Óbidos Lagoon early morning

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Watermedia on paper 15'x6'

Quiet waters, quiet mornings by the lake

Pen & Ink

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Watermedia on paper 6'x8'

As Robert Henri says in his book The Art Spirit, this is kind of Concept-and-Carry method of study.

En plein air painting

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By Helder Vieira

Lagoa de óbidos sem ponta de vento.

Oil on canvas 18x30 Cm (7'x12')

Can you hear the silence?

Works in progress

The most beautiful lagoon in Europe

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Óbidos Lagoon

50 x 25 cm

Oxidations rust and paint on steel



EUROPEAN UNION

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Mixed media on heavy steel 

2 x (41 cm x 34,5 cm)

That's why Art is a hammer...

GRONHO Foz do Arelho

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Rusty steel and mixed media

100x63 cm steel

 

This one gave me serious fight.

It is not an easy thing to control rust formation

"Behave!" I said showing my whip.

It did not work.

Then, I said "please" and... voilà ;) 

 

How many stories this walls could tell...

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Watercolor 14 x9 cm

Just off the hook

Pastel (60cmx40cm)

Early morning on the harbour...

Field work

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Salt extraction, between mountains.
Well... not in the winter or springtime ;)
Only from June to September, depending on the sun.

PORTO

http://vimeo.com/21698583

Porto, also known as Oporto in English, is the second largest city in Portugal and one of the major urban areas in the Iberian Peninsula.

Located along the Douro river estuary in northern Portugal, Porto is one of the oldest European centres, and registered as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1996.

Its settlement dates back many centuries, when it was an outpost of the Roman Empire.

Its Latin name, Portus Cale,[9] has been referred to as the origin for the name "Portugal," based on transliteration and oral evolution from Latin.

In Portuguese the city is spelled with a definite article as "o Porto" (English: the port). Consequently, its English name evolved from a misinterpretation of the oral pronunciation and referred to as "Oporto" in modern literature and by many speakers.

One of Portugal's internationally famous exports, port wine, is named for Porto, since the metropolitan area, and in particular the adegas of Vila Nova de Gaia, were responsible for the production and export of the fortified wine.

PLEIN AIR ARTISTS 2011

"Choosing from nearly 1,900 member artists on pleinairartists.ning.com, this video highlights some of the best we have. This is a sequel to "Plein Air Artists 2009" and features a new group of artists".
Video produced by Don Maier


I was one of the chosen artists to be featured in this video.

Considering they have 1,900 members, I am very proud to be included with so many great artists from around the world.

( I appear at 4:48 )

If you haven't visited this site, please do so and enjoy it.

MALHOA, a Portuguese Painter

José Malhoa, Fado, 1910, Oil, 150 cm x 183 cm

Museu do Fado, Lisboa

José Vital Branco Malhoa, was a well-known painter, who was born in Caldas da Rainha in 1855, and passed away in 1933, in Figueiró dos Vinhos.

He came to Lisbon to learn the trade of wood carver, but as fate would have it, he changed to the art of painting. He attended the Lisbon Fine Arts Academy.

He was a Co-founder of the Group of the Lion - Grupo do Leão.

The “Grupo do Leão” came to the fore at a time that permitted it to oversee a significant turning point in the Portuguese art scene. A generation of painters of great talent, creativity and in the flush of youth emerged. The old painters of the Romantic era disappeared alongside a treasured aesthetic that had shown itself spent and ill-adapted to a new modern era, while Portuguese students trained in Paris and Barbizon brought back new pictorial styles when they returned.



The Naturalism they introduced translated into a movement based on positivist theory that stressed direct experience as its guiding principle and the imitation of nature and daily life as its art.


Pictorial Naturalism took this philosophy as its own, through the experience of painting in the open air, capturing the motifs in nature and then transposing them onto the medium. The understanding of the visible was reformulated, in an attitude that aspired to possess the truth through the coherent study of colour and form.


Light lay at the heart of this style; it defined and motivated the “Grupo do Leão’s” research and its comprehension of the atmosphere and the sun, the contrasts in light and dark, the nuances, hues and transparencies.

Grupo do Leão

The José Malhoa Museum - Museu José Malhoa - painting collection represents an incomparable assembly of works of Portuguese Naturalism. José Malhoa, as patron of the Museum, is represented with the largest nucleus of work ever assembled and here naturally occupies a central position in the organisation of the collection.

 

José Malhoa Museum in Caldas da Rainha, Portugal

 
 
   

José Malhoa- Praia das Maçãs, 1918, Oil, 69 cm x 87 cm

Museu do Chiado, Lisboa

José Malhoa, Espantar os Pardais da Seara, 1904, Oil, 53 cm x 44 cm

Private collection

José Malhoa, Os Bêbados ou Festejando o São Martinho, 1907, Oil, 150 cm x 200 cm
Museu José Malhoa, Caldas da Rainha

José Malhoa, Manhã de Primavera, 1912, Oil, 28,5 cm x 39 cm

Museu Nacional de Soares dos Reis, Porto

José Malhoa, As Padeiras (Mercado de Figueiró), 1898, Oil, 45 cm x 54 cm

Private collection

SQUARE FOOT LANDSCAPE

A little pearl.
Sometimes  we  just don't see it, especially when our mind is worried about big things...

Óbidos Lagoon

Oil on panel 11 x14
... with marks of a perfect landing facing down... and now part of it!

PATH BY THE POND

Mixed media 8' x 5' 3/4

Very sunny day. Even in the Winter, sometimes there is beautiful sunny days around here.

MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY HOLIDAYS

From Lisbon to the world

From me to all the people in the world

Fishing Day

Last weekend I've been sketching here and there and selected this thumbnail sketch to do a painting.
At weekends there is always a bunch of people fishing at Foz do Arelho beach, which is the point where Óbidos Lagoon meets the ocean.
I need to go back there and catch the mood, perhaps in watercolor, and finally I'll do an oil painting.
We'll see.

RIO DE ONOR

Oil on linen 13' x 18 1/2' (33 cm x 47 cm)

Private collection

Rio de Onor is a small village in the North, in a region called something like «behind the mountains», and it is the last communitary village in Portugal.

The picture depicts a tipycal house made of raw stone and wood.

Winters can be very severe in this place, so people live upstairs and the animals, like goats, oxes and cows they live downstairs, keeping the house warm.

I painted this one in the summer.

CERAMIC: THE AFRICAN ROOTS

private collection

Sometimes I love to do a ceramic piece.
I grew up being neighbour of a Mucubal tribe in the North of Namibe desert and the only white kid among these wonderful people.
For them, working with clay was more than a craft to feed an hardware need.
I suppose that Mucubal bowls and  mystic icons still live in my mind.
I simply try to give substance to the reminiscence of those glorious days.