First Friday Santa Cruz December 2nd 2011

João de Brito paintings will be featured at Center Street Grill again, Joao was born on a small island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and after living in New England for ten years, he moved to California in 1978. The natural colors and reflection of the sun from the Ocean reminded him of his homeland and gave him comfort.
” I believe this is why I paint things even brighter than they are in reality, because I want others to feel that same comfort in my art. On a bad day, I can sit in front of my painting with a cup of tea or a glass of wine, and if it gives me that hope and comfort, it’s done its job.”
João de Brito has collaborated with a number of artists both locally and international, among them his dear friends the late Nathan Oliveira, William B. Hannum, also pop painter Mel Ramos and classic painters David Leffel and Mark Geller…

First Friday Santa Cruz November 4th 2011

Center Street Grill featuring – Joao de Brito

João de Brito paintings will be featured at Center Street Grill, Joao was born on a small island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and after living in New England for many years moved to California in 1978. The natural colors and reflection of the sun from the Pacific Ocean reminded him of his homeland and gave him comfort.
” I believe this is why I paint things even brighter than they are in reality, because I want others to feel that same comfort in my art. On a bad day, I can sit in front of my painting with a cup of tea or a glass of wine, and if it gives me that hope and comfort, it’s done its job.”
João de Brito has collaborated with a number of artists both locally and international, among them his dear friends the late Nathan Oliveira, William B. Hannum, also pop painter Mel Ramos and classic painters David Leffel and Mark Geller…

Center Street Grill
1001 Center Street # 1
Santa Cruz, CA

The Gone Tomorrow Art Gallery featuring – Ursula O’Farrell & Center Street Grill featuring – Joao de Brito

Part #1

Gone Tomorrow Art Gallery featuring artist Ursula O’Farrell

“Emotional Color Vibes”

“Ursula O’Farrell’s paintings are in the tradition of Bay Area gestural figure painting. With an intense bravura brush she applies juicy paint, reminiscent of some of the pictures by Elmer Bischoff and David Park. Yet her agitated vibrating surfaces are more abstract than those of her predecessors. Women are the theme of her work, sometimes painted in red and integrated in a complementary green background. They remind us of Nathan Oliveira’s paintings or those of the British painter Frank Auerbach.”

Gone Tomorrow Gallery 1001 Center Street #4 Santa Cruz, CA

Lecturing at Stanford University

 Lecturing at the Cantor Art Center at Stanford University July 13th, I had two groups of students from the Luso American Education Foundation Summer Camp attend, we reviewed nine works on paper by master printer Nathan Oliveira, we covered lithographs, monotype and drypoint from 1956-2000.

What an honor to speak about this great artist, his techniques and impatience with traditional printmaking led him into new ways to produce master works.

I quoted from Robert Conway a art historian and author of a future two set catalougue on all of Nathans works on paper "Oliveira's achievements as a painter, sculptor and draughtsman are enough to earn him his place in the history of modern American art. His career as printmaker, however, elevates him beyond the boundaries of the present, for Nathan Oliveira is arguably one of the half-dozen most important printmakers in the last five centuries of western art" -  I could not say it any better, Comway added Oliveira to names such, Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt van Rijn, Benedetto Castiglione, Goya and Degas "these artists and a few others challenged the boundaries of Western printmaking over the past four centuries".

Having lived in many different places one can only return as a new entity

This is a article that I wrote on "Identidade" recently published "Mundo Acoriano" based on a lecture I gave at the University of the Azores, Portugal in 2009 and yes! they cropped my painting, a faux pas. 

Identidade

Having lived in many different places one can only return as a new entity

As an artist I try to explore aspects of identity, roots and origins, place and displacement, crossings and wanderings, new surroundings and ever-changing reality and how these experiences inform and transform the person and the self that ultimately help me to find my artistic expression on the canvas and other creative materials.

