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© Emanuel De Sousa

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Tell us a bit about your process/mediums and how you developed your style over time?

Well, this one I have to set it up first. In art school, my degree had the duration of five years: the first three you’d develop Painting, Sculpture and Design, and the last two years, we would choose one of these areas and specialise during the remaining time. 

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When I was 19, during a silk printing class, I developed a severe health condition that put i]me in a hospital bed for over a week; according to the doctors, I had developed a severe contact allergy, which almost killed me, due to the use of turpentines and a number of other chemical cleaning products that did not agree with me. They told me I had to quit any class or activity where I had to breathe or touch such components, therefore I had to quit those areas, especially oil painting. That was gut wrenching as I wanted to follow Painting... a few weeks later I came back to school and had a long conversation with my Painting teacher, professor Isabel Santa-Clara, where she advised me to try out acrylics and see how I felt with that material and medium. And my whole approach to painting had to change, I had to learn everything about acrylics and adapt to them, I had no choice. Over the years, I’ve been developing my own technique, adding a number of thickening gels, pre mixing my paint into large plastic containers and trying every possibility under the sun in order to respect and preserve the feel of oil technique, the look and deliver, the opacity and variation of tone and chromatic impact; not only that, but I had to transform and reshape my paint brushes in order to bring out the edginess and porpoise of my intentions on a canvas. 

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Like so many other artists, I had my idols, from Paula Rego (my all time favourite) to Eric Fischl, Edward Hoper and later on, Lucian Freud, Tai Shan Schieremberg, Neo Rauch and a few others, like the school of Russian Impressionism; and having all these influences, I had to bring this spirit into my acrylic world. 

How important is being vulnerable through the creative process and opening yourself up by showing your work?

Vulnerability is crucial to developing your aesthetic and intelectual honesty, as it reveals the most delicate and precious intimate values and structures of your character as a person and artist. Through these moments that you deliberately have to shed any shielding to get to that core, you will expose your fragility and fear, your work is up there for everyone to see, leaving your ego open to be potentially severely wounded. 

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This sacrificial offering, with your bare and open artistic persona, is a thing of delicate beauty and as terrifying as it is potentially rewarding... unless you pretend to be harder and unreachable than you really are. 

What are some of the subject matters you like to touch on with your work?

Nostalgia is the main motivator for my work during these last 5 years or so, and attached to that like a conjoined twin at the hip, the dream like memories and recollections (always based on true stories, no matter how made up they are). This fascination thrusting  momentum helps me to build up my painted narratives and aesthetic choices (like certain objects, colours, patterns, wardrobe and characters): from the “Bruce Lee shoes” (where I got influenced by the spaghetti Hong Kong kung fu cinematic explosion form the 60s/70s) to “RetroFuture” (based on the sci-fi retro stories, of movies like “2001 a space odyssey” or “Zardoz”) to my most recent project called “Black Hats, White Hats”, where the intrigue is completely subjected to free interpretation and opinion from the viewer, where anything and everything goes, it only depends on your own biases and imagination. 

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