eulogies

From Charlie Barnett - from London

Charlie Barnett is an art dealer and friend.

We are all here to remember Lance. I'm sure we all experienced his big smile, hig big heart and his huge spirit and enthusiasm.

I met Lance when he came into an exhibition of Indian art I was managing. He told me that many of the paintings were paintings by his brother Sonnie (Souza) but that he too was a painter and that I must see his.

So on a January afternoon, I climbed up the stairs to his flat and Lance opened the door and beamed his huge smile at me. I could see there was very little space left and the flat was full to the ceiling with hundreds of paintings and seemingly with little room to stand or sit.

We sat and talked and talked and drank tea for hours; talking about painting, his poetry, his love of music and religion, with Mozart and Rachmaninov going at full blast.

But mainly we laughed. Lance found humour in nearly all aspects of everyday life.

I'm sure you all know, he was a first class raconteur.

I visited him again and again to see his paintings and he slowly told me how he had come to be in his extraordinary flat in Haverstock Hill. He told me about his childhood in Bombay, his wonderful mother Lily, his father Joao, his sister Marina, his brother Sonnie, about Ana Rita and his much loved daughters Raissa and Marsha, about Goa, about his schooldays at St Sebastien and St Xaviers College, how in 1951 he went to England and enrolled at St Martin's College and how, while staying in Chalk Farm with his brother Sonnie, he was - despite several previous escapes across the Channel - eventually conscripted to do national service in the airforce.But a natural rebel, he managed to de-enlist himself pretty quickly, partly by refusing to do weapons training after a period travelling around Europe.

He returned to India and started working for an insurance company and of course told me he was extremely successful at it.

In 1954 he took up painting full-time and took up a particular interest in composition, structure and texture of the paint itself.

His prolific painting rapidly gained a following in India. It was a major achievement to win a commission for the Tata Industries to whom he successfully sold many paintings. His shows received many great reviews including this from the Times of India "Ribeiro knows what he wants and goes all out for it".

In 1961, he returned to England, now married, where his brother Sonnie was by now an established artist and duringthe 1960s, success followed success.

Lance formed, and exhibited with, several groups of Indian artists in England at many galleries here in London and Germany, France, Spain and the US, including Nicholas Treadwell, Leicestershire and the Einbaum.

His paintings were way ahead of the time, figurative, expressionist and even science fiction long before star wars and although Lance worked with his brother Sonnie, who encouraged him, Lance's paintings and the expression of his extraordinary imagination, lateral thinking and perception of structures, texture and life figures and religion. His paintings of amorphic faces and heads that he always wanted to exhibit together - to call the exhibition "Heads - in and out of our time".

Lance, as you know, was instrumental in the development of PVA acrylic paint with scientists from DuPont and ICI.

Lance was very focused and carried on painting right to the end. He has left a wonderful legacy of hundreds of paintings and also his ever-youthfulness and life force which all of us valued.

Charlie Barnett
January 2011