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Dalton Portella: Art With A Difference
by Russell Drumm
The East Hampton Star, September 6, 2001

Dalton Portella stood in the chaos of his small studio just off Old Montauk Highway in Montauk on Sunday and beat with a stick on the single string of a berim bau, a mostly percussive Brazilian instrument that looks, with its half-coconut-shell sound box, bamboo neck, and metal string, like a MARRYING of a crossbow and a hookah pipe.

"It's played with a stick, a stone, and a shaker," he said, holding a small maraca in the hand that also held the stick. Using the stone in his other hand, he applied pressure to the metal string to change the voice of the berim bau.
The player himself is a man of many voices, a drummer and guitarist as well as a painter whose view of the world is offered up in multilayered works. They are sometimes brooding in tone, but seldom lack a hopeful and lyrical center.

"I was conceived in New York, born in Miami, and raised in Brazil," he said, to explain in part his layered message. "My mother was German-Brazilian. My father was Brazilian and an alcoholic who left when I was young. I spent what I call my deformative years. from 12 to 18, in Rio."

Drawing Is Central

An early pen and ink drawing of a palm-lined beach in Bahia hangs in Mr. Portella's bathroom. He was very young when he began drawing. "My mother saw that I liked it. She hated how I got after watching cartoons on Saturday mornings, so she got me into an art class with a bunch of old ladies, and I loved it."

His first influences were illustrators, he said. He was drawn to the illustrations in his grandfather's collection of German books, and later by the likes of R. Crumb and Ralph Steadman.

He honed his drawing skills at two art schools in California before attending the Parsons School of Design in Manhattan. "In California I was so broke I couldn't afford oil paints, so I worked with watercolors and I drew. I got good at watercolors. It's so immediate, interacts with itself. There are a lot of good accidents. It paid not to have money."

Drawing, he said, is central to his art - "to be abstract, you should be able to draw first." But the pull of the abstract began as a restless boredom with the representational approach - "doing the same sailboats in the harbor" - in art class. He began making "surreal-scapes" of rocks and waves crashing on them. Waves have continued to be an important part of Mr. Portella's work. He is a surfer who first learned to love waves in Brazil.

Waves, Augmented

Three years ago, he collaborated with the photographer Rachel Tanner, digitizing her photos of waves on his computer, printing onto archival paper, and then augmenting the prints with watercolor and pastel. Ms. Tanner's waves were then incorporated into painted backgrounds in a series of very popular works.

The "striving to do something different" became pronounced at Parsons. Mr. Portella left within a year. "Too much schooling is bad for fine arts. It took me a few years to forget what I had learned."

During this period, he worked as a translator for a Brazilian shipping company long enough to know that the daily ritual of jacket and tie were not for him. The dream of making a living through art began to seem possible when he sold 15 paintings at a juried exhibit in Greenwich village. "The paintings that were closest to my heart, that came from my soul, were the ones that went first. It was very uplifting, that I could make money and move people."

Downward Spiral

This was in the early '80s, not long after he left Parsons. He was working at the time at a place that did photo retouching, just when the retouching business was becoming computerized. "I learned on a million-dollar system," he said, and this eventually led to a freelance business, now thriving, doing high-resolution computer artwork for companies including Miramax, the film studio.

But first, the artist said, he "spiraled down." The friend who had gotten him the retouch job was murdered in 1979. Mr. Portella was living on the Lower East Side. He went to Brazil for five months after the murder. When he returned, he moved to Brooklyn's Williamsburg section to work until 1990, then to Bushwick "for space for very little money."

By this time his marriage of five years had broken up. During the yearlong last stage of the downward spiral, Mr. Portella created dark works that incorporated object found on the streets in Brooklyn.

The upturn began when he stopped drinking and drugging. "I decided to live, and I seduced my wife again." Mr. Portella began painting with oil on canvas, and discovered an image that propelled his work through an extremely productive period, which continues.

"I was at a gas station just before the Southern State Parkway, looked down and saw the skeleton of a tiny bird. It spoke to me. Birds symbolize freedom and peace, and the fact that it was decaying spoke volumes. Decay is such a part of life. Someone said his life had not been a Normal Rockwell painting, and mine hasn't been. I held that bird in my hand and painted for a year. I still find him moving. It gets me right here." the artist said, pointing to his gut.

Variations On A Theme

Variations on the little bird theme were created in oil, watercolor, pastels, and in oil-watercolor-and-pastel-worked digital prints on fine paper. The bird was followed by a series whose central image is a horseshoe crab, and this by a monkfish. "I think forever they will creep into my work," Mr. Portella said.

Dalton and Gabrielle Portella, and 6-year-old Bryn, have moved to a 3,500-square-foot loft in Williamsburg at the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge, but spend most of the summer in Montauk. He shows occasionally in SoHo and in Midtown Manhattan galleries. On the East End, the artist has shown at the Elaine Benson Gallery and is now showing at the Arlene Bujese Gallery on Newtown Lane. A "retro-spectacle" of his work is hanging on the walls of the Cantina restaurant in Montauk. And his paintings are on display at his web site: daltonportella.com
Mr. Portella said his proudest work, by far, was his daughter, Bryn. "She is the greatest thing in my life. Everything else pales by comparison."