Close Window

Antonio Machado

"I've always liked art, especially painting. My childhood was spent amid books, some on painting and beautifully illustrated, that were part of my father's small library. There was also my Uncle Alfredo, a great designer, sensitive artist, and self-taught painter whom I admired and tried to imitate.

"For most of my life, we lived in Niterói, set along the shores of beautiful Guanabara Bay with ports, shipyards, beaches, islands, bays and mountains covered with tropical forests, mountainous areas with a pleasant climate, sandbanks and lagoons in the ocean area, wild beaches, sand dunes and colonies of fishermen.

"I believe that anybody would be enchanted with all that natural beauty, and even today it inspires me.

"The need to survive and earn a living led me to practice art in several ways, which I believe were fundamental for my professional formation.

"While still an adolescent, I hand-painted Christmas cards by hand with gouache. Then I went to work at an engineering office, practicing several specialties in technical drawing. I worked as designer of interiors and decoration, then as an illustrator and also in advertising layout.

"All this experience the area of design gave me the resources and an incentive for practicing fine arts exclusively.

"At the end of the seventies, I began to paint as self taught artist and I was to sell some paintings before meeting my first teacher, Aluízio Valle, already a senior and a wise person, consecrated to the arts.

"Aluízio encouraged me to continue painting and he also spoke to me about the need for technical improvement that I could acquire by frequenting Professor Celmo's classes or seeking advice with painter Tolentino, both great artists in the city where I lived. And so I did, thrilled at the possibility of becoming a qualified professional and accomplishing my dream of being an artist, one I'd harbored since childhood.

"Maestro Aluízio had been a disciple of Pedro Bruno, a great artist formed in the mid 19th century of neoclassical-romantic tendencies.

"After years of great dedication to my studies, I rethought my painting. That, even if I was able to be do more with the techniques I'd recently learned, I couldn't dispense with the purity and creativity of the autodidactic period, either. As a result, I began a series of studies with views toward abstraction in my painting. I painted countless modernized pictures, abstract, expressionist, impressionist, cubist, in a series, until I arrived at a language of my own, representative of all those experiences, yet exclusively at the service of the creative pulse.

"My permanent observation of nature, my philosophical reflection and experimentation guided my last stages, in which my paintings were always preceded by pencil sketches, pen and ink or watercolors.

"Now my studio is located in Itaipuaçu in the municipal district of Maricá, close to Niterói beach but isolated from the metropolis by the forest reserve of the Serra da Tiririca that surrounds the sandbank. It forms a compound of forests, sands and unspoiled beach with water, pure air and many birds. That privileged location, where peace and safety can be enjoyed, stimulates creativity, it facilitates inspiration and the efficiency of painting.

"Imagination, the past memory of the beaches of Niterói and the studies in the shipyards, where generations of painters were formed, spread by work in the studio... these all provide material for the works that I accomplish now."