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more... The Painter in Oil a Complete Treatise 
2008-12-20 - extension: pdf - size: 4 MB
The Painter in Oil a Complete Treatise
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Brazil by Portinari - 1
This film, presented in 7 parts, shows Brazil as seen by the late Brazilian painter Candido (More) This film, presented in 7 parts, shows Brazil as seen by the late Brazilian painter Candido Portinari (1903-1962). PORTINARI (by his biographer Antonio Callado) At the end of his life, when he was very ill and full of financial worries, Gauguin wrote from Hiva-Oa, in the Marquesas Islands, to his faithful friend Daniel de Monfreid, to announce he was thinking of going home, going back to France. In words seemingly brutal in their frankness but dictated by a long, lucid friendship, Monfreid told him not to come back: “... you enjoy the immunity of the great Dead... you have become part of the history of Art.” A few days later, in May 1903, Gauguin was dead. Only Tioka, his old Maori friend, was there to close his eyes. However, as Monfreid had anticipated, Gauguin was, from that day on, among the great European dead. He might have ended his days in a remote Pacific Island, but he was born in France, he had made his name in France, he had been the friend of Van Gogh, of Mallarmé, of Strindberg. In that same year 1903, Portinari was born in Brazil and when he died in 1962, his name was well-known in the United States, in France, in Italy. To this day one can see Portinari’s mural paintings in the Library of Congress, in Washington. And, in the great entrance hall of the United Nations, in New York, one can see his two impressive, gigantic oils named respectively Guerra [War] and Paz [Peace], installed there in 1957. At about the same time, Portinari was showing his paintings in Europe and in Israel, and was illustrating, for Gallimard, novels of André Maurois and Graham Greene. But it seems that the passing of time does not help sustain the works of artists born away from the first world of Western Europe and the United States. The great museums, the great galleries, the great art magazines, the stock exchanges of art are located in New York, in Paris, and in very few other cities. Either an artist belongs to that magic circle where “l’histoire de l’Art” is always alive and rich or he has to have his name brought to life again from time to time, recalled, remembered. The intrinsic value of Portinari’s paintings is shining as brightly as ever. But the memory of his name became blurred. Let us have a look, in this book, at the many-sided, majestic world of Portinari. Born into a family of poor Italian immigrants who toiled in the coffee plantations in the State of São Paulo, Candido Portinari in 1928 won a scholarship in painting that took him to Paris. During his stay in Europe, Portinari had his painter’s block, like a writer’s block: he visited studios and exhibitions; he compared techniques of painting; he spent hours and days in churches and museums; but he painted nothing. Literally, as he used to say, he painted “only a few pictures, small ones.” The truth is that in Europe Portinari felt like a sponge, like blotting-paper, like an open camera, just absorbing impressions, sucking, registering. Upon coming back to Brazil, on the other hand, he started painting as if he might die if he stopped. In a few years, he became the most important painter in Brazil. In 1935, his name reached the United States, through his painting Café [Coffee]. In 1940, The University of Chicago Press published a study of his work under the title Portinari, His Life and Art. This book contains many black-and-white and full-color reproductions, including paintings on social and religious themes and some magnificent portraits that show that he reached the height of his powers at an early age. It also reveals that by this time, Portinari was already acclaimed by no less a person than Rockwell Kent, the American painter, illustrator, and writer. Kent (1882-1971) wrote the introduction to the book, and it is still a pleasure to note the enthusiasm with which he welcomed his young colleague from the south. This is how he describes the vision central to Portinari’s art: The world of Portinari: as, compelled by it, in thought, we move about in it, with wonder — fear, perhaps — but with the same acceptance of its elements as our unconscious selves accord the most fantastic dreams that trouble us in sleep, we come gradually to the realization that this is no world of pure imagination but an intensified, fantastic re-creation of the world that Portinari knows, his native land, Brazil. Of this, his other paintings are the evidence. In them, we see the landscape, we tread the soil; we see its workers and their poverty — not agonized about, just recounted. And recounted with love. Not love for poverty and unremitted toil, but love for woman, man, and child — who, rich or poor, to him are lovable. He paints