About
Biography
Ana Machado was born in 1988, in São Miguel island (Azores islands), Portugal, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. She studied medicine and currently works as a family doctor in Lisbon, but kept painting as a self-taught artist.
As a child, her parents gifted her a box of oil paints and she never stopped since. Soon moved to acrylics for versatility and experimentation. In her young adult years, all her works were black and white, now mostly with china ink. Being a little impatient, the drying time was also a key factor in this changes of medium. Around 2014, inspired by other artists she started her watercolor journey and let color back into her art. The watercolor mix of versatility and quick drying times, often a struggle to some, were seen as inspiring and adrenaline-inducing, making it the perfect medium to blend creativity and color in the short spare time that studying medicine allowed her then.
Poetry started in her teenage years, as a way to make sense of life and all its complexities. She stopped writing consistently in her young adult years, being more focused on painting as a way to express herself. A few years after starting her watercolor journey, poetry made her way back to her life, now more than ever another outlet to express herself in this busy world, but now, every step of the way intertwined with her watercolor paintings, which is why some of her paintings have a poem that pairs with them.
Sometimes, it's words from other people that inspire the watercolor itself as a complement to the emotion she is trying to express. Being from a small island and growing up so close to the ocean and nature with such bright greens and blues, but now living in a big city, this change and duality can also be found in her art.
Ever since the beginning, the artworks were always around figurative art. Some element of human presence was always felt needed to make a painting whole. Evolving with time, art became a most needed escape from the scientific world and a way to explore emotions, especially the ones that we don't have words to clearly describe.