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Truly one could, because this artist, unlike many successful ones, only began painting professionally one year ago and has certainly exceeded expectations. In fact it can be intimated that she is the embodiment of Milton Berle’s quote: “If opportunity doesn’t knock, then build a door.”
Why?
Here is another story.
About three years before she moved to America from Paris, Pinto Da Costa searched unsuccessfully for African plates to purchase. When she realized there was none on the market, she decided to try to paint her own amateur African designs on plates to use at home.
“They were horrible in the beginning but then they started to look good and two months after I finished, there was a company in Portugal that took the plates, they did a whole collection and it went really well,” she says matter-of-factly.
The collection Pinto Da Costa speaks of, however, was created with a computer. Her current designs are hand-painted and self-taught.
“It’s a lonely job,” she talks about her work. “When you’re painting 15 hours a day, and I’ve never done it before, it’s a big challenge. I don’t know, I just have to do it, and I really like what I do. I love these characters; they really make me happy for some reason.”
And indeed the long hours poured into such artistry have not been in vain.
“I have women from Afghanistan, soldiers in Afghanistan who wrote to me. They go: ‘We’re two women with 200 men and we saw that and it fired us,’” Pinto Da Costa refers to the characters posted on her Myspace page.
“So that’s when I really got into it and I was like, ‘Hmm, interesting!’ So I posted a lot of images on my page and I got a lot of feedback and I was like ‘Hmm, I think these characters can be really something.’”
As one to consider herself a citizen of the world – born in Germany and having lived in Cuba, Algeria, Gabon and France with five spoken-languages under her belt: German, Spanish, French, Portuguese and English – Pinto Da Costa attributes her love for people to this privilege. It is why, she asserts, her characters sometimes comprise people of different cultures.
Like any artist or designer, her ultimate goal is for the characters and designs to become household brands.
“I only started painting a year ago. You should write that down and say ‘She’s a genius,’” she bursts into laughter at the last interjection.
“No. Seriously, it’s not normal. A lot of times, people, when you tell them, they don’t believe you. It’s tough, not desperation, but it’s tough. But I guess if you want to accomplish big things, you have to. And I want to accomplish big things. I’m not gonna leave this country, no…I came here, I’m very lucky to be here and I wanna do something that will blow away people’s mind in my own way.”
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