Júlio Margarido Carneiro Giraldes

Sculptor, secondary school teacher, journalist, poet, short story writer, and art critic. He graduated from the former Porto School of Fine Arts, earning a degree in Sculpture with a final grade of 19 out of 20. He was a student of the distinguished artist Master Barata Feyo. He holds a degree in Pedagogical Sciences from the Faculty of Arts of Coimbra. Before entering the School of Fine Arts, he attended the Faria Guimarães School of Decorative Arts, now known as Escola Soares dos Reis, where he later became a teacher. He also taught in high schools and various technical schools located in Póvoa do Varzim, Porto, Vila Real, Penafiel, Vila do Conde, and Matosinhos (where he retired from his teaching career). He served as deputy director of the Industrial and Commercial School of Penafiel and as director of the Vila do Conde Secondary Technical School. An artist also dedicated to literature, he has various literary works, poems, and short stories published in several newspapers and magazines. He contributed art criticism to the former cultural page of Jornal de Notícias, to Jornal de Letras e Artes, in Lisbon (as the person in charge of reports on plastic arts exhibitions by artists from the North), and to the Porto newspaper Letras e Letras. More recently, he has collaborated with Jornal de Matosinhos, where he publishes diverse articles and some poetry. As a sculptor, he has several works (statues, bas-reliefs, and busts) in some parts of the country (Penafiel, Vila Real, Felgueiras) and even in Brazil. In 1960, he received a scholarship from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation to attend a course on Art History and Its Critical Foundations at the Louvre Museum in Paris (a scholarship he would later give up due to professional commitments). In 1958, he published his only literary work presented in volume to date: Rio Verde, a book of lyrical poems, which the author now considers entirely outdated, given his current more evolved and demanding conceptions.