My Father was born in Mytilene, (George Hadjiantoniou) capital of the island of Lesvos, the largest of the Aegean Islands of Greece. My Mother (Edith Coez) was born in Creil, France. A large town just north of Paris. They met in Montreal and moved to Toronto. I came around in 1978, May 2nd to be exact! Anyway I've lived here all my life, Love Toronto, great city! Of course I’ve traveled to Europe and plan on going many times. But I must not go off topic.
At a really early age (around 5 years old) I had this knack, ability if you will, to draw and paint. My mother, bare witnessed to this ability and enrolled me in art classes on the week-end to further my studies. By high school I said to myself....."Well, I've got this talent...I might as well use it" I decided to study animation for a while because it seemed like a right fit. After all I did want to profit from this talent somehow. After High School, I was accepted at Sheridan College for Art Fundamentals and then the following year I did the summer program in Animation. To my surprise, I disliked animating! The labour of 30 frames just to make a pendulum move right and left was too much to bare! I also found that a lot of my friends who were already in the animation field were having a tough time finding work, I decided animation wasn't for me and I was sort of in a bind on what exactly I was going to do professionally.
I took two years off to refocus my direction. I found work at ICE in 1999 as a production assistant. Moving cameras, serving coffee and buying props for the company's many productions. At ICE I met a lot of people who had diverse fields in web design, film, post production and Illustration! There was also a need from time to time to do storyboards on a freelance basis. So I started storyboarding for ICE whenever they needed drawings done. After a year I decided Illustration was the route to go! and applied to Sheridan and the Ontario College of Art and Design. I decided on OCAD because it was much closer for me and it was in the city. Where most of my clients were anyway. I have now completed the degree program in Illustration and so far so good!
What the future holds for me I don't want to know. Right now I do a lot of storyboards and I'm breaking into retail design/architecture work, conceptual design, product design and art direction. Maybe I'll do a masters in art, but for now let's get the degree finished up and see what happens! I hope you enjoyed my little anecdote of myself and I'll finish off by explaining the origins of my last name...Hadjiantoniou. Well according to my Baba (Dad in Greek):
“the Hadji part of my last name is referenced to the Hadji accolade assumed by Greek Orthodox pilgrims being baptized, as St John was, in the Jordan River, and registered so by the keepers of the then social register of names. A remnant of the Ottoman occupation of Greece (1453-1821/1912) , and a Christian emulation of the occupier’s religious practices by the then Christians raised to pre-eminent social status. A, now, and thankfully, defunct practice and time for inventing a new family name that will be good for another five hundred years”
Say ?Antoniou?, as many other Greeks, meaning perhaps ?son of Anton? or why not Helleniou? or Elleniou? to mean perhaps son of the Greek? or probably of Greek decent?. Is it not a reason to come back and check this site out again when some serious decisions are going to be reported! Thank you for your time and feel free to drop me an email with any questions.
aleX