Juicy Artist: How Dig Ferreira Turned Grief into a Mouth-Held Brush and Built Four Pillars of His Art
There’s a Brazilian artist in Brooklyn who paints with his mouth.
ISSUE 01 • JUICY ARTIST PROFILE • DEC 2025
There’s a Brazilian artist in Brooklyn who paints with his mouth.
In 2016, after years of grinding in São Paulo’s architecture scene and losing his mother, Dig Ferreira found himself creatively numb. When he tried to draw, his hand wouldn’t cooperate. So he tried his left hand. Then his feet. Then, intuitively, his mouth.
What started as a desperate experiment to reconnect with art became his signature: Doc-Drawing — a performative drawing technique that uses a Japanese sumi brush and ink held between his teeth, capturing moments in real time as both witness and participant.
Since then, Dig has taken this practice from São Paulo’s streets to protests, festivals, exhibitions, and live events across Brazil, the U.S., and beyond, creating large-scale artworks that document the world as it unfolds.
But Doc-Drawing is just one of four pillars holding up Dig’s world. This is what a juicy Artist looks like — and we’re inviting you to dive in.
The Map: Four Pillars, One World
Most artists are told to pick a lane. Dig built a highway system.
His work lives inside four core pillars:
Doc-Drawing – mouth-held brush and real-time painting from life
Forging Armors – wearable armor made from second-hand clothes
Shakuhachi – a traditional Japanese bamboo flute
Dance – something Dig has been doing since age 10
Together, they weave memory, ritual, body, and transformation into a single, coherent universe.
Juicy Focus: U — Unique
Dig’s world is a case study in what happens when you refuse to split yourself into separate “careers” and let all your skills live in one place.
Pillar 1: Doc-Drawing — The Living Archive
Doc-Drawing emerged in a time of need. After years of not creating freely — and then losing his mother — Dig hit a wall. He challenged himself to resume a daily drawing practice. It was almost impossibly hard, which pushed him to experiment with other parts of the body: his left hand, his feet, and finally, his mouth.
The technique is simple and radical:
A Japanese sumi brush dipped in ink
Held between his teeth
Moving across large paper as life happens in front of him: concerts, protests, parties, street scenes
No sketching first. No correcting after. The body becomes the camera. The mouth becomes the lens. After about five months of exploration, mouth-painting became a symbol of his artistic freedom — a promise to never abandon art again.
For your own creative life: When your usual tools fail, your body knows other paths. The “limitation” is often the doorway to your true language.
Pillar 2: Forging Armors — Identity as Wearable Ritual
In Forging Armors, Dig transforms second-hand clothing into wearable art. The pieces act as armors — symbolic, poetic, and functional — reflecting the body’s resilience and the power of color as a healing force.
He takes thrifted clothes and reconstructs them into garments that protect, transform, and announce. Not costumes — armors for bodies that need to move through the world differently.
What began as a personal ritual is now a communal practice, inviting participants to reflect on fashion, consumption, and self-image — and to literally wear a new version of themselves.
For your own creative life: Your tools, your aesthetics, your “look” aren’t decoration — they’re strategy. Build armor that helps you become who you need to be.
Pillar 3: Shakuhachi — Breath as Ancestor
Dig’s connection to the shakuhachi, a traditional Japanese bamboo flute, adds a meditative and ancestral layer to his work. As a disciple of Sensei Akio Yamaoka (Nishakukai do Brazil), he studies honkyoku pieces on both 1.8 and 2.0 flutes, integrating breath, silence, and discipline into his broader practice.
The shakuhachi is not a performance instrument in the Western sense. It’s a tool for meditation through breath. The player doesn’t entertain — they become present.
For Dig, this practice roots his high-energy, performative work in stillness. The mouth that holds the brush also holds the flute. The same body that dances also sits in silence.
For your own creative life: You need both fire and stillness. The slow, disciplined practice is what makes your wildest work sustainable.
Pillar 4: Dance — The Body as Medicine
Art has been central to Dig’s life since childhood. Influenced by cousins who were professional hip-hop and street dancers, he immersed himself in dance from a young age. Performing with his family’s dance company in some of Brasília’s most important theaters, he learned how movement can hold story, emotion, and community all at once.
Dance, present in his life since age 10, is the root system beneath everything else. Movement is ritual and medicine — a way to purify, liberate, and connect. He often carries this into his performances and artistic processes: the brushstroke has choreography; the armor has choreography.
