After starting a family, I was ready to get back into something but I wasn't sure what. I started painting as a way to clear my head and fell in love with colour and the raw expression of putting something down on canvas.

I find drawing as the most effective way to communicate what I see and feel – for me, it feels like the best way to capture the most difficult or extreme content. At the same time, it seems to be the most accessible form of art for many people.

When I’m painting, I love getting lost in the details and the challenge of creating an illusion that explains how I feel about what I see. I’m fascinated by light and how it describes form, changes colours, is reflected back, and disappears into the dark depths of a background.

When I began taking pictures, digital technology was still many years away. I had to truly learn, not only, how the camera worked but also darkroom techniques and printing. I immediately loved the whole process; f stop, depth of field, ISO, film developing, printing, choice of photo paper, etc, and how all those elements together could and would completely change the mood in an image.

I am a 27-year-old Brazilian-born artist who paints portraits that tell psychological narratives unique to our time. My paintings are influenced by my non-verbal struggles as an immigrant, which pushed me to make careful observations of people’s bodily expressions while trying to understand them.

Having established my medical career, I saw an opportunity to rebuild my connection with art with purpose. Over the last 2 years, I have been defining my style and understanding myself as an artist.

Only during my studies, I discovered the phenomenon of a darkroom, which gave me an incomparable and direct exploration of the medium of photography. With one’s own eyes we can then observe a single image appearance, which we are a creator of – a person who decides about a final form of the produced picture.

Growing up, I loved to record the world around me and express my feelings. Not once did my parents question my interest in art or indicate that it was not a viable career to pursue. I was lucky in that respect and forever grateful for their unwavering support.

As I got older I became more skilled, with an increasing desire to make stuff. This trait was obviously innate in my DNA. I instinctively enjoyed creating things, inventing, building, drawing, whatever – I liked to make things, it didn’t matter what.

I love the language of the smile and I can communicate with it anywhere. I worked for almost 20 years as a casting producer where people and their diversity were my work material. Searching, looking, interpreting, stripping them is my talent. I'm a curious person, I like to move between ambiguous environments and people and dive into worlds different from mine. I'm always moving, mostly towards my inner self. The quest for self-knowledge is my biggest job in the last 50 years.

There’s no specific thing that inspires me to create artworks – it’s mostly borne of a desire to deal with the flux and chaos of the world we inhabit; to find a quiet resolution to all that. It’s not necessary that this becomes a reflection of society, as we are sometimes apt to believe is the function of art.