ArtistsNetwork.com 71drawingsbasedonmypicturesand
sketches.ThereI couldusebetter-
qualitypaperandwatercolor.”
Whentraveling,Corbelworkswith
inexpensive,easilytransportable
materialssuchas“ballpointpens,and
paperandsketchbooksmadefor
ON KEEPING
PORTRAITS
CREATIVE
“I started out doing some very
academic portraits, but then
I thought, ‘That’s just boring,’”
says Corbel of his fi rst attempts
at painting the faces from the
places he’d visited. “So, I started
using unexpected colors, like
painting a pink African woman
instead of brown. I try to keep
the work light, elegant and
sometimes surprising.”ABOVE
This Corbel watercolor
landscape (from Ilhas de Fogo)
features a Santomean roça,
a plantation on São Tomé and
Príncipe, an island country in
the Gulf of Guinea off the coast
of Central Africa.
LEFT
This watercolor portrait
features the leader in a Muslim
community on the Island of
Mozambique, off northern
Mozambique, that appears in
Ilhas de Fogo.
kids—tools that, if I lost them, it
wouldn’t be a big deal.”
After collaborating with Mendes,
Corbel approached his publisher in
Portugal—who also published the late
Portuguese writer José Saramago,
winner of the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1998—about creating
a set of illustrated books featuring
the places he’d been, but “made by
Africans, not Europeans.” This pro-
posal led to Corbel’s return to Africa,
and additional illustrated book proj-
ects kept taking him back.
He worked with the people of
Guinea-Bissau to make Notícias do
Quelele (meaning “news from Quelele,”
a neighborhood there). Each chapter
covers a cultural topic, from the dry
season to hair design. “Because of
that book, I was commissioned by