From The Providence Journal in R.I.:Antonio Carneiro (pictured) came up with a word that would drive his artwork while he was in the hospital recuperating from a broken hip.
“Hipwact,” he said, “here, let me show you.” He struggles to unbutton his jean shirt to show the blue screen-printed ringer T-shirt beneath. The shirt, with a photo of a woman and the peculiar word to the side, is one that he made.
“It can mean whatever you want it to mean,” he said. “It can mean a broken hip, or a crazy hipster, or dancing.”
Carneiro, 38, is a mixed-media artist whose installations have appeared in galleries throughout New England. He continues to create art, despite being legally blind, a consequence of a tumor that began growing on his pituitary gland when he was 12.
Forty pieces of Carneiro’s work will be for sale at an art show, from 4 to 7 p.m. tomorrow, at the Cedar Crest Subacute & Rehabilitation Centre, in Cranston. All proceeds will go to the Carneiro family to help offset medical costs.
He moves slowly these days, gingerly climbing the stairs to his second-floor bedroom. His mother, Carol Carneiro, said he’s doing much better than he was immediately after the surgery. Still, he has some problems with his short-term memory and has to remember to take a deep breath, to keep his voice from rising octaves as he speaks.
“You just have to keep smiling,” Carol Carneiro said. “He’s a miracle. I just can’t believe it.”
There was a time Carneiro thought he wouldn’t be able to make art again.
He was in the hospital after his most recent surgery to remove the recurring tumor, and a number of complications sidelined him. In all, he had 23 surgeries to correct issues that arose after the major surgery, where doctors sliced open his head and had to take his brain out to reach the tumor. When he went to Cedar Crest, he wouldn’t speak or eat and his weight dropped to 147 pounds.“I was so sick and in pain all the time,” he said. “I didn’t think I had the ability to come back from being so sick.”
But things began to turn around. He began eating and added 83 pounds to his 6-foot-frame. As a part of his therapy, he created artwork again. The untitled piece he made while recuperating featured pictures of women and eyes to represent seeing what you’re not supposed to see, he said.
“I wouldn’t say it’s my best work,” he said. “The piece was OK.”
Carneiro spent six weeks at the Cedar Crest center, leaving at the end of September. In that time, said Lynda Sprague, marketing director, the staff “just fell in love with him,” and eventually came up with the idea to host the art show.
“He’s not a complaining person,” she said. “Despite the discomfort he was in and the depression he could have felt, he engaged people, and when we started to see his artwork and see his story, you see what a great imagination he has and what a funny sense of humor.”
When Carneiro sits down to make a piece of art, he has one goal in mind: to make people smile.
“I try to make it as fun and exciting as I can so that when people look at it, they don’t get bored,” he said.
It’s why Carneiro hides jokes and complex images in the mixed medium installations he makes. There’s dryer lint and the wings of a butterfly in one piece. A woman diving through the air in another. Carneiro himself dressed up as a ’50s-era hipster in yet another.
Carneiro was born to be an artist, his mother, Carol said. She remembers when he was a child, he would sit in front of the television and draw pictures of the shows he was watching. It was then that she knew, she said.
“He’s always had this imagination,” she said. “Sometimes I wonder where he gets his ideas.”Carneiro flips through magazines and saves pictures that catch his eye. A look into his old bedroom at his parent’s house, where he had to move back to after the surgery, shows images of Marilyn Monroe plastered to the walls, and earlier pieces of art Carneiro created.
He said he’s beginning work on a new piece now, gathering images and collecting things he might be able to use.
“It’s like rock ’n’ roll,” he said, staring at a reproduction of one of his pieces. “It makes you sweat. It makes you feel good. It makes you smile.”
