicos Michaelides was born in Limassol in 1924 and studied medicine in Glasgow. He was a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh and retired as consultant surgeon and head of orthopedics at Limassol General Hospital in 1984.

 

His retirement from medicine gave him time to discover and experiment with the art of enamel, which would become his enduring passion for the next twenty years, and his greatest legacy. He studied enameling at the Sir John Cass School of Art in London where his tutors were among the contemporary enameling illuminati. He immersed himself in study and experimentation and never stopped challenging and evolving his art, eventually achieving international recognition and acclaim from his peers and several important awards for his designs, including the Grand Prix Award at the 13th Cloisonné Jewellery Contest at the Tokyo International Enamel Exhibition 2000. He was also a published authority on the history of enamel in Cyprus.

 

 

Carl Jung said, “Art is innate in the artist, like an instinct that seizes and makes a tool out of the human being. The thing in the final analysis that wills something in him is not he, the personal man, but the aim of the art.”

 

Panicos Michaelides was above all an artist; the human tool of his art whether as a surgeon or an enamelist. Arguably his greatest artistic accomplishment is the thoroughness with which he expressed his art - precision and design and the unity of science and art - at all levels, right down to the very careers through which he chose to express it.

 

Vivienne Ladommatou, May 28 2005.