Artist of The Year 2007… The Boy From Brazil

THIS week I am featuring a modern art piece by a very fashionable and current artist, who has come halfway around the world to create a movement that is paying dividends.

Henderson Cisz was born in 1960 in a village near Maringa in Brazil.

He showed a massive amount of talent for drawing and painting from a very early age but being a clever lad, decided that painting in Brazil was not going to be a serious career move, so he worked hard and got himself into the banking sector, maintaining his art as a pure hobby.

By the mid 80s Henderson had worked out that banking was not for him long term and decided to pursue his passion for painting.

Having made that decision, the next was to leave, not only his banking career, but his native Brazil too, to make his name as an artist in Europe.

He left his home for London and his first step in his new career was to paint portraits for tourists on the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue. Because of his ability he had an amazing level of success.

His portraits became highly sought after, but he quickly realised he was in the wrong location to promote himself as a serious artist. So, he swapped Shaftesbury Avenue for the railings along the Bayswater Road.

This turned out to be a defining moment as he started to become a really sought-after artist, regularly selling his simple paintings for hundreds of pounds. He even started to develop a following with regular customers coming back to buy anything he produced. His works started to become highly collectible and word spread about this exciting new young “London” artist… His star was on the rise and his prices began to soar.

More than 25 years later he has travelled around the world painting many of Europe’s major cities, has become a world renowned urban scene artist with many of his large acrylic cityscapes selling for many thousands of pounds each, many of his limited edition prints now sell out before they are even released.

He has won many awards including Artist of The Year in

2007 and in the same year won the prestigious John Solomon Trophy.

He has settled in London and has his own stunning riverside studio in London, his adopted home city.

This beautiful little painting is piece of Henderson Cisz history. It is an early work and is a watercolour of a riverside scene presumably from his homeland, Brazil. It only measures 4”x4” (9x9cm) or 10.5”x8.5” (27x22 cm) in its mounted frame, but it oozes quality.

The minimalist nature of the view is striking in its simplicity, which is difficult to achieve in a painting so small and with so few colours used. But one look at it, even to the untrained eye, shouts brilliance.

The painting shows a wide, curving river with woodland to both banks and a small red roofed house surrounded by trees to the rear on one bank away in the distance. A branch of a tree is being swept towards the viewer by the powerful surge of the river as birds fly away to settle for the evening.

This is one of my favourite paintings currently in my showroom and is a snip at only £1,200.

This great original painting, along with many others, is available to view and purchase at AntiqArt, the “preloved art” gallery at Holme Grange Craft Village or online at www.antiqart.co.uk.