'Bampoudas'.
Zoe Skiadaresi (Ζωή Σκιαδαρέση) was a Greek painter, who spent part of her early career working on comics and illustration.
Early life
Skiadaresi was born in 1931 in Kalamata, a city on the Peloponnese peninsula. She got her artistic education at the Athens School of Fine Arts (1952-1959), where the painters Yiannis Moralis, Spyros Papaloukas and George Vakalos were her teachers.
Tam-Tam
By 1950 she was already in Athens, and contributing to Greece's first actual comic magazine, Tam-Tam Illustrated Adventures, by Themos Andreopoulos. The 18 issues contained comic stories based on popular films. The title's other contributors were Konstantinos Rabatzis, Byron Aptosoglou, Potis Stratikis, Sofia Mavroidi-Papadaki and Stefanos Apostolou. Skiadaresi provided the art for issues #4, #10, #11, #13, #14, #16 and #18.
Brávo
By 1964 she was also present in Brávo with a couple of more primitively drawn gag pages about a black kid called 'Bampoudas'. While the gags seem to portray the same boyish pranks as typical kids' comics of the time, the depiction of the main character would certainly be deemed racially offensive to modern standards. Skiadaresi also made illustrations for books with stories and fairy tales by Antigoni Metaxa, better known as "auntie Lena" of the legendary Greek 1950s and 1960s radio show 'Kid's Hour'.
Painter
Despite these excursions in more commercial art forms, Zoe Skiadaresi spent the rest of life painting. She specialized in portraits and landscapes, incorporating the old Greek, Byzantine and post-Byzantine traditions with modern elements. Her works are in the collections of the National Gallery, the Gallery of Kalamata, the National Bank, the Vorre Museum and in private collections in Greece and abroad. The Museum of Byzantine Culture in Thessaloniki held an overview exposition of her paintings in September 2019. Zoe Skiadaresi passed away in 2014.