For your own creative life: Your first language — the thing you did before you knew it was “art” — is probably your skeleton key. Return to it when you’re lost.
The Journey: From Brasília to Brooklyn, Via São Paulo
Dig was born in Planaltina-DF, near Brasília, in a childhood rich in love and family support, even if the local scene offered few artistic opportunities. At 18, he moved to São Paulo to attend university, and the shift to a large metropolis expanded his view of what was possible. He studied Interior Design at Centro Universitário Belas Artes and finished his degree at the Istituto Europeo di Design (IED).
From early on, he worked in architecture and design, rising quickly through top firms and eventually founding his own studio, EPICENTRO, where he created residential, commercial, and scenographic projects.
On paper, it looked like success. In reality, years of an exhausting routine in São Paulo slowly suffocated his free creative expression and eroded his sense of self.
Then his mother died.
And the brush found his mouth.
Today, Dig lives in Brooklyn, New York, continuing to expand and integrate these four pillars into a single evolving practice.
The Integration: Why Four Pillars Work Better Than One
What makes Dig’s work a world instead of a portfolio?
1. Each pillar feeds the others.
Shakuhachi discipline brings focus to the spontaneity of Doc-Drawing. Dance makes his body-based art utterly believable. Armor-making gives his visual world a three-dimensional, wearable form.
2. They share the same core question:
How do we document, protect, and transform the body’s experience of being alive?
Doc-Drawing documents moments.
Forging Armors protects and transforms identity.
Shakuhachi connects breath to ancestors.
Dance liberates emotion into space.
3. They’re all rituals, not products.
Together, these four pillars form a language of presence, resistance, and poetic documentation — a living archive of life itself. Dig isn’t just selling art objects. He’s inviting people into a worldview where art is survival, testimony, and transformation.
The Authenticity Principle: What World-Builders Can Learn from Dig
If you met Dig at a party and asked, “So what do you do?”, what would he say?
“I’m a mouth-painting, armor-forging, flute-playing, dancing multidisciplinary artist from Brazil living in Brooklyn”?
Most career advisors would tell him to simplify. Pick one thing. Build a brand.
But authenticity isn’t simplification — it’s integration.
Dig’s world works because of the four pillars, not in spite of them. Remove one, and the structure collapses.
Here’s a rough integration framework emerging from his story:
Follow the body when the mind freezes.
When his hand wouldn’t draw, his mouth did. Trust the body’s alternative routes.pasted
Turn personal rituals into public practice.
Forging Armors started as self-protection. Now it’s a shared ritual for reimagining identity.Let disciplines cross-pollinate.
Interior design shows up in spatial awareness during live drawing. Dance shows up in gesture. Shakuhachi breath work shows up in performance endurance.pasted
Document the journey as the work.
Doc-Drawing literally means “documentary drawing.” The archive is the art.Refuse to choose between spiritual depth and practical craft.
He studies traditional Japanese flute meditation and sells wearable art and performs at festivals. It’s not either-or.
The Call: What Dig’s World Asks of Ours
Dig Ferreira’s world quietly poses a question:
What are we still refusing to integrate?
What “weird hobby” are you keeping separate from your “real work”?
What skill you learned as a kid have you abandoned as an adult?
What ritual do you do alone that you’re afraid to bring into public?
Dig took mouth-painting — a desperate experiment in a dark moment — and turned it into his signature. He took thrift-store hunting and turned it into Forging Armors. He took childhood dance and made it the foundation of everything.
Authenticity isn’t about finding your “one thing.”
It’s about building the structure that lets all your things work together.
That’s what makes a world instead of a project.
That’s what makes an artist we were born to be.
May all be juicy 🍊
– Fedor
Where to Find Dig’s Worlds
Website: dig-ferreira.com
Instagram: @digferreira
Doc-Drawing Events: @doc_drawing_events
Shop: shop.dig-ferreira.com
Currently based in Brooklyn, New York.
Available for live drawing events, commissions, collaborations, wearable art, and performances.
This piece is part of The Juicy Times “Juicy Artists to Watch” series — portraits of New York City artists who embody one of the five Juicymeter qualities:
Joyful • Unique • Intimate • Communal • You-Focused.
If you know an artist — or you are one — who feels Juicy in this way, reach out to us on Substack or on Instagram and join the movement.