JOSÉ PROJECTO

JOSÉ PROJECTO

I keep plenty of good memories from an urban childhood, deeply influenced by my father and grandfather’s countryside activity. The first contacts with nature I remember, I resembled a scared animal out of its environment, fearing everything that was strange to me. However, the long countryside summer vacations with my grandparents, helped me to face the unknown and develop a huge passion for nature, which still remains today.
Fascinated by the colours and shapes of everything around me, aspiration to draw and paint increased with time, at first marked by a strong imagination, where fiction and reality mixed together under the influence of the comic books I enthusiastically consumed during my youth. When I was six years old, my father offered me my first "Falcon" exemplar (Portuguese comic collection from 60's and 70's), called O Segredo do Deserto, magazine that played a crucial role in my addiction to Comics. I started in the editorial world thanks to small comic editions published by "Agência Portuguesa de Revistas" and later, “Editorial Futura". At the age of twenty two, I started changing fiction for reality, taking over the values that lasted from my childhood, dedicating the next years exclusively to painting, illustration and nature contemplation. Being used to the black and white world of my comic pages, I needed to explore a technique that would better represent my wildlife observations, and I ended up establishing a good relation with watercolours and acrylics, also using gouache in illustration. The passion for nature photography was and still is the starting point of many of my works, not being able to separate it from painting and being most of my originals imagined from my camera's screen or from an optic lens.

Though I recognize I have produced several works related to scientific illustration, my painting only intends to share with others the admiration I feel for nature, and the need to appeal to its conservation. Wildlife painting deeply influenced my development through contemporary painters like the Canadian Robert Bateman and the Belgian Carl Brenders. I must also refer Camille Corot (1796-1875), one of the nineteenth's century painters I most appreciate. In Portugal, I prefer to identify myself with one of the most beautiful periods of the Portuguese art history known as Naturalism, movement that gave birth to Naturalistic Painting. Though wildlife representation wasn't one of the most evident characteristics of that period paintings, nature had a particular highlight, as one can see in the life work of the Portuguese painters José Malhoa (1855-1933 ) or Silva Porto (1850-1893).

I would like to thank my family and all my friends that in some way contributed for spreading my work.
If you wish, download the PDF file, about my work and career as an illustrator and painter.

Thank you for your visit.
José Projecto.

2009