them trustfully. “Blessed are the meek” would seem to be the utterance from his heart. And if the conditions of their life on their Brazilian earth would seem to us to be no great inheritance, they by their goodness make life seem worthwhile. They work; they marry and rear families; their children play. And of their happiness, of the happiness of carefree children at their play, there are no paintings in the treasury of art more eloquent. Thus wrote Rockwell Kent about the great Brazilian painter in 1940. I have just been looking in the Encyclopedia Britannica for the entry on Portinari. There is none, and the entry on Brazil contains only two lines about him. On the other hand, Rockwell Kent is the subject of an excellent article, running to more than twenty lines and accompanied by a reproduction of one of his pictures. Yet, if Kent has a certain position in the art and culture of the United States, it is in no way comparable to that occupied by Portinari in the painting and culture of Brazil and Latin America. The tribute that Kent paid him in 1940 was prophetic. Portinari’s art continued to develop until the end of his life. No painter of comparable stature has appeared in Brazil since his death in 1962. During the first half of the present century, two Brazilian artists, each working in a different art form, enriched their country’s culture and enhanced its international standing. They were Portinari and — in music — Villa-Lobos. To add the name of Oscar Niemeyer, the architect of Brasilia, is to define the area in which the Brazilian cultural sensibility has spread and influenced the sensibilities of other peoples. But there is no doubt that Portinari best and most directly illustrates the Brazilian phenomenon. For reasons of personal taste, some people may think that other Brazilian painters are more important than Portinari. No one, however, would deny his absolute primacy as the painter of Brazil as a whole. The Portinari Project is gradually recording, photographing, and cataloging the monumental heritage of Portinari’s work. The Project gives an idea of the artist’s impressive output of more than 5,100works: migrants from the poverty-stricken Northeast, cowhands, laborers, popular musicians — as well as religious and historical paintings, and portraits. In 1956, I published the book Retrato de Portinari [Portrait of Portinari] edited by the Rio de Janeiro Museum of Modern Art: a biographical study of he who was, in my opinion, Brazil’s greatest painter. The series of interviews for the book served to establish the basis of my longlasting, strong friendship with Portinari. I took to calling him Candinho, as his family and closest friends knew him. I paid frequent calls to the painter’s apartment in the district of Leme in Rio de Janeiro; I enjoyed lunch with him, his wife Maria — my friend to date — and son João Candido, a young man at the time, and today a teacher of Mathematics and a prominent leader of the Portinari Project. In 1979, I published a second edition of Retrato [Portrait] (Editora Paz e Terra), in which the painter’s biography is extended until his death in 1962. [A longer, reviewed third edition was published in 2003 by Jorge Zahar Editor.] I always recall Portinari wearing yellow rubber gloves while painting in an attempt to fight the lead poisoning caused by the paints he could not avoid using. And how he loved to wear Italian-style vests, some of them quite elaborate! Holding his palette in gloved hands, Candinho looked just like an artist of earlier times. That is how I picture him now, in perspective; in the background of an extensive art collection. However, on the easel, the picture I recall is always one of those last on which I saw him working. At that time Candinho painted motifs of the Carajás Indians although frequently returning to the theme of the Rio de Janeiro hillsides; except that the hillsides of his last canvasses were transparent, translucent, much more disquieting than those he did twenty years back, where the crude misery appeared together with the liveliness of biscateiros [those who live off odd jobs] and women carrying water cans on their heads. I believe this way of remembering my friend and the painter is deeply rooted in his personality and in his art: it comes from the conflict that always existed between Portinari’s intense Brazilianism and his Italianism. While a young scholarship student in Paris, Portinari wrote to a friend in Brazil a letter that was to become famous in the story of his life, in which he said: Despite my blood of the people from Florence, a city described by Romain Rolland as feverish, proud, where one was free and one was a tyrant, where it was splendid to live and where life was pure hell, I feel like a “hick.” The hicks Dominga and Baptista, Italian peasants originally from Vicenza in Veneto and from Florence, immigrated to the Brazilian land of coffee in the late 1800s where they conceived their son Candido. The conflict installed in