Manabu Mabe - 100 Years of Japanese Immigration to Brazil

by Luiz Castro | June 18, 2008 at 01:29 pm | 346 views | 5 comments

slideshow view all 2

Celebrating 100 year of Japanese immigration to Brazil I am publishing a series of influent Brazilians Japonese, I have already published brief highlights about Rui Ohtake , Tizuka Yamasaki, and Luiz Gushiken. Today I am introducing Manabu Mabe, a fantastic artist and life history himself.

I recommend also reading a very interesting article about Manabu Mabe, published by Time Magazine in 1959.

Manabu Mabe

Painter (1924-1997)

Manabu Mabe was a Nikkei Brazilian artist. Born in Kumamoto, Japan, on September 14, 1924, Mabe moved to Brazil at age ten accompanying his parents. He brought along his crayons from Japan, as he loved to draw. He wrote: "Plains and more plains, as far as the eye can see. Coffee plantations, cattle farms, forests, trails of red earth cutting through the thicket, the song of birds, the buzzing of insects, the thud of falling mangoes. The sight of a lizard running away from a ripe, yellow papaya at my approach is the memory I keep of 1934, when my parents took me, at the age of ten, to the interior of Birigui, at 450 miles from the city of São Paulo." (From his Official Site) His paintings using vivid colors are said to reflect Brazilian life. A self-taught abstract painter with Japanese and Brazilian influences, he won many awards. His works are exhibited in museums in Brazil, Japan, the U.S., and other countries

Flag this story

Upload

Make your good story a great story. Click here to add your photos & video to this story.

Crowd Power

Scan the web to add photos and videos to this story or add them from the NowPublic Archive.

Luiz Castro

at 14:01 on June 18th, 2008

What is Art?" "Why am I painting?" Twenty years have gone by since the last time I asked myself these questions.

I'm glad I stopped to think. The peasant has become a painter. My life went through many changes.

I used to fish minnows and catfish in a small river on the farm, run after birds and eat small coconuts and guavas. My childhood memories are lyrical poems I will never forget.

The red coffee berries, the green leaves, the clear blue sky of the countryside are all ever-present on my canvas, as in the dreams of the young who used to work hard on the red soil, covered in sweat and dust, even though I am now sixty. The dreams turned into creative power and fighting spirit that drove him to paint and paint, again and again.

I have countless dreams where I wander through the world of Beauty.

To master Beauty and pursue Art always represent a fight against myself.

The suffering and pleasure of creation.

What absorbed me so wildly, so frantically?
Beauty.

I can see it ever closer, ever bigger.

How much Beauty will I be able to grasp before my life burns out?

When I was seven, I painted an umbrella, and when I was ten an autumn landscape. And when I was about 22, I started doing oil paintings of fruits and landscapes around the Japanese settlements.

After 1953, I began to become aware of the composition of colours and shapes.

In 1958, I started creating abstract paintings, as if they were explosions of my own interior, and my blood began to pulse with hope and excitement on the canvas.

"Yes. A work of art is the record of life itself." From that moment onwards, my life began to mold itself into my own creations.

Sometimes I cry, sometimes I laugh when confronted with joy and sorrow, war and peace, all the inequalities in society and te economy, all the happenings around the world, like any human being born and living in this century.

As a child I enjoyed my parent's love, which is more valuable than anything else, and now I experience the joys and sorrows of being a father to my children. The tiny being that I am, in the midst of the huge Universe and stream of history, flaps its wings of dream in the flight towards an ideal world, living every day intensely.

Manabu Mabe

Source: Manabu Mabe homepage.