Fernando de la Rocque has been making images out of cannabis smoke for more than two years now, and he has no plans of slowing down.
De la Rocque says that for him, rolling a joint is about both work and pleasure.
The artist, who openly advocates for marijuana legalization, says he started smoking pot in his younger years and only later decided that instead of wasting the smoke, he would use it to make unique pieces of art.
"I first started smoking when I was an adolescent because I liked to smoke, I think it is pleasurable. And it is a sustainable action, you could say. I'm taking advantage of an 'ink' that's just being tossed into the air to make a work of art," de la Rocque said.
Working out of his Rio de Janeiro apartment, which butts-up against a police station in the Botafogo neighbourhood, de la Rocque manages to smoke the illegal drug and keep focus on his work.
Once he has decided on an image, the artist first cuts out a plastic stencil of what he plans to "paint".
With the stencil made, he lights up a joint, draws in the smoke, and blows it back out through the stencil, staining a sheet of paper placed behind it.
He has aptly titled his expanding collection of weed paintings, "Blow Job" because he blows the smoke to create the one-of-a-kind images.
But even de la Rocque says there are limits to how much he can smoke.
"The darker the colour of the picture that I want to use, the more I have to smoke. But I can only do one layer at a time. Otherwise I end up getting an exaggerated effect (from the marijuana) beyond what it is pleasurable," the artist said.
Though mostly decriminalized, marijuana remains illegal in Brazil. The country has only allowed medicinal use of cannabis in a handful of cases.
But that hasn't slowed de la Rocque down as his collection of weed paintings continues to grow.
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