|
 As a keen observer of the comings and goings of his neighborhood, longtime Lower East Side artist and musician Michael Rimbaud presents a collection of portraits made there over a period of years, which are being shown at L'Orange Bleu in Soho in New York City.
The simple but colorful paintings, done mostly in gouache over paper, show the diversity of the area - people from all walks of life that he has either known for a number of years or whom he simply approached from the street.
He also traveled extensively through Brazil - his former wife was born there - and came back with an impressive array of paintings, which resulted in a series he calls "Brazilian Paintings", which can be seen online at www.mikerimbaud.com. He hopes to find a market for them - an exhibition space, or a permanent place where people could see how a New York artist sees the country he repeatedly fell in love with.
In one of the paintings, he depicts someone sitting at a bar enjoying a cold beer (specifically a Skol, which is not available in the U.S.), and he also depicted capoeira scenes and other things he saw.
"Every time I went to Brazil I brought along sketch books and paints", he told us over an e-mail interview conducted early in January. "I painted everything, all walks of life: the beach, musicians, street kids, dancers, fish, horses, plants, satellite dishes, surfers, you name it. I befriended people in the bars at night and did their portraits. I asked children to pose for me on the street too. Sometimes I gave them the drawings. I can draw fast. I have dozens of paintings and sketches from this time".
Rimbaud explains that he is a big fan of 19th Century French painter Eugene Delacroix. "I saw an amazing exposition of his work in Paris a few years back and I was impressed by the fact he made only one voyage to Morocco in his life. Because with all his sketches and water colors he did there he had a lifetime of paintings to base them on."
"My Brazilian paintings, however, were actually completed in Brazil, all in Gouache and Acrylic. Recently I was commissioned to do a large oil painting from one of my Brazilian gouaches. I'd like to try more of that à la Delacroix". His informal approach to people sometimes strikes a chord with his subjects. For his Lower East Side series, he made a portrait of Phyllis Sanfiorenzo, who he met in his neighborhood's streets. "I was walking down Rivington" she told us over the phone", and this handsome, tall man comes over and says 'Hey, I'd like to paint you', to which I responded 'sure.' About a month later, I sat for him at his house, and it was a pleasant experience."
Rimbaud took her fine features, curly hair and skin color to good advantage. To portray her, he used a mix of colors that revealed the beauty of her racially mixed heritage, and also captured a keen shyness in her eyes. "It's weird how people see you," she says of the final results, "how he put my skin, the different colors he used." Singer Baby Monroe was also satisfied. "It's kind of cool", he says. "I see myself in it - he has a distinct style."
Rimbaud began painting early in his life, influenced by his father, artist Robert Grossman. "I remember being really impressed with how well my father could draw and I wanted to do the same. He often took me to art openings and museums here in New York. My father was a pioneer Soho loft-living artist in the '60's, back when rent was something like US$ 50".
"I was always the 'class artist' in school. In high school, I made caricatures of my teachers. One time in math class the teacher was visibly upset, thinking I was making fun of her. I had to explain that caricature is an art form, exaggerating distinctive features. I think she felt better after that. I majored in painting in college and I earned a BFA.
"Many of the paintings are in gouache", he told us, "but I'm also doing some street scenes and cityscapes in oil. I approach people on the street and I ask if they mind if I sketch them. Often they say yes, sometimes no. Everyone painted is a real person, some of them I've known for years." Ernest Barteldes is a freelance writer based on Staten Island, New York. He is a regular contributor to The Miami New Times, Brazzil, The New York Press, Global Rhythm magazine and All About Jazz-NY. He is also a columnist with The Brasilians and The Greenwich Village Gazette. His work has also appeared on The Staten Island Advance, The Florida Review (in Portuguese), Today’s Latino (in Spanish), Out Magazine, The New York Blade, The Boston Bay Windows, The New Times BPB, The Village Voice and other publications. He can be reached at ebarteldes@yahoo.com. This article appeared originally in The Brasilians.
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
The small, coastal town of Condé is located just a twenty minute's drive from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba. The Northeast of Brazil has historically been a place of encounter and mixing between peoples. For millenia groups of indigenous people fished, farmed, migrated and sometimes fought along this large, fertile area. 
The Brazilian diplo-MÁ-cia (bad diplomacy) carries on its accelerated course towards the non-acknowledgment of human rights, although sometimes it takes pleasure in saying that it does precisely the opposite. The visit of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is another example of a diplomatic omission that verges on hypocrisy. 
On July 4, 2006, representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay met in Caracas to sign the protocol for the entrance of Venezuela into the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). After two and a half years, the protocol was approved by the legislative bodies of Argentina and Uruguay, and as of now it may be only days away from being ratified by the continent's economic megalith, Brazil. 
Some sectors of the fight against AIDS have suggested that Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, committed genocide through his absence from the fight against the illness in his country throughout his two terms. 
One hundred and eleven years after Brazil abolished slavery, the number of workers deprived of their freedom is still huge. They raise cattle, produce charcoal, sugar cane or timber. Some of them, most undocumented Bolivians, work in basements of small apparel factories in São Paulo and other metropolis. 
On November 7, 2009 a few friends and I had an opportunity to take a look inside a Brazilian jail outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. We were able to take some amateur footage of our experience on video (see link below). It's no surprise, of course, that the typical Brazilian jail lacks some of the functionality of those in North America or Europe, but our experience that day was quite shocking. 
Depletion of the Amazon Rainforest is not a new concern facing environmentalists, biologists, ecologists, and a growing number of the Amazonian indigenous peoples. For decades they have feared for the fate of the world's most biologically diverse and species-rich hothouse. 
Geisy Arruda made history this week in Brazil, but for all the wrong reasons. What began as a poorly planned fashion statement has become a worldwide tale. Geisy decided to wear a pink mini-dress to her private college in São Paulo state, and after that, all hell broke loose. 
The push of vigilante groups in Rio de Janeiro's favelas (shantytowns) in the last three years is the most important and alarming information of the just-released study by the Rio de Janeiro University's Violence Research Center (Nupev-Uerj). 
A dispute over drug trafficking territory in Rio de Janeiro has intensified lately, leaving in its wake unprecedented acts of violence, such as the downing of a police helicopter in the northern zone of the city on October 17. Three policemen died and another two were injured. This event has drawn the attention of the international media, who are raising the issue of public security for the 2016 Olympics to be held in Rio.