This young boy was saucy
and mischievous in school, naughty and annoyingly playful,
systematically teasing and worrying with impish laughter.
If you have watched, seen the incredible story of Mozart,
told in flashback mode by Antonio Salieri, Amadeus,
a 1984 film directed by Milos Forman, you might as well
assume it was meant to have the main features of a wild
child young boy named Antonio Pessoa. Do you get the
picture? The cards were thrown, and the radio was on,
modulation of electromagnetic waves releasing the last
waterhole of progressive rock, the music of King Crimson,
Genesis, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Jethro Tull and Yes,
were incorporated elements wild and wide-ranging influencing
the teenager's moody blues. As young Antonio Pessoa
reached the peak of his obscure high school unpopularity,
the seeds of Rock n' Roll were plucking him from the
unfair trench warfare of recycled misery, lack of motivation
and other grey hobgoblins playing average teachers.
The mediocre teacher tells, the good teacher explains
and the superior teacher demonstrates. That philosophical
much was something young Antonio Pessoa was defenitely
well aware of. Now the big question at stake was indeed,
where for Heaven's sake was the superior master? While
Roger Daltrey, through the record player hi-fi speakers
kept shouting "We won't get fooled again"
and the Rolling Stones lead singer Mick Jagger went
on whispering in the young boys ears" time waits
for no one and no one waits for me ",Led Zeppelin's
Stairway to Heaven receiving more radio airplay than
any other song in history, Antonio Pessoa grabbed his
precious treasure, the secret, his perception of urgency,
feeling and knowing deep down inside that hours are
like diamonds, don't let them waste. The big city atmosphere
was bound and just about to take him out on the racing
rushing streets and avenues, with soul mates or even
as a lonesome wanderer, safely away from his dreadful
tyrannic teachers' captivity. Suddenly, one late afternoon
he stopped by a shop window where there was a TV Set
on and loud and an old band named The Beatles filling
up the screen when a seat chilling voice cut through
his ears claiming "I wanna hold your hand".
That did it! Antonio Pessoa buys his first acoustic
guitar at the age of twelve. Only music could protect
the young lad from life's bumps and bruises. He stalked
out of the music shop's door with his brand-new toy,
his new chance at life in his hands. All his troubles
and doubts were gone and his daydreaming nightmares
all packed away. The guitar became his closest confidant
for the next three years. It was only natural that he
would turn to music to see that after all life wasn't
supposed to be so harsh, boring and dull. The artist
was no longer panic-stricken, for another flash of light
called Rock n' Roll Music was holding his hand. Antonio
Pessoa bought that old single. "I Wanna Hold Your
Hand". The future was now transparent! By the age
of fourteen he had an interview with the manager of
a professional rock band. By the end of the demo session
Antonio Pessoa had him broad smiling at him. Speechless.
The young lad told him:"So let me know what you
want me to play more". He was hired and next thing
he knew he was the leader of the band! Pessoa inherits
from his father his taste for classical music long before
his 10th birthday, by then the lad was already a great
connoisseur of the great composers such as Johann Sebastian
Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, Johannes Brahms, Claude
Debussy, George Frideric Handel, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart,
Giuseppe Verdi, Antonio Vivaldi, Pablo Luna, Achille-Claude
Debussy and Giacomo Puccini. Another music genius, modern
composer of his fancy, Igor Stravinsky, strange as it
seems, comes only a few years later when the fourteen
years old boy discovers him through Frank Zappa influence.
Antonio Pessoa's obsession by the american musician
is going to last a very, verylong time, becoming one
of his contemporary composers and performers in the
show biz scene ever. Pessoa enters Music Academy, becoming
an average piano player before he is fifteen years old.
Nevertheless he drops the Academy classes to travel
all over Europe, taking him to new fascinating adventures
and get well acquainted with Amsterdam, Paris, Brussels
and in addition further south with Barcelona and sunny
lively magical Ibiza. The crossroads concerning his
future in a way were manifesting a whole general interest,
leading him to so many different options and activities
apart from music and his promising first steps and academic
attempts in the drawing, sketching and fine art function,
such as Raja Yoga, Pop Culture, traveling, History,
languages, ethnic cultures, multicultural perception
and awareness, motion pictures, literature and later
on even martial arts. Nevertheless, on the other hand
all these exciting propositions were bringing his teenage
times a whole lot of ideals dispersion and consequently
a reasonable amount of distortion, preventing him from
focusing his attention on a specific life picture, model
and a steady working routine. Despite his Raja Yoga
first serious commitment and experiences, his restlessness
was going to ensure him a long lasting risky exposure
to endure his breathless vivid dreams and wild child
adventures plus his continuous wandering- exploring
throughout Europe and across the Mediterranean toward
the One Thousand and One Nights north african magical
exotic space. Young man Antonio Pessoa worships London,
loves Paris and simply adores living in Holland, particularly
in Amsterdam. It's far too evident that throughout his
whole artistic career he idolizes Nederland both in
the intensity of his paintings subjects with which he
systematically recalls his crazy,wild lively days and
promiscuous nightly promenades and in the stimulating
cultural diversity he found in Amsterdam during his
mid, late teens and early twenties. The dutch background,
experience and influences have been clearly proving
to be widely generous in the contribution they have
given to the brave inspiration and fine art making specifically
in his astonishing production of the nineties known
as The Romantic Period. Suffice is to say that Antonio
Pessoa's teenage golden years have been a product of
his wealthy, aristocratic, christian, privileged and
extremely well-educated and too overprotected childhood
and family background. This social origin heritability,
however, involves a controversial feedback causing the
effect of the typical spoiled brat, which in his early
teens has strongly influenced the by then scandalous
impact of the artist's dropping out of high school.
