ArtistsNetwork.com 69work made by other comics writers
from Spain, Portugal and Italy,”
Corbel says. It was a departure from
the heavily conservative, historically
based, more realistic work prevalent
in France at the time. “My friends and
I and other young people weren’t so
interested in that,” the artist says.
LEARNING
THE LANGUAGE
Before the internet made working
remotely so easy, finding steady work
meant Corbel and his family moved
frequently. “We were relocating every
year,” he says. Although a move to
Paris made sense—“the main book
industry was there”—Corbel wanted
to live near the ocean, so the family
moved to Lisbon, Portugal, in 1990,
left and then returned a few years
later before going back to France in
1994 so Corbel could run a publishing
company. When that opportunity
didn’t pan out, he worked as a cowboy
on a French farm to support his grow-
ing family. He also served briefly as
the art director of the children’s
section at a weekly newspaper, over-
seeing other illustrators and writers.
“I visited schools and met a lot of
kids,” he says. “That experience actu-
ally helped me later when I began
teaching workshops in Africa.”
In 1997, Corbel returned to Lisbon,
where he began sketching in the
streets every morning, in part to
learn the local language. “I wasn’t
speaking Portuguese very well at the
time,” he says, “and I knew that if
I stayed home in my studio, I would
never learn to speak it correctly.” In
OPPOSITE
Corbel did a watercolor sketch
in Ilhas de Fogo of fi shermen
from Iemberem, a village in
South Guinea-Bissau.
BELOW
This ink wash drawing for
Ilhas de Fogo features
women washing clothes in
the outskirts of Bissau, the
capital city of Guinea-Bissau
on the coast of West Africa.