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
Saturday, March 22, 2008
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