Luis Sanchez

Luis Sanchez is a young, extraordinary talent who works both in figurative and abstract art. He collides the natural and industrial worlds in painting, sculpture, found objects and shadowboxes. For his paintings, Luis has reinvented the ancient process of fresco; he paints on his own recreations of degraded stucco walls remembered from his childhood in Mexico City. His two-dimensional works are often noted for his masterful use of trompe l'oeil, leaving viewers with the impression that he has used photography, collage or other techniques when he has only used a brush. His works seamlessly combines the past, present and the future. While the medium he uses looks back in time, the work sees into the future.

Born in 1968, Luis lived the first ten years of his life in Mexico City with his family ( a Cuban-born father, a Mexican-Lebanese mother, and an older brother and sister.) His passionate and diverse extended family included artisans, dancers and bullfighters who surrounded his early life. When Luis was seven years old, after demonstrating an innate talent like his father's, his parents enrolled him in Mexico's prestigious Museo De Bellas Artes. This schooling was combined for several years with Luis' observation of his father's techniques and work, starting a valuable trend in self study. He and his family immigrated to the United States in 1979.

After graduating high school in 1987, Luis attended Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle where he studied Art History, Perspective, and Life Drawing. But after a lifetime of chronic kidney disease and years of dialysis, Luis was forced to drop out of school to receive a kidney transplant in 1993. Though his recovery prevented him from being able to return to his studies, it hardly slowed him down. Revitalized, Luis focused on teaching himself by drawing and painting from his recovery bed. He learned the subtleties of human anatomy through books, sometimes sketching for up to twelve hours a day. "My transplant was a rebirth, it's difficult to explain, but it certainly puts life, everyone in it and everything crystal clear perspective." His work emanates the energy, discipline, and drive of someone who has gotten a second chance and lives life to the fullest.

Luis is dedicated, professional, passionate and inspired painter. He enters all that he does from a place of curiosity, and with keen mind for business. In 1997, Luis established L.S. Design, a company producing hand-painted frescos sold in the gift industry. In its five years of business, L.S. Design became a leading company for fine-accent design. He was represented by both East and West coast representatives in over 120 stores in cities across the US and Canada. His work has appeared in various magazine campaigns, TV's "Sex in the City", and in several motion pictures. In order to focus on painting full time, Luis sold L.S. Design in 2002 for a career move to Los Angeles. Still a Seattle-based business, it continues to thrive as Savage Designs.

Luis balances his work with a love of nature, music and by spending time with a community of friends and family. Even with a demanding schedule, he makes time for hiking, camping and getting out of the urban world. He also finds time for charity. Luis donated many works and helped raise thousands of dollars for the Rise and Shine Foundation (children with Aids), DIFFA ( Design Industries Foundation Fighting Aids), LA Shanti, and auctions at the Bellevue Art Museum in Bellevue, WA. He has donated works to local high school art programs, and worked as a camp counselor and facilitator for Power of Hope, and Threshold, two organizations working with troubled teens.

When Luis is not doing business, painting for an exhibition, or working on a commission, you will find him playing with language, learning about words, and jotting quotes in his journal. These fragments often appear, ghost-like in his paintings, deepening the work. Oddly enough, it is the written word that sometimes captures his surreal, ethereal work.

Artspeak (March 1997) says he paints in the "unflinching tradition of Frida Kahlo." The Agora Gallery of New York writes he "occupies the same eerie, unstable space as a story by Poe or a movement by Mahler."

Luis Sanchez is a painter with unusual maturity whose work is palpable with spirit, passion and emotion.