Novelty disturbs and repels, and the young boy's originality,
playful bahavior and pro New Wave generation appearance
and Look, were elements and factors enough, therefore
supposed to helplessly make him definitely no exception
to the rule. Antonio Pessoa's actions and reactions
after a short and unconventional observational sessions
period the ultimate ingredients of matter of what it
is and how to change it, was gradually dropped, archived
and forgotten as in the Common Prayer quote, ashes to
ashes, dust to dust. The young boy's yielding tendency
was no big deal either, so there it is, his destiny
was now being drastically manufactured by an impressive
abstract perverted engineer not a bit affected by what
would make sense let alone the traditional concept of
reasoning responsibility. Pessoa discovers The Beatles
long after the band broke up, an objective observer
enthusiastically excited about a british phenomenon
that no longer existed as a musical ensemble. However
the teenager starts collecting all the albums of the
worlwide popular four from Liverpool, plus the old singles
he grabs on the sly from his two older sisters forgotten
idols under the bed overstocked storage dusty piles.
The boy besides starting coming up with his own updated
versions of songs such as, Back in the U.S.S.R., Dizzy
Miss Lizzy, With a Little Help from my Friends, When
I'm Sixty-Four, Yesterday, Come Toge ther, I am The
Walrus, Don't Let me Down, Let it Be, Octupus' Garden,
Here Comes the Sun, and so on...his first watercolors
were also illustrations of The Beatles tunes, five of
them actually still belonging to the artist's private
collection. With the sound of his twelve strings acoustic
guitar he manages to survive quite well and sometimes
live pretty well off whenever he rans out of money his
family sends him on a regular basis, and in the meantime
getting spoiled and used to the idea of having always
a crowd of admirers cheering him up, willing to get
acquainted with the good looking talented kid... therefore
enjoying life with the talismanic euphoric electrifying
joy, the apparent ecstatic Gladness, witnessing, feeling
and loving the smell, eroticism and rhythm of a young
God living the time of his life! The great intense rapture
and delight of Antonio Pessoa's Europe trotting mighty
performance were crucial for the development of his
easy going social communication open-minded extroverted
mastery and most importantly an endless huge source
of cultural references plus personal experiences he
is going to put down in oil on canvas much later on
with the striking fine art expression empirical command
we all are aware of, and well familiarized with by now.
At the premature age of fifteen he lives for the first
time with an older woman in the sunny, lively, cosmopolitan,
charming island Ibiza, southern Spain, his very first
experience with a beautiful spanish girl on a marital
like life adjustment, a new performing stage where he
quicly learns how to handle the situation, how to act
the proper way and most importantly experience the flavour
of falling in love, sharing, happiness, glory, fulfillment
and overwhelming excitement. In the meantime, young
Pessoa was about to define the foundation from which
his lifestyle, love affairs, art and everything else
was going to be built. Without even knowing or even
slightly aware of it he was actually creating the "blueprint"
of the life of his dreams. The visualization of tropical
fun sunny southern Spain as the perfect ideal was taking
shape in his mind, heart and soul as a subliminal messaging
recommending the perfect living program right there
in the right place at the right time. By now he was
able to see so many solid changes start to happen, feeling
a shift in his inner world and listening to a voice
telling him out loud "Go for it young man"!
His heart his in a flurry of activity flooded with colorful
and powerful images of the way he wants his life to
be. The price Antonio Pessoa had to pay for it, well
that's indeed something else, the other side of the
coin, or if you wish, The Dark Side of the Moon! The
price Antonio Pessoa had to pay in order to keep on
leading such a cinematic breathtaking exciting and fabulous
adventurous life has been equally proportional to the
heat of the magnetic heart beat acceleration filled
with romanticism, adrenal ecstasy, breathtaking stimulus
and unspeakable eroticism. The price the artist had
to pay in order to live up to such a motion picture
like dynamic play, exploding with creative spontaneous
intensity, was after all a continuous display of troubled
moments and painful periods, falling cold hard rain,
envy, defamation and so very often compulsory forced
constrain. However like in the happy ending fairy tales,
the artist, dressed up as a modern times Knight in a
Shiny Armor, Pessoa metamorphically creates a remarkable
immune system which to some degree and extent, became
his Guardian Angel and master protector throughout the
years and very particularly whenever the sign said "if
you're looking for trouble you came to the right place".
