I’m not competing with anyone when it comes to David Bowie. In fact it has been a while since I came to the realization that nothing we think we have belongs to us anyway; we are just temporary custodians of aspects of the material and immaterial world around us. It is absurd to think of ownership, or privilege or preferencial rights to anything. As adolescents and then young adults I noticed, certainly within myself but also amongst my peers, the need to for us to want to attempt to own and also belong to and/or be identified with certain cultural identities that might define us better. A puerile compulsion, yes, based on insecurity and the desire to fit in, I suppose. Music always having been such an important part of my life – as with so many of us – and Bowie’s contribution being yet another fundamental part to my musical culture (amongst so many others), I was quite unprepared for the sudden news of his death. In fact, the news of his death hit me quite hard…as silly as that might seem. And I wasn’t alone in this, of course. A lot of people were very affected, for reasons that I find quite understandable. Someone or other in the British press wrote about this, attacking our apparent collective hysteria – labeling it “the dianafication of Britain” – as something that was unseemly and un-British and out of place. I seem to recall that Suzanne Moore of The Guardian took a stand for Bowie and for the rest of us, to say that our mourning was justified. And how right she was! Musically and creatively the man was huge! And a thoroughly nice guy, to boot! Watch him in interview on Youtube and he just brims over with wit and humor and humanity. In one interview I remember him touching on how one’s background, one’s parents, form you and yet deform you at the same time. You get a package; the good comes with the bad. And there is an extra bit….that little bit “just for you!” He winked and laughed as he said this. There was a warmth to his archness.

Brian M left me with countless nuggets that serve me well to this day. “Tone is everything”. He instilled in me the notion that the use of pure black, as a colour when painting, should be avoided; the darkness should be insinuated, and I retained that. A few years later at Belas Artes, in some workshop in our first year we were asked to show our range of colours when painting (the tubes of paint) and how we employed them. I showed my tutor the broad range of colours that I employed and I explained why I had no black. It might have been partly due to my faltering Portuguese at that time but my tutor did not understand my posture. In fact he was quite scandalized.