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Chris knew what he wanted to do: become a professional artist. With that goal, and armed with burgeoning artistic talent, a growing command of English and increasing confidence, he began to emerge from his shell.
When he left school in 1966, his art teacher, Mr Huew Gordon, helped him to apply to the local art school, Hornsey College of Art, then a renowned hotbed of political radicalism. Chris had wanted to study illustration, so he could learn to draw the heroic characters he had seen depicted in both Bellamy’s art and his own imagination.
However, much to his disappointment, Hornsey did not offer such a course. He was left with the choice of studying either Fine Art or Scientific and Technical Illustration. As the Fine Art taught at Hornsey was modern impressionism, not at all the traditional figurative style Chris wanted to learn, neither choice was particularly attractive.
He chose Technical Illustration because it involved learning about various drawing disciplines, airbrushing and perspective, but during his first year at Hornsey it became obvious that the course, with all its rigid disciplines, would never enable him to flourish artistically. Consequently, Chris began illustrating scenes of heroic fantasy anyway, and developed his own comic strips filled with scenes of epic battles and heroism.
Fortunately, there were some tutors at Hornsey who were sympathetic to his cause, which gave Chris the chance to express his own style. He also gained his first job assisting one of his tutors, Colin Rattray, in illustrating a book dedicated to the first American moon landings in 1969.
Browsing in his local second-hand bookshop one day, Chris found an imported American paperback edition of Conan the Conqueror, written by 1930s novelist Robert E. Howard. It was not the title or the subject matter that interested Chris, but the cover art — a painting by American artist Frank Frazetta. In today’s fantasy art community, Frazetta and his distinctive style are iconic.
The cover of Conan the Conqueror — an imposing figure on horseback, charging right out of the picture, bloodstained sword in hand — was everything Chris aspired to artistically. As he struggled to identify his artistic ideals and goals, Frazetta was more than an influence. He was a confirmation.
Chris bought the book, raced home and began reading through the pages, discovering in the process a wholly different realm of fantasy from the ones he was familiar with. Through the character of Conan, the freebooting wanderer of the Hyborian Age, Chris was offered a world view diametrically opposed to the classical Greek and Roman heroes he had loved so much.
As a child in Cyprus, Chris had been immersed not just in ancient history but also in classical mythology. Odysseus and Achilles, the legends of the Trojan War and The Iliad, were no less real than the Spartans or Alexander the Great. But, having gazed at Frazetta’s art and read about Conan’s exploits, Alexander and Achilles began to look a little tame. Instead, he decided to paint sword-wielding, rippling-muscled barbarians, cutting down their enemies with impunity.