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As a young Greek-Cypriot, Chris spent his youth roaming the countryside around his rural home near the town of Famagusta in Cyprus. After his father passed away whilst Chris was still young, his mother and grandmother had to work to support a brood of young children. This left Chris alone to pretty much run wild. Cyprus is a hot place — perfect for a boy fond of the outdoors, which is exactly where Chris spent most of his days, climbing trees, hunting or fishing, and inevitably precipitating any amount of mischief.
Isolated from most pop-culture influences, Chris and his friends needed to be creative in their own ways. They made toy weapons, and transformed acres of orange groves into battlegrounds, where armies of boys would wage epic battles in which Spartans fought Persians and Greeks were pitted against Trojans, as well as the more dangerous and therefore more fun game of playing cat and mouse with the armoured cars that policed the curfew which had been imposed as a result of the period’s political unrest.
However, troubled by the violent political unrest besetting Cyprus at the time, and desperate to find a better life for herself and her four children, his mother moved the family to London in search of a more secure future when Chris was twelve.
It wasn’t an easy time for Chris, transplanted to a new culture, a new country, away from his friends, unable to speak a word of the native language, with little of his precious sunshine. Feeling isolated, Chris sought solace in solitary pursuits and, in doing so, discovered art. Until then art was not something he had found particularly interesting, not in Cyprus anyway, where the outdoors beckoned.
But there had already been hints of his new-found interest: the shadow-puppet theatre crafted from scavenged scraps of cellophane and cardboard, and his love for the art of exotic birds printed on cardboard trading cards.
In Cyprus, Chris and his family had also frequently attended one of the local open-air cinemas, where his father had worked as a projectionist. He never forgot the impact of seeing films such as The Ten Commandments, Alexander the Great, The Crimson Pirate and The Flame and the Arrow for the first time. These influences, and later the classic Lawrence of Arabia, would remain the first real inspiration for his artwork.
Chris began drawing shortly after he moved to London, at which point he discovered the world of comics. Within their pages, filled with such fantastical art, Chris could visit exotic places and experience feats of heroism and might. Unable to then read English, Chris credits comics — along with his school studies — as his principal method for learning the language.
Not surprisingly, Chris’s favourite strip was ‘Heros the Spartan’, drawn by his favourite comic artists, Frank Bellamy and Luis Bermejo, which ran in the legendary UK comic The Eagle. Chris’s other major influences include Don Lawrence and R. Embleton, amongst many others, whose work he still admires today. Proper art materials were beyond his reach, but he was kindly given large sheets of wrapping paper by the local butcher, and even larger paper rolls were available cheaply from the wallpaper shop.