Portinari’s spirit between Florence and Brodowski, his hometown, between the Arno River and the region of the Alta Mogiana railway, would have caused, according to one or two critics, a certain inconsistency in his style. Thus, in their opinion, there was a lack of consonance and conviction between, let us say, Portinari the portraitist and painter of religious and historic themes, and Portinari the painter of retirantes (migrants from drought areas), of favelados (shantytown dwellers), of popular musicians. The first of these two Portinaris was viewed as a conservative and the second, an innovator; the first, classical, the second, modern. Such criticism seems superficial and unfounded, considering that even in Portinari’s most hieratic and grave works such as A Primeira Missa no Brasil [The First Mass in Brazil] or A chegada de D. João VI à Bahia [The arrival of D. João VI in Bahia], the modernity of style is overwhelming, as indeed the classic monumentality is present in Portinari’s Cangaceiros [Bandits] and in the Meninos de Brodowski [Children of Brodowski]. One always finds tension, a powerful balance in his work: the bow in one world, the bow string in another. Any survey of the amazing Portinarian labor assures us that, besides his painting of “social” inspiration, at least in three other painting categories Portinari revealed himself as the most complete of Brazilian plastic artists: religious, historic, and portrait. Take portrait painting, for instance. The depth and variety of the gallery of portraits Portinari left us make me often think of the keen, peasant-like cunning with which he observed and summed up people around him. His blue eyes used to flash behind his gold-rimmed glasses and people would be instantly defined with respect or dismissed with a boutade. Portinari’s portraits are as “painterly” as Kokoschka’s and at the same time intensely psychological. Suffice to mention here the four portraits Portinari painted of the Rubinstein family, pianist Arthur, his wife and their children Eva and Paul. Arthur Rubinstein’s portrait belongs to an extensive group of portraits Portinari painted of artists and poets, the fine faces, the peace, the inner glow. Mrs. Rubinstein’s picture belongs to another extensive wall in Portinari’s collection: the wall of elegant women, of hostesses. Finally, we have, with Eva and Paul, two perfect early instances of the passion with which he painted children. He loved them and painted them as if he were dipping his brush in golden, sparkling wine. His series of children’s portraits are a permanent delight to the eye, from the portraits of the Rubinstein’s children to those of his own granddaughter Denise. In his last years of life, Portinari painted Denise repeatedly. It was his self-portrait of the painter as a doting grandfather. Portinari used to say he did not like portrait painting. He stuck to doing them during his life because a few portraits of very rich people would bring him enough money to buy lots of time in which he could paint only and exactly what he felt like painting. And he in fact reduced his portrait painting in proportion to the rising level of his bank account in his mature years. But he fortunately never stopped painting portraits for nothing, portraits of his friends. He did mine, thank God. The experience of having your portrait painted by Portinari was not only an honor and a special emotion, but for those dealing in any kind of art, a learning process, a lesson in effort and integrity. A master of all the resources of his art, Portinari painted and repainted an ear, or the cloth of a shirt, for as long as it was necessary — hours, days — awaiting that moment when the artist suddenly feels the thrill of arrival, of having achieved what he sought. Portinari did not have a work routine, so to speak: he worked all the time, the whole day. However, he never established dates to finish anything. The canvasses he diligently worked on seemed to know the time to consider themselves finished, to finish themselves. Portinari resembled a gardener or a hand at a coffee plantation, just like his parents. He toiled his ground of paintings from sunrise to sunset, and after that left them to thrive by themselves. And let me now recall one more aspect of Portinari’s creative genius, actually the last one he revealed: that of a poet. His posthumous book Poems was published in 1964. He caught his poetry fever in 1958, on board the Conte Grande. He feared it might be his last trip to his beloved Europe. He seemed to know that his longstanding disease — that fatal incompatibility of his with oil paints — was lately gaining firm ground in his body. And the painter felt almost professionally inquisitive. He wrote: I wonder whether there is color in death? Which color shall I find on the other side? Then, the following day, he wrote: How much I would be able to tell If only words came to me as colors do. The truth is, however, that taking for granted that he didn’t know