More than twenty years after leaving RTP Açores, one of the archipelago’s most recognizable television journalists reflects on journalism, painting, cultural policy, the anxiety of the contemporary world—and the enduring necessity of learning how to see

Some people spend their lives telling us what happened. Others attempt to show us what the world looks like when we stop long enough to observe it. Emanuel Carreiro has spent much of his life doing both. For three decades, his face and voice entered Azorean homes through RTP Açores, helping generations understand their islands and recognize themselves on television. Yet behind the journalist was always another observer: the painter who had begun drawing long before television entered his life, fascinated first by airplanes, later by landscapes, portraits and, above all, the sea. More than twenty years after formally leaving RTP Açores in 2004, Carreiro remains one of the emblematic figures of Azorean broadcasting—a journalist who became an artist without ever really ceasing to be either.

His television career did not end abruptly when his contractual relationship with RTP concluded. He continued producing audiovisual projects for years, including the cultural talk show O Programa do Emanuel, the ambitious historical reconstruction project Açores – Viagem às Origens, the gastronomic series Sabores das Ilhas, and, in 2020 and 2023, Solares e Palácios dos Açores, devoted to the archipelago’s architectural heritage. The latter became his final television project after, he says, insufficient cultural funding made another series financially impractical.

Television as a Way of Seeing the Islands

Carreiro’s relationship with television began almost accidentally. He had been studying Fine Arts in Lisbon when RTP opened a competition for its new Azorean television service in 1975. He applied despite having no previous experience in radio, newspapers or television—and was selected. What began almost as an interruption of one vocation became another vocation altogether.

“For 30 years, I loved what I did,” he recalls. Journalism, he believes, requires something instinctive: the desire to search for facts, investigate, understand the truth and reveal realities that might otherwise remain unseen.

There is an intriguing continuity between that definition of journalism and his painting. Both require attention. Both begin with looking. The journalist asks what happened and why; the painter asks what light, color and form reveal when the eye becomes patient enough to notice.

His assessment of contemporary RTP Açores is affectionate but not nostalgic. He knows relatively few of those now working there, but continues to regard the regional public broadcaster as indispensable. Despite limited resources, he believes it continues performing a fundamental service because it “shows the Azores to Azoreans”—speaking about the islands every day and presenting dimensions of regional life that national television frequently overlooks.

That sentence contains an entire philosophy of regional media. In a fragmented archipelago, television does more than report events. At its best, it allows nine geographically separated islands to recognize themselves as participants in a common public space.

When News Makes the World Darker

Carreiro remains attentive to current affairs, although increasingly weary of the contemporary news cycle. He rarely uses social media and consciously filters the information he consumes. He describes turning between Portugal’s principal television channels and repeatedly encountering the same international crises, eventually experiencing something increasingly familiar to modern audiences: exhaustion from news itself.

His criticism is directed particularly toward media models built around sensationalism, crime, conflict, fear and human misfortune. He does not advocate censorship—quite the contrary. He emphasizes freedom of choice. But he believes continuous exposure to the darkest dimensions of society can distort public perception until viewers feel that everything around them is collapsing.

The world, he argues, cannot be painted rose-colored. But neither is it necessarily as black as some media portray it.

It is an observation made by someone who understands both television and color.

Carreiro acknowledges that audiences themselves participate in the equation. Sensationalist programming survives because people watch it. His proposed remedy is therefore less governmental than personal: citizens must exercise judgment, select credible sources and use their freedom to choose what deserves their attention. Television, he insists, still possesses enormous power to influence society.

The Journalist Who Was Always a Painter

Painting came first.

As a boy living for six years on Santa Maria, where his father worked for an aviation company, Carreiro would accompany him to work and wander toward the hangars to draw airplanes. Employees began noticing the young boy’s drawings. By the age of eleven or twelve, he had become something of the “official” student artist for school commemorations of Portugal Day, drawing images associated with Camões and the Discoveries.

