Alex Goncalves

Alex Gonçalves
www.alexgoncalves.com

Born in Angola in 1948, Alex did most of his schooling in Zambia and South Africa. He became increasingly conscious of the effects of racism and apartheid during his high school years and was profoundly affected by the seminal novel by Alan Paton – Cry the beloved country, when he read it in 1965.

Having an artistic inclination, he began to express his feelings and opposition to racism and injustice through art and ironically won a South African Santam Student Meritorious award for his depiction of a slave in a competition entitled “Great moments in our history”

In 1968 he was drafted into the Portuguese army which at that time was fighting a colonial war in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea –Bissau since 1961.

Being totally opposed to the war, he escaped induction by illegally crossing from Portugal into Spain and France.

Having married in 1971 in England, he immigrated to Australia looking for open spaces. The responsibility of family (four children) and the demands of work and study (BA Sociology UOW – 1996) overwhelmed his needs as an artist and he describes what little work he did during that time as “sporadic and disjointed”

In late 2007 he retired from paid work without any substantial formal training in fine arts but determined to pursue and resurrect his deep seated feelings for art and to seek to restore the journey that had begun in his youth.

His latest work was painted in India where he stayed for four months with a fellow artist and mentor Elio Pereira.

Alex has an interest in philosophy, religion and mythology all of which influence his work. He explains his use of bright colors as means of satisfying his need for expression.

Everything is sacred just as it is – Sri Ramakrishna