TREES,
São
Paulo,
Brazil
Oil
on
canvas.
Private
collection,
U.S.A.
I was very young and living with my parents in a suburb of São Paulo when I painted this. My favourite artist at the time was Van Gogh. I had taken drawing lessons in Paris from a very good but unknown painter and teacher, Pierre Bressoud, and in Brazil I occasionally visited the studio of an abstract painter, Flexor. But most of all I was influenced and taught by the intense tropical colours and the vitality of everything I saw in South America. In this landscape, I focused on the shapes between and around the trees, the way that they fitted together like a jigsaw.
