I vividly remember my fear of the air-raid sirens at night, my mother wrapping me in a blanket and running with me into a shelter, and the hair-raising, drawn-out cry of “I’m hungry” heard on the streets. Also the terror I felt, when I was small, of the Germans with their high, brilliantly polished, black boots, and the dead people on the street. But we were lucky. We survived.

I will remember as long as I live my father’s tranquility throughout it all, an optimistic scientist and inventor, ideologue and romantic. My mother was of a warm artistic nature, an amateur painter with a great deal of talent. They were deeply in love with each other right to the end of their lives. He was the son of the numismatist Ioannis Svoronos and she, Maro Pappa, originally from Constantinople, came from a family that boasted many artists.

At the homes of various aunts I occasionally met the painters Sofia Laskaridou and Thaleia Flora-Karavia.

We had works of theirs in our home, but the painting I first admired was that of my mother, enthralled by her colors.

I began to paint as a small child. When I turned fourteen, I took my first formal lessons at the studio of my aunt and uncle, Giorgos and Eleni Zongolopoulos.

The studio was frequented by the sculptor Apartis, the painter Eleni Stathopoulou, and the musician Manolis Dounas, all of them passionate about their art. They weren’t interested in money. They all lived rather penuriously in fact.

I’ll never forgot Giorgos Zongolopoulos looking for cigarette butts under the plaster sculpture where he had stuck them for times of need.

I can hear them talking among themselves about their work. Despite the fact they lived during a wretched and anomalous political period, dominated by the occupation, they were always in high spirits and played guitar and sang. Another thing I remember is Apartis, who was always playing practical jokes. I’ll never forget the time he dumped plastic cockroaches, which he had bought at Minion, in the food of my squeamish Aunt Eleni and the bedlam that followed.

In addition to the lessons I was taking during that period, I also posed for a marble tombstone for Giorgos Zongolopoulos, instead of laurel I was holding...a paint-brush. The charm of a entire era that was to disappear; who could have known then that in twenty to twenty-five years we would see the end of all those ideologies, and the demythologization of art, with artists entering the marketplace and everything connected to that.

In 1956 I entered the studios of the Athens School of Fine Arts and for the first year studied under Spyros Papaloukas; the rest of the time I studied under Yannis Moralis. I graduated in 1960, and received a commendation for “Plein-air studies, the semi-nude, a prize for composition and the Georgios Bouzianis Prize”.

In the meantime, Professor Pavlos Mylonas opened new horizons at the School when he assumed the helm in 1959, offering students various new opportunities; he sent us to Lesbos, for example, to study and copy folk painting, architecture and Byzantine wall paintings.

There I worked with Demosthenis Kokkinidis for 3-4 months. I had known Kokkinidis by sight for eleven years, as we lived in the same neighborhood, Neo Faliro; we then both studied under Moralis for the final two years at the School.

We first really met in Lesbos, fell in love and in 1962 married.

The early years proved to be very difficult for us, both painters. In order to deal with our economic problems, along with our painting we also worked as designers. We created our very own kind of artistic article, the painted fabrics, which were destined for female clothing. But we never abandoned our painting. Fortunately, we had enough free time, as the clothing business was seasonal.

At the start, I worked with oil and acrylic. Later, I added special printing pigments for the fabrics. In many of my works from that period (1966-1979), there is an influence from these colors, and the textures and the wealth of motifs offered by them. I also started doing constructions then, as well as relief surfaces made of fabric and wood and of large dimensions.

In 1967 there was a coup d’etat in Greece and once more we found ourselves living under a fascist occupation, albeit it domestic. As an indication of our protest, we and other artists refused to exhibit.

But something pleasant happened to us as well. We had Katerina, our daughter, the best thing that could have happened to us.

In 1976 Mimis was elected professor and gave up his work with painted fabrics.

In 1978 I did the same thing. I have since devoted myself exclusively to my painting, setting aside all other activity and taking part in group exhibitions. During this period I have gone back to oil on canvas. It is a material I truly love for the depth it furnishes to the colors and for its plasticity. I felt that oil paint is all I needed and I didn't want to use any other material.

I worked steadily for some time, and exhibited this work in two solo exhibitions at the Medusa Gallery, in 1989 and 1992.

The following years, I also did works in mixed techniques, in addition to the oils.

I showed this work at the Nees Morfees Gallery in 1997.

I go on working. In 2001 I had two solo shows in Thessaloniki, at the ZM and Metamorphosis Galleries.

In the meantime the tragic events in Serajevo, Afghanistan and most recently Iraq, have troubled our life. These events are particularly disturbing for us as we grew up with bombardment ourselves and have experienced the travail of the refugee and deprivation.

My work has, naturally enough, been affected by all this. Especially since it is taking place in the Middle East. That is why I am now using mixed techniques, a wealth of fabrics, and the microcosm of nature, and whatever can help me enter the world of myth and fairy tale.

In many of my works, behind the myth is suggestively hidden something threatening. In others the black figures are in plain sight, showing the presence of the tragic element.

This work I exhibited at my own individual booth at Artathina, 2001.

The largest part of this work was later exhibited at the Astra Gallery as well.

In 2002, at the initiative of the art historian Andreas Ioanidis, there was a retrospective of seventy of my works held at the Cultural Events Hall of the Municipality of Patras.