Artistas Cubanos Chévere opens at Louisville Visual Art on July 11th. Two of the artists, Carlos Gamez De Francisco & Julio Cesar joined us in the studio this week. Tune in to WXOX 97.1 FM/Artxfm.com each Thursday at 10 am to hear Artists Talk with LVA.
Carlos Gamez de Francisco was born in post-revolutionary Cuba in 1987, to a Cuban-Spanish mother and a Cuban-American father. He grew up in Cuba and was educated in an academic style heavily influenced by the Russian Academy. At age five, he determined, with absolute certainty, that he would be an artist. By the time he was fifteen, Gamez de Francisco was diligently painting 8 hours a day, every day. Today, he often spends 15 hours a day painting and feels “very blessed to do what I love.”His exceptional talent, hard work, and perseverance led him to earn artistic commissions and recognition.
Julio Cesar Rodríguez Aguilar was born in 1976 in Holguin, Cuba. From a very early age, he was enthusiastic about drawing. As an adolescent, he entered the Vocational School of Art Raúl Gómez Garcia, and later he entered the Professional Academy of Visual Arts in his city, graduating in the specialty of Painting, Drawing, Photography, and Artistic Weaving in 1995. Julio also went on to be a professor of the arts and involved himself in book illustration, stage and costume design, muralism, and more.
He specifically found fascination in surrealism, which provided him with the necessary vision of what he most identified with: the mystical, the surreal, and the poetic.