I started painting when I was still a little girl.
In high school I was a great student in English, math and drawing and my teacher was a Finnish nun.
On Saturdays we painted still lifes, grapes, fruits and vegetables in general and when I was 12 years old, as I loved ballet, I painted two ballerinas that I still have today.
At the age of 17 I wanted to go to Rio de Janeiro to study at some art school, but my father vetoed it and preferred to choose Emeric Mercier to be my teacher.
Emeric Racz Marcier was a Romanian painter naturalized in Brazil, today considered an icon in painting. Emeric Racz Marcier was a Romanian artist who studied at the Accademia di Belli Arti de Brera Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, Italy, from 1935 to 1938. In 1939, he attended the sculpture course at the École Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts National School of Fine Arts in Paris. In 1940, because of the Second World War 1939-1945, he traveled to Lisbon, where he stayed for a short time and spent time with the painters Arpad Szenes 1897-1985 and Vieira da Silva 1908-1992. He came to Brazil that year, where he began to give private painting lessons, and among his students was Djanira 1914-1979, one of the most renowned painters in the history of national and international art. From the 1940s onwards, he maintained a studio in Barbacena, Minas Gerais, where the landscape of the historic cities of Minas Gerais left a lasting mark on his work.
For a year, I frequented his studio, where I learned to draw with fusain. I felt as if I were painting in Paris.
In Rio, my vision of art opened up and I realized that artists can express themselves in different ways, such as actresses, dancers and writers, in addition to painting.
Later, I studied engraving at the Museum of Modern Art in my hometown and metal engraving at a studio in the Ingá neighborhood of Niterói, the former capital of the state of Rio de Janeiro.
I learned metal engraving at the Museum of Modern Art and at the Ingá studio in Niterói, and I learned ceramics at the studio of Luzia Pérez, where my colleagues said that I was the Brazilian Camili Claudel, since I made small pieces of sculpture and experimented with different glazes, exploring new colors.
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