Today we’d like to introduce you to Gabriel da Silva.
Hi Gabriel, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I was born in São Paulo – Brazil in 1983. I’ve had an interest in art since I was very young when I was used to copying the cartoons I watched on TV. Later in middle school, I fell in love with hip-hop culture and started to make graffiti which led me to get arrested for painting in the center of the city. At that moment, I was convinced I wanted to still make art but make money as well. So I moved to Spain to finish my studies in Art Direction. Madrid and its cultural life was mind-blowing to me.
It was during this time I started to paint what would be my most important work and one that would definitively mark my style. I got Inspired by the works of Hieronymus Bosch, especially “The Garden of Earthly Delights” (a painting I visited frequently in the Prado Museum in Madrid), I’ve made my version of it and discovered the great visual impact that I could attain by immersing the viewer in super-saturated images of people, colors, and symbolism.
In 2019, an agency in Miami recruited me to become part of their creative team. Here I live with my wife and my two sons while working in my house/studio developing my craft inspired by the stunning Miami sky. It is crucial for this new chapter of my life and work.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
The need to express myself led me to get arrested while painting under an important bridge in São Paulo. I was 17 y/o and full of energy, that moment was crucial to rethink what I wanted to do with my life and how to pursue my art career.
Was not easy to make the decision to go to Madrid, alone and short of money. But I loved the city and since the people were receptive got a job as an art director, which allowed me to continue living there for 12 years.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
My art has its foundations in my passion for drawing, I love to draw, and I use it as a way of thinking, first I think on paper, then in my head. My drawings led me to create a world that was just mine, a world where all my characters coexist, imaginary characters inspired by Brazilian and African folklore and legends. Seeing all these characters coexisting in harmony in a single space is magical to me and is what I would love to see in real life.
There is not always a happy story behind these characters, sometimes they are ex-slaves who need to disguise themselves with pieces of cloth so as not to be recognized by their owners, others do not have to eat and eat clouds, others live in hard environments and conditions, as is the case of my most recent body of work “Hurricane Season”.
I’m proud to still be related to graffiti in some way, most of my time I paint in the studio but still use the same techniques I used to create a mural.
Do you have recommendations for books, apps, blogs, etc?
I just finished The Wynton Marsalis book “Moving to Higher Ground: How Jazz Can Change Your Life”, very inspiring and how you can apply the knowledge from music to any part of your life.
Other recommendation is the podcast “Make Art Not Content”, a must for every creative.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://gabrielsilva.art
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/artebiel/?hl=en
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@Gabriel_Silva_Art
