70 Artists Magazine October 2019
just three months, he amassed a
sizable collection of sketches and
portraits of interesting subjects,
many of them women. “At that time
of day, I’d observe them cleaning
workspaces, selling fish, working in
restaurants, things like that.”
That led to teaming up with a
female journalist to sell his drawings
and her writings to a newspaper that
printed their collaborative work every
Sunday for a few months.
“After that project, I received a
call from someone who said that
Portuguese writer Pedro Rosa Mendes
was going to Africa for a nonprofit
organization and was looking for an
illustrator to do sketches,” Corbel
says. “A month later, I was in Guinea-
Bissau working with Pedro.”ADVENTURES
IN BOOKMAKING
Corbel traveled with Mendes to five
former Portuguese colonies in
Africa—Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau,
São Tomé and Príncipe, Angola and
Mozambique—over a period of two
years. Their goal was to record the
stories and experiences of the people
living in the small communities there,
for the Portuguese nonprofit organi-
zation Associação para a Cooperação
Entre os Povos (Association for
Cooperation Among Peoples, or
ACEP). “Pedro had written a book
called Bay of Tigers: An Odyssey
Through War-Torn Angola,” says Corbel.
In it, he shares the extraordinary,
often harrowing accounts of the peo-
ple he interviewed in 1997. “For ACEP,
Pedro basically was contracted to do
the opposite,” says Corbel, “in a book
that would highlight Africa in a posi-
tive way, revealing the Africa that
nobody talks about.”
Corbel said his job was simply to
draw. “I followed Pedro, and while he
interacted with the people, I was just
drawing, drawing, drawing,” he says.
“I didn’t have much time, so I had to
draw very fast, sometimes sur-
rounded by onlookers. It wasn’t like
being in the studio. I had to make
abstractions of the environment to
produce good drawings.”
While working on the book, Corbel
traveled back and forth from Africato Portugal, where he continued
working as an illustrator. He wasn’t
always pleased with his efforts.
“Living in Portugal, which is a very
different market from the American
market, I had to work faster to pro-
duce more to make a living,” he says.
“Some of my illustrations needed
more work, and I didn’t have the time
to redo them.”Corbel’s book with Mendes, Ilhas de
Fogo (Portuguese for “Fire Island”),
was published in 2002. They teamed
up again a short time later and
headed to East Timor in Southeast
Asia to create another book, Madre
Cacau—Timor, which was released in- “I did plenty of sketches, then
I went home,” says Corbel. “I nor-
mally had a month to produce more