Nevertheless, Pessoa wasn't definitely looking for trouble,
no way, but rather aiming to let his deep beliefs all
out in the open and make a magical mystery tour out
of his life. Antonio Pessoa, a steady regular of the
Louvre Museum and of the Centre Pompidou during his
countless visits to Paris, is basically fascinated by
the impressionists, namely Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul
Cézanne, Alfred Sisley, Camille Pissaro, Édouard
Manet, Edgar Degas, Monet, Bazille, etc... visits for
the first time at the age of sixteen, the Picasso Museum
in Barcelona and the Salvador Dali Museum in Figueras.
If Pablo Picasso - apart from his Blue Period masterpieces
- didn't succeed awakening Pessoa's special interest
for his oeuvre back then, on the contrary, Salvador
Dali's surrealistic paintings caused an immediate impact
on the young man's emotions and subjective personal
criticism. However, anyway, still not yet to such a
degree of love at first sight worth mention it. Only
four years later was Antonio Pessoa going to have the
opportunity to approach Dali's work and biography with
a different perspective and this time now at last with
an increasing particular interest, after several visits
to a Dali's retrospective exhibition downtown Amsterdam.
As for Pablo Picasso, it was going to take a whole lot
longer, before Pessoa actually discovers in the spanish
master's life and work, enough substantial interesting
content to grab his attention and even so, only during
the nineties, finally accepts Picasso not just only
as a modern art pioneer and a genius unique, but also
as an art action working phenomenon lifestyle model.
During his late teens, Antonio Pessoa remains totally
devoted and genuinely faithful to the impressionism,
neo-impressionism and even fauvism. André Derain,
Henri Matisse, Paul Gauguin, this one his favorite modern
master ever, and even Maurice Vlaminck. Pessoa attends
his first art workshops in Amsterdam at the age of seventeen,
arousing the teachers curiosity first and after a short
while even their astonishment at his drawing skills
and very particularly at his unusual action speed. Despite
his obvious growing interest in Fine Art, Antonio Pessoa's
priority is still music. He enjoys playing Live with
bands but on the other hand playing solo provides him
with a much higher daily-weekly income plus the absolute
freedom he feels, enjoys and relishes, with his new
Fender acoustic guitar always by his side to keep him
company and keep the show going on. By the age of seventeen,
Pessoa has indeed become a very interesting, vigorous
and enthusiastic piano player, a rather eclectic singer
with a powerful and now well trained voice, a guitar
player with a very spontaneous improvising flow plus
a highly developed technical quality now which naturally
gives him always the privilege of being accepted and
hired right on the spot by some of the best New Wave
rock and Jazz bands in the dutch-british Amsterdam's
music biz scene. Back and forth from southern Europe
to the magical northern Triangle, London, Paris and
Amsterdam, Antonio Pessoa now an eighteen years old
busy, extroverted, dynamic lad, is finally experiencing
something close to a nervous breakdown. Too many night
Live music gigging around, footloose and fancy-free
short-term love affairs, spectacular Live Painting and
too much on the road Europe up and down sleepless nights
and frantic days, celebrating life, youth and that special
take it as it comes sort of breathless allucinating
living rhythm, a physical and emotional earthquake which
was at last coming up with a rather harsh verdict, ruthless
and inevitable, stating that the glittering fast heavy
speedy trunk was running out of fuel, meaning the young
man needed urgently a God-forsaken break, energy was
fading away, over and out! That actually did it and
the Final Countdown was online like a boomerang feedback
effect warning. Antonio Pessoa drops everything in a
wise hurry and after randomly pack his backpack, he
takes off in the first available plane and yes, next
thing he knew he was landing at Casablanca airport.
Exoctic, magical and new, like being in another far
away Planet, another cultural twilight zone he had been
reading about in books and by watching old Golden Years
Hollywood motion pictures. However he was no veteran
brave Lawrence of Arabia, nor dressed up like Peter
O'Toole neither that was a cinema silver screen opening
widely making way for a CinemaScope Twentieth Century
Fox Technicolor great adventure. This time it was for
real,useless start playing Indiana Jones, Valentino
or even Humphrey Bogart, for now this daring young man
knew right away he was on his own in a strange new world,
where learning how to play by the rules was just about
the same as starting from the scratch. Wandering around
Casablanca was definitely really something, fascinating,
that puzzling feeling of weird excitement, on the other
hand there were to many resemblances in the superficial
details with the modern European metropolis. That wasn't
his idea of breaking on through to the One Thousand
and One Nights incense smelling, colorful marketplaces
established in mysterious narrow streets, where anything
can happen, even oblivion. Pessoa entered Casablanca's
bus Station and after one hour map researching he found
his index finger pointing at one specific spot by the
sea. Essaouira! The Rolling Stones lead guitarist Keith
Richards, and Jimi Hendrix favorite Moroccan hangout.
