Ninety-seven-year-old Nascimento de Souza’s lifelong fascination with birds takes shape in coloured pencil in ‘Once More, With Wonder’ at the Museum of Christian Art, Old Goa
VINIKA VISWAMBHARAN | NT BUZZ
A daily photograph shared in a birding group unexpectedly brought Nascimento de Souza, affectionately known as Nasci, back to a childhood pastime.
“I became an enthusiastic follower of those images,” he says. This inspired him to begin sketching again after his home carpentry workshop was temporarily inaccessible. Drawn to the colours and combinations found in nature, he notes, “Nature has produced colours that are very hard to match.”
The drawings are made with coloured pencils, a medium he says simply came about naturally. His family, after seeing him take up the hobby, began gifting him sets of pencils, leaving him with a huge collection.
His fascination with birds, however, goes much further back. Born and brought up in Nairobi, Kenya, Souza remembers growing up in a town surrounded by wildlife and farmland. “As a boy, we spent a lot of time outdoors. I did a lot of camping in the wild.”
Birds were part of that early connection with nature. He remembers seeing friends use catapults to catch birds and questioning why they would do so. “What have the birds done to you?” he recalls asking them.
That fascination stayed with him through his life, even as his career took him to the U.K., Mumbai, and Madras. Drawing, though, was never pursued as a profession. His education was in mechanical and electrical engineering, where it was also part of his training.
His renewed interest in drawing birds has now culminated in ‘Once More, With Wonder’, an upcoming solo exhibition at the Museum of Christian Art (MoCA), Old Goa.
For the curatorial team consisting of Benjamin Monserrate and Gunjan Mitra, with Natasha Fernandes supporting the project, what drew them to the drawings was the story behind their making. “There is something particularly moving about seeing an old interest return with such curiosity and attention,” says curatorial associate and educator at MoCA, Monserrate. “The works are not intended as scientific studies or demonstrations of technical perfection. Instead, they record an act of looking, of noticing, observing and trying to understand the birds around us. That quality of observation became central to our thinking about the exhibition.”
Souza has also shared a long association with the museum. He has been connected with MoCA since its establishment at Rachol and served as vice-president of its managing committee for several years, while also being involved in the museum’s development and modernisation. Bringing his drawings into the museum, Monserrate says, felt like a very personal facet of someone who has been part of the museum’s story for decades.
That sense of returning to something familiar also shaped the exhibition’s title. “The title ‘Once More, With Wonder’ emerged from two ideas that came together: the return to a childhood passion and the act of looking at the familiar world anew,” explains Monserrate.
The word “wonder”, too, is central to that idea. “Wonder is often associated with childhood, with the instinct to ask questions, observe closely and find fascination in ordinary things. Through the exhibition, we hope visitors pause and rediscover that quality of looking,” he says.
The exhibition’s invitation to slow down and look again at the familiar world fits into this larger message. “People don’t have time to admire nature,” says Souza. Slowing down for him is also about stepping away from the pace of contemporary life. “Young people, need to make time to simply observe and enjoy what surrounds them,” he says.
After a long working life, Souza sees hobbies as more than ways to pass the time. “They are a stress reliever,” he says. “It’s also an outlet for creativity.”
His own list of interests extends well beyond sketching. He gardens, composts, cooks and works with wood, making gifts and toys for his family. These activities, he says, keep him occupied and mentally alert. “You are concentrating on what you are doing at the moment.” Souza sees his sketches as a way to encourage people to engage with that larger idea rather than as an attempt to establish himself as an artist. In fact, he agreed to display his works after seeing the exhibition as an opportunity to communicate two ideologies that matter to him: a love for nature and the importance of hobbies. “You are never too old to start something new,” he says.
The timing of the exhibition is also deliberate. It opens on Souza’s 98th birthday. It also coincides with the period when migratory birds begin arriving in Goa, giving the museum’s programme a wider focus on the state’s avian heritage.
(‘Once More, With Wonder’ will be on view from September 19 to October 18 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at MoCA, Old Goa.)