how to handle a pen as well as he handled his brushes, Portinari not only left us sweet and at times deeply moving poetry, but also yet another instance of his artistic integrity. When Portinari had quite a sheaf of good poems — mostly impressions from his humble but inspiring childhood, peopled by ghosts and angels — his publisher José Olympio, who happened to come from the same backcountry as Portinari, asked him for illustrations for his verses. Portinari was adamant in saying no. He did not intend to use the painter to promote the poet! People, he argued, would only buy the book because of the illustrations. I, personally, tried to make him reconsider his decision by saying that William Blake, the great English poet, had illuminated his poems with his own etchings. Portinari replied that Blake would have been famous through just his etchings, whether he had written poetry or not. No. His case was different and he refused to draw or paint anything for his Poems. Some day he might produce a very limited edition of Poems with illustrations: “for intimate friends, only.” Portinari’s obsequies in Rio, on February 6, 1962, were at par with those French funeral processions — of Valéry and Sartre— during which the heart of Paris seems to stop beating. And the crowds who looked on — black people and mulattos, Indian-looking people and white people — were the very crowds Portinari painted in a thousand pictures: his Northeastern cangaceiros, his farmhands, his popular musicians, his shantytown mestizos, his 16th century Portuguese discoverers, his saints. A lifetime of titanic artistic effort was somehow alive around the dead painter now. And I suddenly remembered Portinari telling me once he had managed to bear with fortitude many a day of physical and spiritual suffering because the one unbearable suffering he feared he had been spared: he never had to stop painting. However hard he worked, he added, he would never say he had earned his living with the sweat of his brow. He had always been thrilled and fulfilled by his painting. I kept thinking while I followed the funeral procession that lovers would never say either that they had reached pleasure by the sweat of their bodies; to a certain extent it would be true, but it would be a meaningless truth. (Less)
Adding Details and Finishing a Portrait
In this painting tutorial series, expert painter Alexander Shundi explains step by step how to add (More) In this painting tutorial series, expert painter Alexander Shundi explains step by step how to add the finishing details and complete your portrait. (Less)
Brazil by Portinari - 1 This film, presented in 7 parts, shows Brazil as seen by the late Brazilian painter Candido (More) This film, presented in 7 parts, shows Brazil as seen by the late Brazilian painter Candido Portinari (1903-1962). PORTINARI (by his biographer Antonio Callado) At the end of his life, when he was very ill and full of financial worries, Gauguin wrote from Hiva-Oa, in the Marquesas Islands, to his faithful friend Daniel de Monfreid, to announce he was thinking of going home, going back to France. In words seemingly brutal in their frankness but dictated by a long, lucid friendship, Monfreid told him not to come back: “... you enjoy the immunity of the great Dead... you have become part of the history of Art.” A few days later, in May 1903, Gauguin was dead. Only Tioka, his old Maori friend, was there to close his eyes. However, as Monfreid had anticipated, Gauguin was, from that day on, among the great European dead. He might have ended his days in a remote Pacific Island, but he was born in France, he had made his name in France, he had been the friend of Van Gogh, of Mallarmé, of Strindberg. In that same year 1903, Portinari was born in Brazil and when he died in 1962, his name was well-known in the United States, in France, in Italy. To this day one can see Portinari’s mural paintings in the Library of Congress, in Washington. And, in the great entrance hall of the United Nations, in New York, one can see his two impressive, gigantic oils named respectively Guerra [War] and Paz [Peace], installed there in 1957. At about the same time, Portinari was showing his paintings in Europe and in Israel, and was illustrating, for Gallimard, novels of André Maurois and Graham Greene. But it seems that the passing of time does not help sustain the works of artists born away from the first world of Western Europe and the United States. The great museums, the great galleries, the great art magazines, the stock exchanges of art are located in New York, in Paris, and in very few other cities. Either an artist belongs to that magic circle where “l’histoire de l’Art” is always alive and rich or he has to have his name brought to life again from time to time, recalled, remembered. The intrinsic value of Portinari’s paintings is shining as brightly as ever. But the memory of his name became blurred. Let us have a look, in this book, at the many-sided, majestic world of