His older half-brother, the artist F. N. Souza (1924–2004), contracted the deadly smallpox virus at 3 months of age but survived.
Although Goa was part of the Indian subcontinent, its customs and traditions had been shaped by the Portuguese 400-year colonial presence, which had brought the Roman Catholic faith there.
This included the trio of Jewish émigrés who had helped develop India’s nascent modern art scene – Rudi von Leyden, Walter Langhammer and Emanuel Schlesinger, who had escaped Europe’s Holocaust.
His experimentation with polyvinyl acetate (PVA) positioned him as “a godfather to generations of artists using acrylics as an alternative to oils” (The Times, 2011).
In 1972, describing his own artistic practice for the Commonwealth Institute, he reflected on the impulses which drove his work, a sentiment that could equally be used to convey a lifelong philosophy: “I could go on endlessly to produce painting after painting – interesting perhaps – but somewhat meaningless and self-plagiarizing.”[6] Ribeiro's creative life spanned half a century, during which time he became known for a "huge body"[1] of figurative and abstract work.
[7] In November 2016, as part of the 2017 UK-India Year of Culture, the exhibition Ribeiro: A Celebration of Life, Love and Passion was held in association with the British Museum and other institutions.
His creative life spanned half a century, and he left what has been described as a "huge body" of figurative and abstract work.
[1] Among his artistic productions were portrait heads, still lifes, landscapes, and pigment experiments dating back to the early 1960s which "lead to works of peculiar brilliance and transparency".
Ellen Von Weigand wrote that "Souza's success and resulting social life meant that he frequently left works unfinished.
Ribeiro would complete them, using the painter's harsh, aggressive strokes to form his church spires, iconographic heads and anti-naturalistic still-lives.
[11] In a longish obituary, The Times of London acknowledges Ribeiro's role as an "acclaimed Indian artist who pioneered the use of acrylics in the 1960s, producing a brilliancy of color in his expressionistic works".
[12] The paper talks of Ribeiro's "increasing impatience" by the 1960s over the time it took for oils to dry, as also its "lack of brilliance in its color potential."
But they quickly recognized the potential demand and "so Ribeiro became the godfather of generations of artists using acrylics as an alternative to oils.