Salazar Gallery

My art is about values. I work in two distinct countries with different cultures. Most assuredly they differ in the art forms that have graced their histories as a nation. For Mexico and the USA and more particularly Maine create a distinct artistic challenge for me. In Maine, the visual emphasis is on the land and water, the blue and green. In Mexico colors are more intense, they range from purple to bright yellow. The sun in Mexico and the high altitude of many of its cities creates a brilliant atmospheric value that challenges all. In Maine, the sky is less brilliant, and the intensity is more muted.

To live and work in these two places has been both a privilege and a challenge. It has resulted in my two diverse bodies of work: the Maine Years and the México Years. While each tries to state how the atmosphere has come to be represented in my paintings and drawings they equally try to show what inner value both places have meant to me. There are times when I wonder what is to happen next; what direction my art will take, and how I will express it. But, it is better for me to just go with the flow, and not attempt to develop a rational for what is happening. Of course, we all play the intellectual game and it does not always work out well.

My art has afforded me the opportunity to search for meaning in myself, and to seek meaning in this life. As an artist, who returned full-time to his art in his mature years, I brought to that time the passion that Henry Murger expresses, as those years when climbing the green hillside of youth.

I often work in series. My web site www.salazargallery.com is in Gallery Rooms: The Maine Years and México Years and displays images from exhibitions with explanatory text. I have developed a medium and instructions for its use, which I have named Sal-Zar.™ It has been under experimentation and further developed when I completed the 1,000 images in the Four Seasons of the Master Myth series. The medium enables the artist to work with hard, soft and oil pastels, and to use the medium in oil paintings and as an encaustic resin. Its properties are such that it is lightfast, non-yellowing and non-photo chemically reactive. The work does not need to be protected from glass.

I do originals…my only prints are mono prints. My reasons are many, the speed in which I can execute a work of art using the Sal-Zar Medium and my belief that too many works are reproduced in editions of hundreds and thousands, especially bad work. A body-of-work I have been pleased with is the paintings and drawings in the collection “Expressions of Spirituality”. It is a collection of large, 4 X 7 feet paintings, and smaller works-on-paper. This work is an exploration of my mixed Jewish and Christian heritage and my struggle to understand my Jewish heritage, unknown to me until late in life.

Another achievement I feel proud of is my founding of the Maine Artists Space, Danforth Gallery. As a non-profit artists’ space, member of the National Association of Artists’ Organizations since 1988, it has provided a vehicle for thousands of emerging and mid-career artists.MAS is now an Online Gallery offering opportunities to International visual artists on its virtual gallery: www.masonlinegallery.org.

The Four Seasons of the Master Myth and the 1,000 images, the right brain, left-brain dialog between Salazar the artist and my intellectual side is what I wish to finalize and show to the public as a symbolic mythology on which all artists could work. It seems to me that to a large extent modern art has divorced itself from the artist and audience.