Keeping in mind the wider context and guiding theme of the projects that I work on – the aesthetical reflection on contemporary Azorean artistic manifestations – I nonetheless leave room for other intangibles pertaining to my craft. While recognizing and asserting origins, one must be careful not to neglect important influences and aspects of one’s art in favor of background. That can or could place an artificial restriction on the artist’s vision.

Exonome is a term which originated in an Internet community some years ago and seeks to define/describe an individual who has lived outside his/her homeland, original place, social group or culture for an extended period of time and “has adapted to the new surroundings without losing awareness or characteristics of his/her origins.” This adaptation does not mean one fully blends in with the new reality; yet one has changed enough to feel somewhat “foreign” in the place of origin.

A full return is therefore never possible. Having wandered about and lived in many different places one can only return as a new entity. One belongs to nowhere and everywhere. This suspended state, this nomadic condition – exo (outside) + nome (possible alter. of nomad) – is in many ways an appropriate symbol or metaphor for the creative life.

The artist is a wayfarer, a nomad, a citizen of the world. This very unsettling and unsettled state constitutes also paradoxically a privileged viewpoint from which to see anew, to recreate one’s world.

As a Portuguese American artists, this journey, or sea voyage in the tradition of the navigators who charted new routes and remapped the world, led me geographically and symbolically across continents, space and time from Vila Franca do Campo in the Azores to California, via New England.

I’m part of a new generation of artists residing in this California where cultural diversity flourishes. We are the originators of new topographies, paradigms, symbols, a particular mode of expression and being that reflect the significant cultural contributions that immigrants have made in this outpost state. Yet we are first and foremost artists and our first allegiance is to our calling and inner vision.

In my work I seek to understand and incorporate roots through an identification with the land and the topographic islands of memory and emotion that I hope will reach viewers on a visceral level.

While I can plumb my own personal story for subject matter and ask myself what it means to be Portuguese American and an artist of Azorean origins, from the viewpoint on this other side of the world, I carry the weight of a people that were isolated in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean for 500 years and dreamed of living in other lands, I embrace the challenge to revive and transform tradition, to question assumptions and stereotypes and reinvent roots.

In my paintings of landscapes and portraits you may detect hues and expressions of seedlings that have crossed the oceans, found new colors, new communities of artists, were scattered all over my long voyage, redrawing the map of my identity as a painter.

My work has been variously described in terms of magic realism, expressionism in the Fauve tradition, as having an “exotic, spiritual, magical, surreal, magnetic exuberance.”

For my part I strive to present the viewer with images that are both familiar and alien, that elicit a strong response and maybe a second view, and ultimately defy schools, labels and explanations.

I see myself as a wanderer, exonome in art. I feel privileged to inhabit this nomadic space which allows me to go beyond artificial cultural definitions/limitations and hopefully enter the realm of a primordial and universal
reality.

João de Brito

Artista plástico - Natural de V.F. Campo, S. Miguel, Açores, residente em Stª Cruz, Califórnia USA

http://www.mundoacoriano.com/index.php?mode=noticias&action=show&id=121

Provincetown Magazine "The Exuberant Images of Joao de Brito"

Provincetown Magazine by:  Jeannette de Beauvoir

The colors are vibrant and bright, bright as the sunlight in João de Brito’s native Portugal and just as welcoming. They belong to paintings that comprise scenes from the artist’s homeland, scenes from his travels in Europe, scenes from here on the Outer Cape, that form a distinctive way of looking at what de Brito calls the “discovery of the everyday.”

