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Ditch Bench. During summer there are hundreds of people at this spot. If you sit long enough at this bench you will see the world go by. Photo: Dalton Portella.
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Hawk. I found this hawk by the side of the road over a year ago and have chronicled it’s decay. Art Brewer contacted me and asked if I would barter a print of this for one of his. I now own a beautiful Art Brewer shot of Mark Cunningham body surfing. Stoked! I love barter. Photo: Dalton Portella.
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Montauk Winter Sky. One of my favorites. This captures the essence of Montauk in the winter, solitude. The first photograph I entered in a juried exhibit when I decided to show my photography. It was a show about skies. I won first place, then I donated it to a benefit and Alec Baldwin bought it. Photo: Dalton Portella.
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Path To Paradise. This shot is composed of five different shots. The wave is from the same beach on a different day, the birds are from a bird sanctuary nearby where they’ll eat from your hands. Surfer’s Journal published this in an article about artists. The path is in front of my house. Paradise. Photo: Dalton Portella.
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Riderless Tube. I love shooting empty waves, it allows me to mind surf them over and over. This was from Thunders in the Mentawaii’s. First day of a fourteen day trip. I broke my camera after shooting for an hour. Spent the rest of the trip painting instead. This and one other shot paid for that trip several times over. Photo: Dalton Portella.
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The Dinner Party. Another from the Picnic Table series. PhotoDalton Portella.
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Trapped. This piece looks at the effects we are having on our planet. Photo: Dalton Portella.
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This captures the solitude and peace we get during the winter months out here. Summertime, there would be a hundred people in the water here. Photo: Dalton Portella.
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After Challenger. This was inspired by a painting by John Grande called Challenger. I posted this on Flickr, someone commented that a novel could be written from this piece. I like that. That’s my daughter walking away from the tank. She’s in a lot of my work. Photo: Dalton Portella.
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After The Storm. Sara Nightingale Gallery invited me to participate in a show called “(no) Picnic”, that inspired my Picnic Table series where I photocomposed a picnic table in to various scenarios intended to provoke thought about family, environment, etc. Photo: Dalton Portella.
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At Play in the Fields of Men. I put my daughter and her friends in this shot from a dump in Mexico. Photo: Dalton Portella.
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Camp Hero. This was after a spectacular session with one other friend on a very cold January day. Surfing is the priority when there’s swell but I always have a camera ready in case I get lucky enough to shoot before or afterwards. In this case I got lucky. I have never seen it this perfect in the five years since I shot this. The temperature was in the 20’s that day. I was still in my wetsuit shooting with frozen fingers. Photo: Dalton Portella.
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Descent. I just loved the composition and the contrast between the boards and the cliff. Photo: Dalton Portella.
I’m an artist/photographer/musician/designer/surfer. I was born in Miami, Florida. When I was twelve, my mother moved us to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where I learned how to surf. I came of age on Ipanema Beach in the ’70s, an amazing time in the history of Brazilian surf and counterculture. When I was 18 years old, I moved to California for a couple of years, then landed in NY to study art at Parsons. Due to a screw up in my financial aid, I dropped out of school and got a job photo retouching for advertising, back in the days when it was done on film. This eventually morphed in to digital work and Photoshop, which I use a lot in my art.
While I was in Brazil in the ’70s, I’d seen a picture of Montauk in a surf magazine and when I found myself in NY, in 1980, I started coming to Montauk to surf. On 9/11/2001 I moved here full time. While watching the Trade Center burn, I asked myself “what would I regret if this was my last day?” The answer was that I would regret not surfing more, waking up to the sound of the ocean, surrounded by nature’s beauty.
After a long, lucrative career in advertising, the last few decades or so doing movie poster work for Miramax—practically every poster from Pulp Fiction to Aviator—I forsake the almighty dollar to concentrate on a fine art career. Now I make my living selling fine art prints, paintings and playing music. I also do some illustration and graphic design.
To see more of Dalton Portella’s work, click here.
