FACE is the Figurative Art Convention & Expo that took place in the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables (Miami), Florida, I attended the conference thanks to my dear Professor David Chang who told me to register as a volunteer, the conference lasted for 6 days and it was wonderful, I believe it might be one of the most important events of the year for artist and art teachers who want to support the figurative art movement, I got to see a lot of the important characters who are making a difference in working together to build an infrastructure for students and professional artist who want to push an open a door for the art market, the conference was a mixture between technical workshops about classical techniques such as painting Alla Prima and charcoal drawing and also anatomical demonstrations, clay and bronze casting demonstrations, and the second part was made possible by TRAC a more lecture based and philosophical organization that focus on discussion about the art movement and the implications that are created on art education and all the Ateliers that are being created to facilitate this evolution within the coming years in United States and Europe.
My favorite artist who I got the opportunity to meet were Max Ginsburg , David A. Leffel, Sherrie McGraw, Jacob Collins, Cesar Santos and others.
The conference was not incredibly big in fact maybe 800 people attended the event, but, it was an excellent opportunity to see what other professional artist are working on and how they are dealing with the art world, another interesting thing that happened was that I got to meet Cesar Santos who is a great guy, very humble and passioned and he was not actually part of the show for professional reasons but still came by to say hi to the fans and many other people from all over the world.
Another point I wanted to make is how smart and professional Eric Rhodes the owner and organizer of this event was during the days of the workshops and presentation he was very supportive and one could feel how passioned and sharp this businessman is, I learned about by looking at his vision and his future ideas and projects, this man is a marketing and art investor machine it was very inspiring to see.
Eric Rhodes and Graydon Parrish were talking during the workshop about color mixing and the oil painting process, the workshop was good but a bit to short for the amount of information on optics, colors and the process of mixing colors to achieve an specific mood and quality for the pairings, we can see Grayson Parrish work on google and it really shows the amount of effort he takes to compose and paint his work, I got close to him at the end of the workshop to ask him how he would find the overall look of his pities and he replied that he would work on a small scape color studies to play around with the color palette and create smaller versions of his paintings before working on a big scale he mentioned Delacroix work in this manner and It was interesting.