Later, at the Liceu Antero de Quental, an encounter with painter and teacher Luísa Athayde became decisive. She introduced students to modern artistic currents and eventually guided Carreiro in extracurricular painting sessions held on Saturdays in a makeshift atelier on the school’s upper floor. She became his first painting teacher and later encouraged him toward Fine Arts, preparing him for the entrance examination. He would subsequently learn from Azorean naturalist painter Victor Câmara, whose studio in Paço de Arcos he attended.

Since then, Carreiro estimates that he has painted “hundreds and hundreds” of works. He defines himself simply as a figurative painter and landscapist, with the Azorean landscape as his preferred subject. Over time, he specialized particularly in the sea and portraiture.

His artistic philosophy might almost serve as an autobiography: “Insist, persist, recover.”

When a painting fails, he does not instinctively abandon it. He tries to rescue it.

There are worse principles by which to live.

Twenty Paintings and the Sea

Carreiro has now completed a new collection devoted entirely to the sea: twenty marine paintings, ready for exhibition, probably at the Ponta Delgada Municipal Cultural Center and potentially connected with PDL26, although that possibility had not yet been confirmed when he spoke. The exhibition is expected around October.

The collection also represents a technical departure. After a lifetime primarily associated with oil painting, Carreiro has moved into acrylics for these works. Yet even while experimenting with a new medium, he is already thinking about returning to oil and to another artistic fascination: portraiture. His previous exhibition, appropriately titled Retratos, took place in 2023.

Portraiture fascinates him because improvement is composed of tiny victories—the exact tone of skin, the hair, the eyes, the elusive resemblance through which paint suddenly becomes person. There is no shortcut, he argues, only work, insistence and persistence.

Digital painting, however, does not attract him. He recognizes its possibilities but prefers what he calls the “organic side” of painting. It is not, he insists, resistance to change.

“I am fine this way. I am happy this way.”

Culture Cannot Be Treated as an Ornament

Carreiro becomes considerably less serene when discussing cultural policy in the Azores. Asked whether Azorean culture is receiving adequate institutional support, his answer is clear: officially, he does not believe it is.

He argues that the governmental department responsible for culture should dedicate greater attention and resources to artistic activity and points specifically to criticism surrounding the Regional Legal Regime for Support to Cultural Activities (RJAAC). Artists can and should seek alternative sources of financing, he says, but public cultural authorities cannot use that possibility as justification for retreating from their own responsibilities.

The argument reaches beyond budgets. A society reveals what it values partly through what it chooses to sustain. Culture is easy to treat as decorative precisely because its consequences are difficult to measure immediately. A road can be counted in kilometers; a hospital in beds; an economic program in euros. The effects of a painting, book, documentary, archive or concert may unfold across generations.

Yet those are precisely the things through which a people remembers itself.

Knowing When to Leave the Studio

There is remarkably little bitterness in Carreiro’s recollection of his television career. He says he never felt pressured to suppress stories or avoid saying what he believed. Asked what he misses from three decades at RTP Açores, he remembers the work itself, particular projects, camaraderie and colleagues.

“I don’t carry disappointments with me,” he says.

He also believes he left at the correct moment. Age eventually changes memory and the ability to retain information, he observes with characteristic humor, and “before we begin saying foolish things, it is better to stop.”

But stopping television did not mean ceasing to observe.

The camera gave way more completely to the canvas. The daily news yielded to the slower rhythm of paint. And perhaps the transition is less dramatic than it initially appears. For decades, Emanuel Carreiro stood before a camera helping Azoreans see themselves. Today, before an easel, he continues essentially the same work.

Only the language has changed.

One language is composed of questions, images and spoken words. The other is made of pigment, light, faces, coastlines and the innumerable colors of the Atlantic.

His next exhibition returns him to the sea, appropriately enough. For after a lifetime spent observing the Azores—through the television lens, through journalism, through history and through paint—the sea remains the great Azorean portrait: never entirely still, never exactly the same color twice, and never finished being seen.

Based on a interview for the supperb cultural platform Complexo N, that we highly recommend to stay in touch with the arts in the Azores. You can read the entire interciw in Portuguese on the project’s Facebook Page.

https://www.facebook.com/complexon.instintocriativo