You can see some of these paintings at Thanassi Gallery during this year’s Provincetown Portuguese Festival, as part of a special exhibit of João de Brito’s work in oils and giclée, titled Coastal Views.
De Brito is no stranger to Provincetown. A longtime member of the venerable Beachcomber’s Club—and the first Azorean visual artist invited to join—he has a long history with the town. “I was offered a stay in Harry Kemp’s shack,” he says. “I was not able to stay for any length of time, but I spent several hours there. His poetry moved me incredibly... it’s a special world out in the dunes.” (Included in the exhibit at the Thanassi Gallery is a painting of the Tasha and Margo Gelb dune shacks.)
The names he cites as friends are icons of Provincetown, past and present. “I did a painting of Flyer Santos, and this fellow from Toronto fell in love with it and bought it right away,” he remembers. “Napi showed me his collection, and looking at all those paintings—it is like taking a journey. There’s a special energy here, especially in the winter. “Provincetown reminds me of the Azores,” de Brito continues. “It’s flooded with light, with that ocean reflection … I think that I paint things even brighter than they are in reality, because I want to put a positive spin on my art. On a bad day, I want to sit in front of a painting with a cup of tea or a couple of glasses of wine, and if it makes me feel better, it’s done its job.”
Certainly his own paintings do that. Described as exotic, magical, and surreal, they invite the viewer to participate in the sheer exuberance of de Brito’s vision. The Thanassi Gallery exhibit includes a number of paintings—especially those of the Outer Cape, as well as one of Tuscany—that are so filled with light, life, and joy that the viewer cannot help but smile when looking at them. “I like my work to be pleasing,” admits de Brito. “But beyond that pleasure, you can go deeper. There are layers of paint, layers of me... you’ll never get bored. I put the wrong colors in the right places purposely, to draw people in. That’s the essential aspect of the creative spirit. It’s true to who I am as a person.”
João de Brito was born on a small island an ocean away from Cape Cod, in a creative and artistic milieu in the Azores archipelago that was “very much like Provincetown,” according to the artist. He emigrated from Portugal with his family when he was a teenager and lived in Massachusetts and Rhode Island before moving to California—with its own coastal beauty and light—where he continues to live and from which he departs frequently to travel and paint en plein air. “I moved there to study,” the artist explains. “And stayed.”
His studies and influences are wide. Working and learning both in the United States and in Europe, he looked constantly for ways to convey the brightness of his vision. The French fauves, the early California impressionists, the Society of Six, Selden Gile and August Gay, Armin Hansen, the late Nathan Oliveira and E. Charlton Fortune, and Portuguese artists Domingo Rebelo and Viera da Silva all played a part in de Brito’s developing style. But “it is a distinctive style now,” says Vasso Trellis, curator of the exhibit at the Thanassi Gallery. “The colors and the lines are distinctive, the use of light, these are all his style.”
De Brito may travel widely for his plein-air paintings, but he returns again and again to his native Portugal … and to Provincetown. He is drawn to scenes that use vivid colors to convey—and create—an underlying powerful emotion, something a reviewer cited as “reaching out to the viewer’s soul.” He finds those colors in Azorean island images and also here on the Cape. “In my work,” he explains, “I seek to incorporate an understanding of the topography, sea, and people of Cape Cod. I try to [provoke] the viewers on a visceral level to enjoy my paintings now and in the future.”
João de Brito has collaborated with a number of other artists, among them impressionists William B. Hannum and Mark Geller and traditional painter David Leffel. It’s a different sort of collaboration that is absorbing him at the moment, however. “I’m involved in several exciting projects right now,” he responds when asked when he’ll next be in Provincetown, “so I’m debating what to do. I was contacted by a professor of music in Texas who saw my art and wanted to put it to music. So far the collaboration includes four piano solos, but there’s an entire symphony in the works and we’re getting a crew together to record it. The Berkeley Symphony wants to take it on the road!”
It’s certainly a collaboration to look forward to. In the meantime, the collection at the Thanassi Gallery will give viewers a vivid taste of João de Brito’s art: a celebration of life, and an enduring vision of a brighter world.
“Coastal Views: The Art of João de Brito” is on exhibit June 23 - July 1 at Thanassi Gallery, 234 Commercial St., Provincetown, 508.487.0233. There will be an opening reception on Saturday, June 25th, 7 - 9 p.m. 

http://provincetownmagazine.org/Art/the-exuberant-images-of-joao-de-brito