What passes
through the house
stays in the story.

I'm sitting across from a client in a glass tower somewhere in Brazil, doing exactly what I was raised to do — and I keep asking myself a question I don't know how to stop: Is this really enough?

I am the younger son of a Portuguese immigrant family in Brazil. My father is a photographer. He has been documenting our family since before I was born. “This is your first kiss,” he told me once, showing me a photograph. When I was ten, he decided I should understand the value of work — so I started filming weddings and events beside him. I haven't stopped working since.

I was raised on strong values: work hard, do your best, study, make your family proud. So I did. I became a great student, then a great business consultant at one of the best firms in Brazil. Fast growth, smart people, salary going up.

I was very good. But it was not enough.

I had always dreamed of being an artist. To paint like Frida Kahlo. To write like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. But I believed it was a matter of talent — and the talent for art had been given to other people, not to me.

Then I started traveling for my job, city after city, and something shifted.

To be great was never a matter of talent. It was focus. It was hard work. It was a choice.

Every person — including me — is born as an artist.

I realized I was never going to be ready to jump. And to really face the fear of falling, I had to jump anyway.

I walked the Camino de Santiago. I put one foot in front of the other until the noise of the office was behind me. I arrived in Portugal with a different question — not “what am I good at?” but “what do I want to make?”

I founded StartArt Residency in a house beside a river in the north of Portugal. I teach photography here. I run art workshops, lead wine tours of the property, host game nights that go past midnight. Every year, forty to fifty people come — writers, painters, photographers, people who have been carrying an unfinished project for years — and in one week, they often create what would have taken months alone at home.

“More than profiles, we welcome people.”

That is what I say when someone arrives. Because it's what I needed to hear.

My father has been photographing our family since before I was born.

I'm still in the frame.

I wasn’t looking for it. I didn’t choose it. I just — by accident, by chance — walked in one day. I liked it a lot. I got good basics. And since then, somehow, yoga was always in my life.

I think about that sometimes. How the things that stay with you longest are the ones you never saw coming.

I’m Polish, and I’ve just started teaching yoga — which means this stay at StartArt has been two things at once: a chance to practise, and a chance to learn how to teach better. When you move from practitioner to teacher, something shifts. Suddenly you’re responsible for someone else’s grounding, not just your own.

Yoga gives me happiness. It gives me grounding and a feeling of stability. It’s been in my life for so long that I struggle to imagine myself without it — not because I decided that’s who I am, but because it just kept showing up, and I kept saying yes.

“I think I haven’t chosen that — it just happened.”

I found StartArt on Workaway. I came as a volunteer — no particular plan, just open to it.

I loved it.

So this year I came back. For over a month. And I’m already planning to return next year.

Some places are like that. You arrive without a plan and find yourself choosing them again and again, even when the choosing takes effort — a flight from Poland, a month away from home. The choice doesn’t feel like a cost. It feels like returning to something that was already yours.

Morning yoga on the concentric-tile floor, the light flooding in from the open wall. Hikes through the forest. Swims in the river. Long dinners that drift into the evening with people who all, in their own way, showed up here by accident and decided to stay.

I didn’t choose yoga. It happened.

I didn’t plan to come back to StartArt. That happened too.

There are things in life that don’t arrive as decisions. They arrive as chances — small, easy to miss. A class you could have skipped. A listing you almost scrolled past.

You show up. You like it a lot.

And before you know it, you’re already planning your third visit.

I put them there. One scene per note. Each one a moment in the novel I’ve been carrying inside me — a story set in London and Toronto, about friendship over decades, and about first love, and how first love never really leaves you.

I didn’t know that was going to happen when I arrived. I came looking for time to write. What I found was something harder to name.

My name is Rajinderpal. I’ve lived across an ocean from where I was born — from India to Britain to Canada — and those crossings ended up inside my first novel. However Far Away is about migration, belonging, the quiet distances that accumulate between a person and the place they came from.

Now I’m working on a second one. Writing a novel is strange work. You can carry the whole thing inside you for years and still struggle to get the first sentence out. The noise of a city. The demands of a life. The friction between the writer you are and the writer you need to be.

My advice, if anyone asks, is simply: start. Get words on paper, even if they feel wrong. The wrong words push you toward the right ones.

But what I’d never quite had before was the right window.

StartArt gave me the window. A real one — in a sun-filled room — and I covered it in sticky notes. The novel that had been a fog became a map.

Long walks by the river. Three meals a day made with care. Uninterrupted afternoons with no one asking anything of me. And around me: artists, filmmakers, photographers, visual artists — all of us learning from each other’s process, all of us quietly making things.

“I’ve probably accomplished more in three weeks here at StartArt than I would in a few months at home.”