Portinari. Born into a family of poor Italian immigrants who toiled in the coffee plantations in the State of São Paulo, Candido Portinari in 1928 won a scholarship in painting that took him to Paris. During his stay in Europe, Portinari had his painter’s block, like a writer’s block: he visited studios and exhibitions; he compared techniques of painting; he spent hours and days in churches and museums; but he painted nothing. Literally, as he used to say, he painted “only a few pictures, small ones.” The truth is that in Europe Portinari felt like a sponge, like blotting-paper, like an open camera, just absorbing impressions, sucking, registering. Upon coming back to Brazil, on the other hand, he started painting as if he might die if he stopped. In a few years, he became the most important painter in Brazil. In 1935, his name reached the United States, through his painting Café [Coffee]. In 1940, The University of Chicago Press published a study of his work under the title Portinari, His Life and Art. This book contains many black-and-white and full-color reproductions, including paintings on social and religious themes and some magnificent portraits that show that he reached the height of his powers at an early age. It also reveals that by this time, Portinari was already acclaimed by no less a person than Rockwell Kent, the American painter, illustrator, and writer. Kent (1882-1971) wrote the introduction to the book, and it is still a pleasure to note the enthusiasm with which he welcomed his young colleague from the south. This is how he describes the vision central to Portinari’s art: The world of Portinari: as, compelled by it, in thought, we move about in it, with wonder — fear, perhaps — but with the same acceptance of its elements as our unconscious selves accord the most fantastic dreams that trouble us in sleep, we come gradually to the realization that this is no world of pure imagination but an intensified, fantastic re-creation of the world that Portinari knows, his native land, Brazil. Of this, his other paintings are the evidence. In them, we see the landscape, we tread the soil; we see its workers and their poverty — not agonized about, just recounted. And recounted with love. Not love for poverty and unremitted toil, but love for woman, man, and child — who, rich or poor, to him are lovable. He paints them trustfully. “Blessed are the meek” would seem to be the utterance from his heart. And if the conditions of their life on their Brazilian earth would seem to us to be no great inheritance, they by their goodness make life seem worthwhile. They work; they marry and rear families; their children play. And of their happiness, of the happiness of carefree children at their play, there are no paintings in the treasury of art more eloquent. Thus wrote Rockwell Kent about the great Brazilian painter in 1940. I have just been looking in the Encyclopedia Britannica for the entry on Portinari. There is none, and the entry on Brazil contains only two lines about him. On the other hand, Rockwell Kent is the subject of an excellent article, running to more than twenty lines and accompanied by a reproduction of one of his pictures. Yet, if Kent has a certain position in the art and culture of the United States, it is in no way comparable to that occupied by Portinari in the painting and culture of Brazil and Latin America. The tribute that Kent paid him in 1940 was prophetic. Portinari’s art continued to develop until the end of his life. No painter of comparable stature has appeared in Brazil since his death in 1962. During the first half of the present century, two Brazilian artists, each working in a different art form, enriched their country’s culture and enhanced its international standing. They were Portinari and — in music — Villa-Lobos. To add the name of Oscar Niemeyer, the architect of Brasilia, is to define the area in which the Brazilian cultural sensibility has spread and influenced the sensibilities of other peoples. But there is no doubt that Portinari best and most directly illustrates the Brazilian phenomenon. For reasons of personal taste, some people may think that other Brazilian painters are more important than Portinari. No one, however, would deny his absolute primacy as the painter of Brazil as a whole. The Portinari Project is gradually recording, photographing, and cataloging the monumental heritage of Portinari’s work. The Project gives an idea of the artist’s impressive output of more than 5,100works: migrants from the poverty-stricken Northeast, cowhands, laborers, popular musicians — as well as religious and historical paintings, and portraits. In 1956, I published the book Retrato de Portinari [Portrait of Portinari] edited by the Rio de Janeiro Museum of Modern Art: a biographical study of he who was, in my opinion, Brazil’s greatest painter. The series of interviews for the book served to establish the basis of my longlasting, strong friendship with Portinari. I took to calling