Also the place where in the early fifties Orson Welles
stayed during the filming of his classic version of
Othello. Also legend has it that during Welles sojourn
in the town he met Winston Churchill. Anyway, what do
you know! The long, long bus trip to Essaouira supposed
to take seven hours, after all turned out to be a fifteen
hours noisy, shaking endless voyage across a mysterious
outstretched display of strangely silent exoctic small
towns where the screechy bus came to a long waiting
stop during which scruffy looking and shabby dressed
folks slowly came to board carrying dusty straw bags,
rabbits, chickens and the round eight inch diameter
moroccan loaves and titanic goat cheeses they gently
shared with everyone in the Noah's Ark looking bus,
with some mint tea to go with it. If the heat in the
Moroccan Doodle Dandy bus running at its made in the
fourties full running speed was basically unbearable,
the long motionless wait times became a beyond imagination
burning overcrowded concentration Purgatory. Nevertheless,
the loud crying children and resigned happy moroccan
adults didn't seem to be suffering much, calmly and
patiently putting their concerns into a slow low-pitched
voice conversation as if the time concept hadn't yet
arrived to those fairly backdropped remote villages
of the northwestern Africa's semi-arid landscapes. Antonio
Pessoa is going to keep these images, impressions, smells
and sensations in his system, slowly cooking a cultural
recipes collection he is going to print on canvas with
rich imagery and captivating fine art narrative, a visible
indicator how the extent of these arabian adventures
provided a great influence upon his later artistic performances
during his mid-twenties. During those six weeks in Essaouira
and it's sandy, sunny, soporific outskirts, the young
artist pulls himself up the dunes diving into the hot
sand,running to the beach watching the sun tumble red
beyond the oceans skyline. He scans his daydream searching
for the new meaning of all related to life, spirit,
culture, awareness and imagination, chasing the magic's
wild horses running after a mirage just about to become
real. No, that wasn't a dream, rather a high quality
revelation as he by raising his head could make out
diamond designs as sensual erotic pleasures, now with
his hands in the sea water and feet in the air smiling
at friendly upside down angel faces dancing to a sound
of an old arabian music he couldn't explain, only hold
that vision, feeling and thought and keep it forever
as a knowledge private treasure, a universal religious
arrangement he could only entirely confess in the privacy
of his later fine art sessions. No more searching in
vain was the final conclusion as the flying angels kept
on getting back to him, as the african red sun went
on falling behind a great distance. The young man only
felt a pleasurable tiredness after receiving the unexpected
instructions, finally falling asleep behind a soft tender
dune under the One Thousand and One Nights stars, knowing
that from then on he could live forever in harmony with
the universe and that all his efforts should be directed
towards the realisation of the Truth, goodness and beauty
in love, heart, life and Art! Antonio Pessoa leaves
Morocco with a new outlook of life and very particularly
with a new perspective of Old Christian Europe. After
a few summertime weeks in is dear Nederland, he returns
to his family nest. He goes back to his Raja Yoga and
Meditation sessions and rituals and becomes a seriously
commited disciple of the oriental martial arts high
values principles and philosophy. With nineteen years
old he has a daughter, Paula, with his first official
wife, Helen. For a few years he dedicated his time to
live music, fine arts and his family. However it wasn't
going to take long before Pessoa hits the road again,
playing live and developing his art technique, expression
and performance wherever he is and most importantly
accepting new influences, such as Wassily Kandinsky,
Joan Miró, René Magritte, Tanguy, Man
Ray, Vieira da Silva, Marc Chagall, Andy Warhol, David
Hockney, just to mention a few. He becomes for some
time a true eclectic artistic tendencies researcher.
Nevertheless yet ten years still have to go by before
Pessoa drops music professionally to become a steadily
full commited art studio worm and on a surprising short-term,
a unquestionable experienced art studio veteran, working
on a daily basis, almost as a religious ritual, a solid
lifestyle prospect he's actually going to develop and
cherish with a unique enthusiastic endeavour, maintaining
it with increasing passion, devotion and an amazing
fast improving determination, learning eagerness, method
and discipline, a validated procedure which is going
to become the basic essentials of his worldwide artistic
professional reliability reputation and at last but
not the least the very power source of dynamic art action
remarkable studio performance naturally and inevitably
turning out to be the creative energy fluxus which after
all gave birth to one of the largest high quality solo
artist fine art collections of the last decade of the
Twentieth Century!