Not because home is bad. But because a room where nothing else is asked of you is rarer than it sounds.

On the last day, I sat in front of a mural.

Behind me on the wall, painted beside the face of Malala Yousafzai: “One child, one teacher, one pen, and one book can change the world.”

I’m not sure I had thought about why books matter in a while. The second novel had become a project, a task, a thing to be completed. Writing about first love had started to feel like work.

That day, in front of that wall, I remembered.

That’s what StartArt gives you in the end. Not just time. Not just nature. It gives you back the first love that made you start.

The sticky notes are still on the window.

Through the forehead, between the eyes, over the lips, into the throat. Like a column of light split open through a face.

I put it there.

I came to StartArt in a t-shirt with David Bowie’s lightning bolt on it. I work barefoot. My studio is a folding table with a bin liner draped over it, and on it, a small army of Tupperware boxes filled with paint — red, pink, turquoise, the cheerful coral that becomes a cheekbone.

I’m from Madrid. I’ve been painting murals for twenty years. I call myself an illustrator, a little painter. The walls are what matter to me.

I love murals because they let you be part of a community. You offer your point of view to a place. You share your world with the people who pass through it — openly, in the street, in the light.

“The painting doesn’t belong to you anymore. It belongs to whoever looks at it.”

This one is about energy.

Not the kind you measure in watts. The energy that everybody has inside — that you can create for yourself, that you can find inside you. It can be light. It can be love. Every person carries it. Most people haven’t discovered it yet.

I had been carrying the face for a long time. Three metres of it — pink and purple cheekbones, blue across the chin, two calm eyes looking out. And that yellow line running straight down the centre. Like a spine made of dawn. The energy made visible.

What I didn’t have was the wall.

The first thing I did was roll white over black. Slow, patient, almost ceremonial. The wall has to be empty before it can be anything.

For days, it was just colour appearing. A green sketch of an eye. Hot pink at the top. The vertical band of yellow that didn’t yet mean anything.

I didn’t explain. I just kept painting.

Late one afternoon I stepped back.

The face had arrived.

I changed into a clean shirt. I walked back in barefoot, stood in front of my own work, and tilted my head up to look at it.

If you’ve been carrying something inside you that is three metres tall — and you’ve been making it smaller to fit your apartment, your city, your everyday life — there is a wall here. There is the right kind of light. There is the sort of week where the thing you’ve been carrying finally gets to be the size it always was.

I came with the line in my head. I left it on the wall.

I’m retelling the stories of my dad. For a long time they had been living in my head, waiting for somewhere big enough to unfold.

The house gave me that. It literally gave me the physical space to let my ideas come to life.

It’s big enough that you can find your own quiet time. But it’s also the kind of place where you bump into other people and end up doing things together.

On the very first day, I had barely arrived when someone said, “Okay, let’s go to the river.” It’s a one-minute walk. And then you’re standing in this beautiful scenery.

“I felt like all the workload of the last months was just dropping from my shoulders.”

What I didn’t expect was the people. Like-minded, creative people who will turn to you over lunch and say, “Hey, here’s a blank canvas. Do you want to paint with us by the river?”

I came to write. I ended up painting too.

It was a lovely experience.

Dona Custódia lives next door to StartArt. She keeps a close relationship with the land, and every so often she walks over with whatever it has given her — persimmons, passion fruit, whatever is ripe that week. Residents come and go. The fruit keeps arriving.

Victoria Akino noticed.

Victoria is a muralist from Hidalgo, Mexico. She first came to the house in 2025 and left two murals behind. This year she came back — and this time she wanted the wall to say something about the place itself.

The result is the Mural das Colheitas — the Harvest Mural. Ears of corn. A hand holding a bunch of grapes. Vine leaves set with azulejo patterns. And a woman’s face, eyes closed, painted in the vivid colours Victoria carries with her from Mexico.

It is a tribute to the women who have worked the fields of Vila Verde for generations — usually without anyone painting them.

“Es muy importante que también se vea esa otra parte.”

The village noticed too. O Vilaverdense, Vila Verde’s local newspaper, came to see the wall and told its story: a Mexican artist, a house by the river, a tribute to the women of the land.

For Alexandre, who runs the house, the mural marks a shift. Artists from more than 60 countries have passed through StartArt, each bringing their own story. Now the house wants to tell the stories of where it stands. “É a hora de também contar as histórias portuguesas,” he told the paper — it’s time to tell Portuguese stories too.

The mural joins more than thirty others across the old Quinta do Vau, by the Rio Homem. Each was left by someone who came for a week or a month.

This one began with a neighbour.

Read the full article by O Vilaverdense, Vila Verde’s local newspaper (in Portuguese) →