ABOUT ME

I grew up in Setúbal, Portugal, and started sailing when I was eight years old.

What began in a small Optimist became a life built around wind, water, movement and competition. Sailing took me around the world and into professional sport, from the Volvo Ocean Race and the RC44 circuit to three America’s Cup campaigns.

For most of my life, movement was something I experienced physically.

Today, I also put it onto canvas.

FROM WATER TO CANVAS

My work is abstract and process-driven.

I work mainly with water-based and sand paints, using gravity, rotation and motion as part of the painting itself. I build tools and techniques around pendulums and spinning canvases, allowing the paint to move in ways I can influence but never completely control.

That balance interests me.

There is intention, but also uncertainty. I can set the conditions, choose the materials, control the speed and direction, and decide when to intervene. But at some point I have to allow the process to take its own course.

In that sense, painting feels strangely familiar.

It carries something I have known through sailing and racing for most of my life: you prepare, you make decisions, you react, but you never control everything.

Wind changes. Water moves. Things happen.

You work with it.

WHY I PAINT

Art became a much bigger part of my life during and after COVID.

It was a period of change and reinvention. The professional sailing world I had lived in for decades slowed down, and I found myself exploring other ways of creating.

Painting gave me a language I hadn't had before.

I don't paint to illustrate sailing or reproduce what happens on the water. My paintings are expressions of something more personal: emotion, energy, tension, instinct and whatever is happening inside me when I work.

Sometimes the result is controlled. Sometimes violent. Sometimes quiet.

I don't always know exactly where a painting is going when I begin.

That is part of why I keep doing it.

THE RACING CONTINUES

In the same period, I discovered another form of sailing that brought me back to the beginning: wingfoiling.

After decades in professional sailing, I became a competitor again.

I started racing internationally, became Portuguese National Champion and reached the European Masters podium. Now, in my forties, I'm still travelling, training and competing against people considerably younger than me.

But this chapter is different.

There is no major professional team behind the campaign. I build it myself.

That is where Art for Racing comes in.

When you buy one of my paintings, you are buying an original work that exists because I needed to make it.

At the same time, your purchase directly helps me continue racing. It contributes to equipment, entries, travel, training and the thousands of kilometres between one event and the next.

The art supports the racing.

The racing keeps feeding a life of movement, experience and emotion.

And somewhere along the way, that finds its way back onto the canvas.

OWN A PIECE OF THE JOURNEY

You don't need to know anything about sailing to connect with my work.

A painting ultimately has to speak for itself.

But if you choose to own one, you also become part of the story behind it and help make the next chapter possible.

Explore the available works.
Follow the racing and the process.
And if one of the paintings speaks to you, make it yours.

I'm still racing.
I'm still creating.
And I'm still curious about where both can take me next.

Pedro Sacramento das Neves
Artist · Sailor · Wingfoil Racer
Setúbal, Portugal