With this painting I'm working on right now, I had a question about what I should use for which medium I should use for the glazing so I actually ended up talking to somebody at Gamblin because I use their paint and their mediums and she was super helpful in terms of giving me a recommendation for which material was best to use and even on their website you can schedule a call with them if you go to their help section and I was just like oh my gosh this is amazing.

I think I've always had animals in my life so I've always just been connected through nature and through them and my family and I spent a lot of time traveling around the world when I was younger and I got to pick really extreme places; so we went to the jungles of Peru and the savannah in Africa and I would always like drag my poor mom and dad to these really tough places and just being able to access and see that wildlife was always super special to me. So, learning about environmental damages and climate change just took hold of me and I just haven't focused on anything else since.

I have had a lifelong passion for drawing and painting. I have been using coloured pencils since I was a child, I have always liked painting. I have been using pencils since I was 10 years old. My first drawings at that age were with graphite, coloured pencils, and pen, I liked drawing animals so much. I spent long hours drawing and painting for myself, my school friends and each painting was a new adventure for me.

Facing an empty white canvas requires bravery followed by decisive brush strokes, splashes, and expressive marks. With traditional media, I can express myself not only in figurative terms but especially in an expressionistic style.

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.