Deladier Almeida Biography
With a rich palette and luscious brushwork, Deladier Almeida infuses vitality into each of his subjects, which range from portraits to scenes of contemporary life to brilliantly observed landscapes. His images of California’s varied terrain, depicted from a bird's-eye view that Almeida achieves by flying over regions of the state in helicopters or small planes, are alive with texture and movement.
Working quickly, with an emphasis on improvised brushwork, Almeida captures the sense of traveling over the earth - geometric shapes of productive land passing in a mesmerizing array of shapes and colors. As in the landscapes of Wayne Thiebaud, with whom Almeida studied, the images beautifully manipulate perspective, presenting us with compositions that pulse with life.
Born in Brazil, Deladier Almeida has lived in California since the mid-1980s, earning his Art degree from the University of California, Davis. Trained by renowned painters Wayne Thiebaud and Roland Petersen at UC Davis in the 1980’s, Almeida’s work marries the restrained quality of Thiebaud’s sleek style with Petersen’s more gestural brushwork, inspired and embraced by other Bay Area artists including David Park, Elmer Bischoff, and Richard Diebenkorn. He has exhibited his work at galleries, museums, and art fairs including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Caldwell Snyder gallery in San Francisco, the Campton gallery in New York City, the Bennington Center for the Arts in Vermont and the Albemarle Gallery in London.
“Out of the fluid life of these fields, constantly evolving to serve the agricultural needs of many, a visual pattern of recurring elements emerges. Fields of crops and their edges of separation; the arteries that feed these crops and carry away their product; the shapes of water; the shadows of trees. It has been my challenge and delight to read and reflect in paint, arrangements of these recurring elements, recombining them in formal compositions as a writer recombines the building blocks of a common language. The resulting narrative on canvas is a departure and an extrapolation of the landscape which, in simplifying it, dignifies it and reveals its essence.” – Deladier Almeida
