Hi. My name is Carl Monteiro. I was born in Newark, New Jersey, the son of Portuguese ancestry.

I wen to public schools with the typical education process, but soon found a better interest in doing artwork.

As I got to high school, Kearny High School in this case, I had the chance to get into a better, more concentrated art class, that was reserved for more "gifted" (to choose a word) art students.

This particular class was run by an ex-art director from Manhattan, New York, who probably did it thinking he could help ids better this way. He taught us the carious instruments used that one might not have any knowledge to in other settings, such as loupes, lucies tempera, oil, acrylic and water color paints, sumi sticks, rulers with picas and agates, etc. It was more of a gearing for the advertising world than anything else.

I was hoping to be accepted at Cooper Union, in Manhattan, but, I felt that I wasn't ready art-wise or academically at 17 years of age. So, after applying to several colleges, I was accepted at another art school. The same basic thing, a standard process of classes, and as time went on one would concentrate more on a specific trade, such as photography, illustration, fine arts, etc.

Having picked illustration, I put together a portfolio and began to walk the streets looking for work, but had no real luck. Eventually, I began to work at a lot of production houses, places that mostly put together magazines.

Time went on, and really going nowhere, I eventually got a job with the Post Office in Kearny. I spent about 11 years doing that, and after putting aside some money, I quit and have been working on things at home, such as on computers, and with photography and software programs.

My father had been sick with emphysema for quite a while, and when he passed on July of 2007, I began to find all this artwork that I had stored away, kind of forgetting about it. So, with the use of web design and web servers, I put together a website that can be translated into eleven other languages, this way making it convenient to view for anyone with a computer, and also worldwide.

I tended to choose working more with pencils than anything else. It required little clean-up, and kept things more "motif-like", since it tended to be the same pencil, used with different degrees of pressure or volume. I tended to keep in mind the basic shape of things, circles, squares, rectangles, but also giving it a "twist" in some manner.

Also, getting back to my high school art teacher, he told us to keep in practice by trying to imitate the anatomical drawings of George Bridgman, in this way, we could learn drawing and also anatomy. If you are familiar with these drawings, they break down things into basic shapes. I also had a college instructor the first year, which made us try to copy the old masters' paintings as best we could using acrylic paint, to save time. He also brought out that all artwork is indeed an "abstract", which is correct since you are trying to convey on a two dimensional piece a three dimensional object.

He had some really good advice, that it's not necessarily what you put into your artwork, but what you leave out, leaving the viewer's imagination to it.

My "theory" is that light tends to do all the work. Think about that. It's a very simple thing, but it does hold true.

Unfortunately I only have a small portion of the original artwork I produced, the rest of it is "out there somewhere."