kiaf 2013 : Hamilton Aguiar

source: http://www.parkcitymagazine.com/Park-City-Magazine/Summer-Fall-2006/Hamilton-Aguiar/

Recent art works from wynwood art group : http://www.wynwoodartgroup.com/Artist-Detail.cfm?ArtistsID=672

Hamilton Aguiar

TEXT: MELISSA FIELDS
PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF REDSTONE GALLERY

Hamilton Aguiar is tired, but you wouldn’t know it. Slight pauses in his animated dialogue, where he seems to be trying to remember what he’s talking about, are the only hint to how fatigued he really is. Then one of the pauses stretches to a lapse and he says, with an endearing giggle, “I’m sorry, I’ve been working day and night and haven’t slept in three days.” He may be exhausted, but it is a good sort of exhaustion; in fact, for this South American-born artist, sleep deprivation is all too familiar. And so is success.

Aguiar, who arrived in the United States almost 20 years ago knowing only a handful of English words, is now one of the country’s hottest new visual artists. His unique oil-on-silver-leaf silhouetted landscape paintings can be found in galleries in New York City, Aspen, Laguna Beach, Scottsdale, Boston and at our own Redstone Gallery in Park City. He’s also penetrated the art scene in several countries around the globe including Sweden, Japan, Korea, Germany and Canada. The Spring 2005 issue of Fine Art Magazine said of his paintings: “… his landscapes incorporate many historical elements while breaking new ground in technique and composition.”

With this kind of overwhelming sensation for his work, it would be easy to imagine Aguiar’s road to success paved with years struggling as a starving artist. To the contrary, since following a girlfriend from Brazil to New York state at age 21, Aguiar has embraced everything he’s done from house painting to owning a gallery in the same way. He now enjoys his art, considering each experience as an opportunity to better himself. “I’ve always looked at whatever I was doing at the time as part of the path that would lead me to something bigger,” Aguiar says. “I’ve always tried to enjoy whatever I was doing for what it was and learn from it.”

Not long after coming to the U.S., Aguiar knew he wanted to make America his permanent home and hired an immigration lawyer to help him get his Green Card. “As a thank you for her help, I did a painting for her,” he says. “She liked it so much that she said I should consider going into a field that allowed me to utilize my artistic talents.” The next day Aguiar enrolled in a decorative painting class in New York City. At the time, he was making a living as a house painter in the Hamptons and soon began incorporating faux finishing into his repertoire of services. One of his clients introduced him to Ken Verosko, one of the Big Apple’s most sought-after faux finishers. With Verosko, Aguiar worked on a number of large faux finishing projects including the Louisiana State Capitol building. “Ken had hired these two women from Germany who were master gilders to work on the project in Louisiana. Through them, I added gilding to my skill set,” Aguiar explains.

While growing his house painting and faux finishing business and collaborating on projects with Verosko, Aguiar continued to paint on canvas, mostly for himself. Then in 1999, his father had a heart attack, and Aguiar returned to Brazil. While there, he visited with an old friend and gallery owner. The friend knew Aguiar painted and invited him to participate in a small show he was hosting the following week. “Well, I had maybe one painting at that time,” Aguiar says. He worked day and night for five days to produce about eight paintings. At the show he was an unexpected hit, selling almost everything he’d produced, including one large piece for $10,000. “That’s when I started to think about my painting in a different way,” he says.

Buoyed by his artistic accomplishment in Brazil, Aguiar opened a gallery in South Hampton, New York when he returned to the States. The gallery hosted shows of artwork by Romero Britto, Norman Rockwell, Burton Morris, Thales and many Brazilian artists. Aguiar continued to supplement his income with gilding and faux finishing jobs.

About a year after opening the gallery, Aguiar met Nan Miller, a well-known gallery owner, publisher and art dealer. “Nan saw my work and told me that I was a faux finisher, gallery owner and artist, and that I needed to pick just one and focus on it. She told me she thought I should be an artist,” A year later, Aguiar closed his gallery and focused on creating his art full time.

Up until this point, Aguiar’s technique involved applying resin to canvas and then painting over it with oil paints. One midwinter day, however, as he was leaving a restaurant in the Hamptons, Aguiar paused to observe the sun reflecting off the fresh snow of a recent storm. “I felt something when I saw that image,” he says. “I wanted to capture that light.”

Aguiar returned to his studio with an idea. He applied silver leaf to a canvas and then used oils to paint a landscape over it. The next morning when he returned to his studio, two other artists he shared the space with were looking at his painting. “They first asked me how I did it and then told me they thought I had really hit on something,” Aguiar says.

Over the next several months, feedback for his silver-gilded paintings continued to be positive. Aguiar decided to take a leap of faith and enter himself as an unrepresented artist at the 2004 New York International Art Expo, widely considered the place where up-and-coming visual artists are discovered. Within two hours of the show’s opening, Aguiar sold half of the 20 paintings he’d brought with him. The other half were purchased by Bill Handler, art aficionado and owner of Park City’s Redstone Gallery. “We were eight months out from opening the gallery in Park City,” Handler says.

“But I knew even if we never opened the gallery, Hamilton was going to be a great commercial success and I’d always regret not at least purchasing his paintings for myself.”

At the end of Art Expo, Aguiar had more then a dozen commissions and, in addition to the Redstone Gallery, had made agreements with gallery owners in Aspen, Laguna Beach and Boston to carry his work. A short time later, Nan Miller signed on as Aguiar’s publisher and distributor. “The response to Hamilton’s work is like no other I have experienced in the 35 years I’ve been in this business,” Miller says. “Every gallery owner’s greatest desire is to find an artist whose talent is so unique and impressive that individual collectors and gallery owners alike need to have this artwork in their collections. Hamilton is that artist.”

Aguiar now employs two full-time gilders, but continues to complete all of the painting himself which, in light of exploding demand, is why he’s almost always tired. “I suppose I could train someone to reproduce some of my paintings, but that just wouldn’t be me,” Aguiar says. “I never know what I’m going to paint before I paint it and you can’t teach someone how to do that.”

Although Utah-based freelance writer Melissa Fields has yet to add pieces of world reknown to her collection, she has accumulated more than 100 works from a very promising up-and-coming artist: her 3 1/2-year-old son, Charlie.

See Hamilton Aguiar’s work at Park City’s Redstone Gallery, 1678 West Redstone Center Drive, 435.575.1000.