him Candinho, as his family and closest friends knew him. I paid frequent calls to the painter’s apartment in the district of Leme in Rio de Janeiro; I enjoyed lunch with him, his wife Maria — my friend to date — and son João Candido, a young man at the time, and today a teacher of Mathematics and a prominent leader of the Portinari Project. In 1979, I published a second edition of Retrato [Portrait] (Editora Paz e Terra), in which the painter’s biography is extended until his death in 1962. [A longer, reviewed third edition was published in 2003 by Jorge Zahar Editor.] I always recall Portinari wearing yellow rubber gloves while painting in an attempt to fight the lead poisoning caused by the paints he could not avoid using. And how he loved to wear Italian-style vests, some of them quite elaborate! Holding his palette in gloved hands, Candinho looked just like an artist of earlier times. That is how I picture him now, in perspective; in the background of an extensive art collection. However, on the easel, the picture I recall is always one of those last on which I saw him working. At that time Candinho painted motifs of the Carajás Indians although frequently returning to the theme of the Rio de Janeiro hillsides; except that the hillsides of his last canvasses were transparent, translucent, much more disquieting than those he did twenty years back, where the crude misery appeared together with the liveliness of biscateiros [those who live off odd jobs] and women carrying water cans on their heads. I believe this way of remembering my friend and the painter is deeply rooted in his personality and in his art: it comes from the conflict that always existed between Portinari’s intense Brazilianism and his Italianism. While a young scholarship student in Paris, Portinari wrote to a friend in Brazil a letter that was to become famous in the story of his life, in which he said: Despite my blood of the people from Florence, a city described by Romain Rolland as feverish, proud, where one was free and one was a tyrant, where it was splendid to live and where life was pure hell, I feel like a “hick.” The hicks Dominga and Baptista, Italian peasants originally from Vicenza in Veneto and from Florence, immigrated to the Brazilian land of coffee in the late 1800s where they conceived their son Candido. The conflict installed in Portinari’s spirit between Florence and Brodowski, his hometown, between the Arno River and the region of the Alta Mogiana railway, would have caused, according to one or two critics, a certain inconsistency in his style. Thus, in their opinion, there was a lack of consonance and conviction between, let us say, Portinari the portraitist and painter of religious and historic themes, and Portinari the painter of retirantes (migrants from drought areas), of favelados (shantytown dwellers), of popular musicians. The first of these two Portinaris was viewed as a conservative and the second, an innovator; the first, classical, the second, modern. Such criticism seems superficial and unfounded, considering that even in Portinari’s most hieratic and grave works such as A Primeira Missa no Brasil [The First Mass in Brazil] or A chegada de D. João VI à Bahia [The arrival of D. João VI in Bahia], the modernity of style is overwhelming, as indeed the classic monumentality is present in Portinari’s Cangaceiros [Bandits] and in the Meninos de Brodowski [Children of Brodowski]. One always finds tension, a powerful balance in his work: the bow in one world, the bow string in another. Any survey of the amazing Portinarian labor assures us that, besides his painting of “social” inspiration, at least in three other painting categories Portinari revealed himself as the most complete of Brazilian plastic artists: religious, historic, and portrait. Take portrait painting, for instance. The depth and variety of the gallery of portraits Portinari left us make me often think of the keen, peasant-like cunning with which he observed and summed up people around him. His blue eyes used to flash behind his gold-rimmed glasses and people would be instantly defined with respect or dismissed with a boutade. Portinari’s portraits are as “painterly” as Kokoschka’s and at the same time intensely psychological. Suffice to mention here the four portraits Portinari painted of the Rubinstein family, pianist Arthur, his wife and their children Eva and Paul. Arthur Rubinstein’s portrait belongs to an extensive group of portraits Portinari painted of artists and poets, the fine faces, the peace, the inner glow. Mrs. Rubinstein’s picture belongs to another extensive wall in Portinari’s collection: the wall of elegant women, of hostesses. Finally, we have, with Eva and Paul, two perfect early instances of the passion with which he painted children. He loved them and painted them as if he were dipping his brush in golden, sparkling wine. His series of children’s portraits are a permanent delight to the eye, from the portraits of the Rubinstein’s