by “The woman comes out of my fingers in drawings, words, sculptures and paintings.” Who says this is the sculptor and painter Francisco Simões, author of the drawing that today, International Women’s Day, illustrates its cover Diário de Notícias.
Its pastel design Woman in deep blue was the painting technique that Francisco Simões chose to enhance and express something he considers very important: the beauty of the female body.
The blue color that paints the body of the woman in the work of Francisco Simões is what the painter calls Deep blue, name of the series to which the drawing belongs. The color is meant to symbolize peace, hope and love. “It makes perfect sense that women fit into this world of peace. Blue brings peace and tranquility just like women,” the author explained to DN.
The painter describes this work as a simple design “made with love, respect, admiration” that he feels for the female gender.
Sometimes, the sculptor needs to study in order to then proceed with the realization of the work. Other times, it draws more fluidly. In a row Deep blue I don’t know how long it took. “Maybe it only took 20 minutes or an hour. Sometimes it takes a whole day and at the end of the day we tear up the page because we don’t like the design,” he points out.
The woman is the center of the artist’s work, since throughout his life he dedicated many pieces to her aspects: mother, sister, daughter, partner, lover, worker and intellectual.
Regarding the fight for women’s rights, Francisco Simões says that there is a long way to go and that society still does not respect women, their importance and their role. “Every day we are faced with the brutality that is aggression against women. Every day we are faced with crimes against women. Many people say they like women, but in the end they don’t like them because if they liked them they wouldn’t attack them, they respected them. how can we be more wonderful and more beautiful than what the universe has.”
The works of Francisco Simões are spread all over the country, from his statues Women of Lisbon in Campo Pequeno, passing through Parque dos Poetas de Oeiras, in Porto, where in Largo Amor de Perdição (next to the old Cadeia da Relação) there is a statue of him paying homage to Camilo Castelo Branco. Internationally, the sculptor worked at the Louvre Museum in the 1960s. Later, he was also appointed Visual Arts consultant for the project Culture Begins at School in the late 1980s.
The Parque dos Poetas, in Oeiras, was one of the projects that gave Francisco Simões the greatest pleasure during his career as an artist. He made twenty statues of twenty Portuguese poets of the 20th century. “I had to study the life and work of each of them. This gave me immense pleasure for the aesthetic search, the realization of the portrait of the poet, but also for the pleasure of studying poetry and literature.”
mariana.goncalves@dn.pt
