Brazil: Raquel Taraborelli - Rain is Champagne in her Garden By Sol Biderman January 11, 2008 Raquel Taraborelli is a Brazilian Margaret Mee who does not have to wedge her way through the Amazon jungle to paint flowers. They are in her front yard, her backyard, her terrace, her house, her mind. Her house, built in the Provence style is in the rear of a garden spangled with thousands of multi-hued flowers, overseen by a mango tree ripe with fruit. Flowers abound everywhere. When she travels abroad her destination is the same as in Brazil - gardens, fields with wild flowers. She especially enjoys the poppies of Italy and Provence and the gardens of Giverny. Inspired by Monet, she makes pilgrimages to his garden in France, as others would go to Lourdes, Rome or Jerusalem, even though all she has to do is look out of her window at her garden in the Voturantim suburb of Sorocaba, Sao Paulo, for all the inspiration she needs. On the wall of her home is a phrase from the French poet Constance Block: "Rain is champagne in the garden." In her glassed in studio, where she creates some of the most beautiful paintings of flowers of all living artists around the world, she looks out at her garden of iris beds, multicolored dahlias, tea roses, rambling roses and lavender and a mango tree burdened with fruit and says, "Flowers are not the product of human hands. God is a garden." When gazing at her art in Sao Paulo‘s Galeria Andre on the busy corner of Avenida Rebouças and Rua Estados Unidos, the warmth and vibration that emanate from her canvases stop the hustle and bustle and urban chaos that envelop the onlooker, arrested in time, admiring the sheer clarity of form, composition, color arrangement and spirit. "I often notice that people are transported inside the painting, experiencing the same sensations that I do when I slip on thick layers of paint. I feel each detail of the scene, the texture of the leaves, the scent of the flowers, the color of the sky, the heat of the sun, the light and the shade." Impressions she has captured and controlled, eliminating the gaudy excesses of some Brazilian flora when transported realistically to the canvas. "The flowers must be controlled by pastel tones," she says.
Paisagem com Belas Papoulas She is not only a superb painter but has a refined green thumb - an excellent gardener, coaxing dahlias of all different colors and hues and encouraging beds of irises that brighten her paintings with a joie d‘vivre. In the Voturantim suburb of Sorocaba, Raquel has gone to great lengths to grow lavender, purchasing the only species that survives in Brazil and leaving mulch from cut grass around the base of the plants to retain humidity. The dahlias in their beds smile at you in a variety of different hues, the rambling roses climb wrought metal arches. Some of her compositions come from the gardens and terraces of her own home, built partly from windows removed from a hospital demolished in Tatui, São Paulo. Others come from photos she has taken with her camera or mental snapshots taken on her trips to Provence and Tuscany and other regions, all recomposed and refined with the paintbrush of her mind, She recaptures the remembrance of colors that have passed through the filter of her inner eye in such works as, "Roses and cushions in the garden", "Poppy fields with two green chairs", "Poppy field with two girls", "Warm morning with blue doors", "Soft morning light, flowers, fruit and the sun drenched house", and other works highly popular at her exhibits at the Galeria Andre, São Paulo, or at the National Arts Club in New York and other exhibits in galleries and museums in Europe and the Americas. She avoids the gaudy tones that some landscape painters use to represent flamboyants, poinsetta, paineiras and ipés. Raquel creates by subduing, transforming, modulating, harmonizing on the canvas overly bright flowers and blossoms through the controlled brushstrokes of her mind. With variegated palletes of pastel hues and tones that subdue the brilliance from the overly colored flowers, but never nipping the beauty in the bud, Raquel‘s paintings, when seen up close, seem to be splotches of paint but from a distance they merge together conveying a sense of movement, mass, harmony, vibration. The masterful way she organizes the colors, forms, textures, shades on the canvas corraborates the esthetic theory that James Joyce borrowed from St. Thomas Aquinas: wholeness, harmony and radiance. Above all the radiance. To see more of her work visit her website www.raqueltaraborelli.com and www.rtaraborelli.com.
Caminho Colorido com D谩lias e Girass贸is Sol Biderman is a member of the Brazilian Art Critics Association and the International Art Critics Association, Paris.