JOSÉ PROJECTO

Since February 2021 that I began to sign my originals with the pseudonym José da Nazaré Projecto, in honor of my mother who died at age 88, not resisting the current pandemic.
Although it is not easy, I wish to officially change my name to José da Nazaré Martins Projecto and thus link my name to both the first and last names of my parents. I justify my intention, so that there are no misconceptions in identifying all the works I performed and eventually I will perform. José Projecto, José Martins Projecto and José da Nazaré Projecto are the same person in my work.

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.

A published interview in the BD Blog on August 28, 2021, add more details about my route as an artist.

I would like to thank my family and all my friends that in some way contributed for spreading my work.

Thank you for your visit.
José Projecto.

2022