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Dalton Portella plays the drums in his Montauk home. Emily Weitz photo.
Walking into Dalton Portella’s studio, on a hillside overlooking Lake Montauk, feels a little like walking into his wildly creative mind.
A tall table crammed with acrylic paints greets you upon entry, and then your eye meanders up past an impressive collection of instruments, headlined by at least a dozen electric guitars. Paintings of wispy women juxtaposed against stark colorful backdrops hang on the walls, and surfboards frame a full drum kit.
Before I can even ask where we should begin, Portella is sitting at the drum kit with a guitar slung over his shoulder, performing a song he recently played as a one-man-band.
“If I grew up these days, I probably would have been diagnosed with ADHD,” he tells me as he leads me into another space with a computer and a large flat filing cabinet stacked with drawings. “There were very few things that would hold my attention. But when I was drawing, time would slip away.”
He recalls spending hours hunched over drawing pads, inspired by the album cover art of the 1970s, like YES and Pink Floyd. When, at 12, Portella moved with his mother from Miami to Brazil, he found another thing that held his attention: surfing.
“Those were great waves in Rio,” he says, gazing out at the Montauk blue. “And I’ve been surfing ever since. It keeps me healthy, and I love the flow — the life lessons you have to learn in the ocean. If you’re not flowing with it, you’re gonna get hurt.”
Portella’s life was flowing, and by 19 he found himself in the New York City art scene, taking classes at Parsons and reading formative books like “The Art Spirit,” by Robert Henri.
“It’s like the Bible,” he said, pulling the book from the shelf. “It’s about the responsibility you have to use the gift you’ve been given.”
He watched some of his contemporaries lose themselves to excess or to capitalism. He documented the 1980s in sketch books that he still has.
“I was wrestling with a lot of demons,” he says, flipping through images of bar flies and people experiencing homelessness. “I used my art as a place to put the pain.”
As technology made its way into the art and publishing worlds, Portella decided to learn with the times. He rode the wave, learning the language of digital art while others resisted.
“I was scared because I had never worked on a computer before,” he said, “but the writing was on the wall. I knew I had to get on board or get a different career.”
After some work on commercial retouching, he ended up connected to the art director for Miramax. He started working on movie posters, an interesting manifestation of his early interest in album covers. Portella put together the Pulp Fiction movie poster, making sure Uma’s cigarette had just the right glow and the paper had that perfectly distressed look.
“Turns out that was a big break for me,” he says, lighting up his own American Spirit as we make our way down to the basement, a trove of paintings, drawings, and surfboards turned to art.
He worked on lots of posters, and ended up having an account with Miramax that gave him a lot of freedom. But he knew that would never be the end game.
“I saw so many good artists let their own creativity die in the commercial world,” he said. But Portella never ran out of steam. At the end of a long day creating for other people, he went back to the work he was creating for himself. Sometimes that was art, other times it was music — for a while, he was in a band that played at CBGB and other hot spots in New York City.
“I never made it too big,” he said, “but music’s always been a part of my life. While I’m thinking of what to paint, I’ll kick back and play guitar and meditate on it. The guitar has become a companion.”
Sometimes he asks himself if he’s diluting the artwork by playing music, or if he could go further if he focused on one thing. But then he shrugs it off.
“I can’t pick,” he says. “I am who I am.”
That’s what Wingspan, his recent show at the Lucore Gallery in Montauk, referred to: the wide breadth of his creativity. Photographs of crashing waves or Montauk sunsets, haunting paintings of women in bold colors and shadow, drawings that span the decades, and music on any instrument he can get his hands on.
What’s next for Dalton Portella? A little bit of this and a little bit of that — catch him if you can.
Dalton Portella’s next show opens at 484 Gallery in Montauk on August 24 with a reception from 5 to 7 p.m., and you can always find his work online at daltonportella.com or on Instagram @dltnart.
