For decades I taught adults; now the youngest too — from five to eleven. It was the age I had been missing. They all learn the same thing: to see, and to draw what is in front of them.
I was born in Caruaru, Pernambuco. My life has been marked by a productive tension between rigorous empirical inquiry and deep artistic vision.
My doctorate in physics — at Washington University in St. Louis, with a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard — taught me to see the structure of the invisible. And that is exactly what revealed to me how the Great Masters saw the world.
For more than thirty-three years I have taught drawing, painting, visual perception, artistic anatomy, and the History of Art in Recife. My method, The Act of Drawing, distills that experience into a practical training in seeing differently — one study a day, the way habit forms in the brain.
My most recent work is the record of a research journey — a conversation between a human being and an artificial intelligence — undertaken to find, translate, present, and contextualize ancient texts preserved for centuries in the monasteries of Ethiopia. The question I asked one Friday morning in Recife was simple. The answer, it seems, had been waiting for centuries.