When Joanna Drakos was 20 months old, in 1969, she moved with her parents from Athens, Greece, to Charlotte, N.C. It was a culture shock for the whole family. A few years later, she was dropped into first-grade without being in kindergarten.
Drakos still has the evaluation book that her teacher kept, and in it is written: “Joanna is a very good student she’s slow in completing work and daydreams a little too much but she has made excellent progress.”
“What my parents didn’t know was that she complained constantly about me daydreaming,” Drakos said. “She was trying to fit me into a mold. I didn’t have any exposure, outside of maybe Sesame Street, to the ABCs, so a lot of the kids were way ahead of me. … Because I was so slow in picking up writing and spelling, I was not allowed to go to recess for several months. I was left alone in the classroom while all the other kids got to go play, and I think that was traumatic.”
She said that experience made her feel like something in her brain was broken.
Today, decades later, Drakos is a professional abstract painter and the Reno City Artist for 2026. Memories of first-grade still surface sometimes when she paints, which explains the title of her current show at the Metro Gallery, The Audacity of Daydreaming.
Drakos’s work has a warm luminosity—an appealing brightness of spirit. These canvases, for her, are zones of freedom.
“When I’m painting, that’s where I can be absolutely free,” she said during an interview in her studio. “I do follow rules of design and composition—at least to the best of my abilities—but I enjoy the absolute freedom and the artistic expression that it allows me. … You can’t go into my brain and control me mentally or physically.”
Abstraction, for her, peels away some of the constraints of figurative art—the fealties of representation, perspective, anatomy and so on—but, of course, abstraction doesn’t offer a complete freedom from standards. It’s quite possible to make a bad abstract painting, after all.
A zone of play; a way to process memories
In Drakos’ paintings, colors chase after an impression of glow, of light emanating from the forms at hand. The geometry has been blunted or fogged. In a painting titled “Mental Hopscotch,” appropriately, the squares have a chalky looseness—providing just enough structure for a zone of play: boxes to dance around in, teeter, balance, make the next move.
In another painting, “The Hazy Days,” rectilinear forms vie for territory with ovoid ones. The rectangles are somewhat pacified, in lighter pastel shades. Where the rectangles abut each other, there’s some give-and-take between neighbors—the boundaries are smeary or textured, or they allow some underpainted tone to fill in the ragged gaps. The title is an indication of some of the memories that passed through her mind as she was working on it.
“When I’m painting, my brain is processing, and it’s usually processing memories from my past,” Drakos said. In this case, what came to her were hazy days spent at the beach as a child, making sandcastles. Her paintings aren’t “about” her memories, or depictions of them. Memories are parallel mental activities that infuses the work without determining it.
The less geometric, more organic “I Lose Myself in Blue” is a meditation on the titular color, which does not—at least to my eye—suggest a body of water; the irregular expanse of blue that overwhelms the middle third of the painting seems less like a substance than an energy. Composed of swooping swirls and scratched over here and there with thin scribbles, the blue projects vitality. One can feel the tension between skill and a deliberate ceding of control over the marks.
For Drakos, that tension is where the human presence can be felt in the work—where the painting comes alive.
Joanna Drakos: The Audacity of Daydreaming is on view at the Metro Gallery in Reno City Hall through Aug. 28. A reception is scheduled from 5 to 7 p.m., Thursday, July 30. Drakos will also have a booth at the Reno Tahoe International Art Show at the Reno-Sparks Convention Center from Sept. 17-20, and a solo exhibition, The Bitter and the Sweet, at the Depot Gallery in Sparks, from Nov. 7-28. To see more of her work, visit joannadrakos.com and follow joannadrakos.art on Instagram.