Born and raised in Cyprus, he would go on to spend most of his life working and teaching in England, where he famously became embroiled in a 1966 obscenity trial.

[1] He went to England in 1953, working first as a pot washer and waiter at the ABC Tearoom in London's Tottenham Court Road, then moving to Leeds to become a cook at his brother's Greek restaurant.

[3] He became close friends with artists such as Dennis Creffield, Terry Frost, and Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, with the latter two persuading him to move to St Ives in 1959.

Despite luminaries of the art world speaking in Paraskos' defence, including Sir Herbert Read and Norbert Lynton, and messages of support from Britain's Home Secretary Roy Jenkins, he lost the trial and was fined £25.

[5] The curator of a retrospective exhibition of Paraskos' work held in Leeds in 2009, Terence Jones, was quoted as saying, "Ironically the painting in question now hangs in the Tate.

"[6] Following this, Paraskos was invited in 1967 to take part in a group exhibition, Fantasy and Figuration, alongside Pat Douthwaite, Herbert Kitchen, and Ian Dury at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.

'[13] Despite primarily being a painter, in 1992 he began work on an ambitious sculpture wall, in the village of Lempa, on the west coast of Cyprus.

This wall is made of found and recycled everyday objects, and comprises a mixture of abstract and figurative forms, including a King Kong-sized gorilla, a pigmy elephant and a giant pair of welcoming hands.

He called the European Union-backed international arts festival Manifesta 6, scheduled to be staged in Cyprus in 2006, a "capitalist plot to hijack and destroy what is uniquely Cypriot in our culture and replace it with a bland globalism".

[20] In 2017 he was the subject of a major exhibition at Paphos Art Gallery in Cyprus as part of the city's celebrations as European Capital of Culture.