The Artist and the Galleries

About galleries, their director-owners and how they go about choosing artists to represent.

Galleries and their directors are difficult to fathom. At present, galleries appear to develop a clientele who buy a particular style and expression of art works. So if an artist comes in with truly competent work but does not fit in to their chosen style or niche of buyers the artist is inmediately shown out the door.

Must the artist first find a gallery that shows similar works to his own and then approach them with the request that they show his or her work? That is sometimes possible. Other times the works may be very competent but not alligned with current fashions. This is particularly difficult since there is nowadays no set style that can be easily gaged for competency. Anything goes if it is effectively realized: abstract, installations, messagy, realistic, computer idea art and many other expressions. In the end nothing helps an artist get in the door like being recommended by someone who has the "power" to influence the gallery director. That power could come from friendship or money, the last one best of all.

The power to accept or reject is intoxicating and many gallery directors consequently lose perspective and often act pretentiously patronizing. Even when they see excellence in the artist's work they still believe themselves above the level of the artist and ignore any request for a gallery to show his or her work.

Since the selling of good art is so diffucult for the individual artist there is a need in the artistic community for agents that may handle a large group of artists and be able to get access to the different art directors. That introduces a third element that gets a cut of the pie. So then we have the artist, the agent and the gallery.

Back to what has traditionally occurred throughout history, we can see that Van Gogh had his brother peddling his work yet failing miserably at it or we have the opposite,
Castelli gallery almost singlehandedly stopping abstract expressionisn and ushering in pop art.
So Andy Warhol, much less of a painter than Van Gogh was given a free ride to fame and monetary success.

I throw up my hands in frustration at the thought of approaching galleries for exhibition space.
Wish me luck as I do the same for all of you fellow artists out there!

Lam and Picasso

As a young man living in Cuba in the early fifties I came in contact with the 30's generation of Cuban painters. A cut above all of them as far as fame was concerned stood Wifredo Lam. He left Spain at the collapse of the war in 1938 and arrived in Paris armed with aletter of recommendation to Picasso. Already influenced by African art as can be witnessed in the Demoselles de Avignon and possesing a large collection of African primitive sculpture Picasso was charmed by the AfroCuban roots of Lam's work. Picasso's and Lam's work of those periods are quite akin in their celebration of the primitive, the mysterious.

Lam was referred by Picasso to Andre Breton and soon was integrated to the surrealist movement of that time.



Thus, similarities in Lam and Picasso of the 30's abound. Nevertheless there is a persistent tendency in museum curators to show Lam and Matta side by side. I personally saw this happen in the Houston Menil Collection years ago.



Lam and Matta may have a superficial similarity in their brush strokes but Lam speaks of the primitive and harks back to the intuitive, mysterious, the personal innermost regions of the soul of man and Matta speaks of industrialization and modernism. To rationalize grouping them as Surrealist betrays the most inexact of appraisals of these artists' works.



As a coda to this comment, the Cuban School of painting of the 30s to the 50s was often referred to as Picasso in the tropics.

Painting abstract figurative versus abstraction

I paint now in a more abstract manner. When I was younger (thirty years ago) I stopped doing pure abstract canvases as I felt that they remained on a "decorative" level. By including the human figure or rendering earth landscapes in an abstract figurative mode I thought then that they would elicit stronger reactions from the viewer. Now I feel the desire to paint abstractions which to me, like music, convey mood, rhythms, tones of color, ambience and reach one's spirit effortlessly , JULIO CREWS

Biography & Artist's Statement

Julio Crews belongs to a generation of Cuban painters who left that island nation during early youth, the development of their art occurring in exile.

He was born in 1932 in Havana. A strong attraction to the arts manifested in him during childhood. Entering the University of Havana at the age of seventeen, he began to paint. During those early student years, he met Cuban painters Portocarrero, Dirube, and others. Influenced by their painterly expressions reflective of the vibrancy of Cuban life, his work, like theirs, betrays a Caribbean origin by the dynamic use of line and brilliant color.

In 1952 he entered Columbia University in New York city to major in architecture with a minor in painting and sculpture. Graduating in 1956, he returned to Havana but left Cuba again in 1961 to establish residence in the United States. His painterly work evolved towards abstraction, stopping short of non-objectivity. His images are suggestive of humanity inhabiting an exuberant earth but transcending the appearance of reality and revealing an inner world.

Embedded in a questioning spirit, this artist’s work issues as an exercise in spontaneity, transformed by a demanding sense of order and gestural concerns. Compassion for the human condition is always at the heart of his painting. “It is essential mystery that I search for as a painter. Intimations of a deeper reality inform my art in pursuit of that paradise feared lost, yet ever becoming within our deepest self. Using line and color in vivid chromatic transitions, I create works that are signs born of my life journey.” –Julio Crews