Gabriel  Picart

Gabriel Picart was born in Barcelona, Spain, in 1962, where he still lives and works. He began a successful art career at the early age of twenty when he started working as an illustrator throughout Europe, and shortly thereafter for the major publishing houses and advertising agencies in the United States and Canada. Since 1996, Picart paints full time and no longer makes illustration commissions. His paintings have attracted special attention of noteworthy critics and collectors and they are permanently on display at some of the most recognized galleries in the US.
He credits his devotion for Art in general, and to the aesthetics of the fin de siècle XIX period in particular, to the exceptional and privileged environment where he grew up and have spent most of his life: the Park Güell, the famous public park designed by the great Catalan architect Antoni Gaudi in 1900. Picart's family lived in the huge concierge’s pavilion at the right side of the main entrance for over fifty years, and he spent all his childhood there. In addition, his parents were able to rent the smaller house at the opposite side of the park entrance at the time Gabriel was a teenager. This building, with its oddly shaped tower bearing on its top a double cross, one of Barcelona main’s cultural symbols, had been for many years Gaudi's own workshop. It also became Picart's amazing first one when addicted to painting he gave up studying to be an architect himself. In 1978, he met the famous Spanish painter and illustrator Enric Torres, who invited him to visit the studio that he shared with the best ink and charcoal illustrator of Spain, Pepe Gonzalez, one of the world's foremost comic artists. A young Picart became the third member of the studio, and has always considered himself the most fortunate art student by having learned Painting Art in the old style of the Parisian free-tuition ateliers with two great masters for himself alone. As the normal consequence of this, Picart began an early and successful art career when he started working as an illustrator throughout Europe, and shortly thereafter for the major publishing houses and advertising agencies in the United States and Canada. Working exclusively in oils, rather than other faster and easier mediums and techniques, he attributes his rapid success as a fine art painter to the particular challenges which commercial work presented, with its tremendous technical demands and requirements, and its insistence on communicating directly with the viewer. Picart consciously used these challenges to gain command of how to use oils, always with the goal in mind of parlaying this technical acumen into the painting of fine art. Although some of Picart's paintings had been shown sporadically at prestigious places like the Society of Illustrators in New York City, the real beginning of his fine art career took place at the exhibition that the Ambassador Gallery in New York city devoted to the Barcelona School of figurative painters in November'96, where he showed with some of the leading contemporary figurative artists at that time in Spain. Since then he devotes all his time to fine art paintings only.
		"Black over Red" (2008) Oil on panel, 106 x 50,8 cm - 41.55 x 20 in.
		"The Rape of America" (2011) Oil on canvas, 101.6 x 152,4 cm - 36 x 48 in.
		"The Flight of Icarus" (2004) Oil and mixed technique on panel, 122 x 152,4 cm - 48 x 60 in.
		"The Connoisseur II" (2004) Oil on panel, 101.6 x 127 cm - 40 x 50 in.
		"Minorcan Horseman" (2008) Charcoal, ink and oil on panel, 101,6 x 101,6 cm - 40 x 40 in.
		"Red Boat" (1998) Oil on canvas, 71.1 x 101.6 cm - 28 x 40 in.
		"La Birraria" (2006) Oil on panel, 76,2 x 113 cm - 30 x 44.5 in.
		"Antigua Casa Figueras" (1999) Oil on panel, 101.6 x 101.6 cm - 40 x 40 in.
		"Catalan Still-life" (2005) Oil on panel, 51 x 127 cm - 20 x 50 in.
Official Website: www.gabrielpicart.com
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