My hands are sweating. My heart is pumping fast. I'm scared.
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.