children to those of his own granddaughter Denise. In his last years of life, Portinari painted Denise repeatedly. It was his self-portrait of the painter as a doting grandfather. Portinari used to say he did not like portrait painting. He stuck to doing them during his life because a few portraits of very rich people would bring him enough money to buy lots of time in which he could paint only and exactly what he felt like painting. And he in fact reduced his portrait painting in proportion to the rising level of his bank account in his mature years. But he fortunately never stopped painting portraits for nothing, portraits of his friends. He did mine, thank God. The experience of having your portrait painted by Portinari was not only an honor and a special emotion, but for those dealing in any kind of art, a learning process, a lesson in effort and integrity. A master of all the resources of his art, Portinari painted and repainted an ear, or the cloth of a shirt, for as long as it was necessary — hours, days — awaiting that moment when the artist suddenly feels the thrill of arrival, of having achieved what he sought. Portinari did not have a work routine, so to speak: he worked all the time, the whole day. However, he never established dates to finish anything. The canvasses he diligently worked on seemed to know the time to consider themselves finished, to finish themselves. Portinari resembled a gardener or a hand at a coffee plantation, just like his parents. He toiled his ground of paintings from sunrise to sunset, and after that left them to thrive by themselves. And let me now recall one more aspect of Portinari’s creative genius, actually the last one he revealed: that of a poet. His posthumous book Poems was published in 1964. He caught his poetry fever in 1958, on board the Conte Grande. He feared it might be his last trip to his beloved Europe. He seemed to know that his longstanding disease — that fatal incompatibility of his with oil paints — was lately gaining firm ground in his body. And the painter felt almost professionally inquisitive. He wrote: I wonder whether there is color in death? Which color shall I find on the other side? Then, the following day, he wrote: How much I would be able to tell If only words came to me as colors do. The truth is, however, that taking for granted that he didn’t know how to handle a pen as well as he handled his brushes, Portinari not only left us sweet and at times deeply moving poetry, but also yet another instance of his artistic integrity. When Portinari had quite a sheaf of good poems — mostly impressions from his humble but inspiring childhood, peopled by ghosts and angels — his publisher José Olympio, who happened to come from the same backcountry as Portinari, asked him for illustrations for his verses. Portinari was adamant in saying no. He did not intend to use the painter to promote the poet! People, he argued, would only buy the book because of the illustrations. I, personally, tried to make him reconsider his decision by saying that William Blake, the great English poet, had illuminated his poems with his own etchings. Portinari replied that Blake would have been famous through just his etchings, whether he had written poetry or not. No. His case was different and he refused to draw or paint anything for his Poems. Some day he might produce a very limited edition of Poems with illustrations: “for intimate friends, only.” Portinari’s obsequies in Rio, on February 6, 1962, were at par with those French funeral processions — of Valéry and Sartre— during which the heart of Paris seems to stop beating. And the crowds who looked on — black people and mulattos, Indian-looking people and white people — were the very crowds Portinari painted in a thousand pictures: his Northeastern cangaceiros, his farmhands, his popular musicians, his shantytown mestizos, his 16th century Portuguese discoverers, his saints. A lifetime of titanic artistic effort was somehow alive around the dead painter now. And I suddenly remembered Portinari telling me once he had managed to bear with fortitude many a day of physical and spiritual suffering because the one unbearable suffering he feared he had been spared: he never had to stop painting. However hard he worked, he added, he would never say he had earned his living with the sweat of his brow. He had always been thrilled and fulfilled by his painting. I kept thinking while I followed the funeral procession that lovers would never say either that they had reached pleasure by the sweat of their bodies; to a certain extent it would be true, but it would be a meaningless truth. (Less)
Adding Details and Finishing a Portrait In this painting tutorial series, expert painter Alexander Shundi explains step by step how to add (More) In this painting tutorial series, expert painter Alexander Shundi explains step by step how to add the finishing details and complete your portrait. (Less)
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