Dedicated to Preserving the Art and Legacy of Conceptual Artist Fernando Garcia

This blog is dedicated to preserving the life and art legacy of conceptual artist Fernando Garcia who died in 1988. There were so many artists lost during this terrible time from the AIDS virus. As a result of his untimely death, many of his artworks are held in private collections with very few pieces every coming to market and Fernando seems to have become forgotten. We can't let this happen as Fernando is the most influential Cuban- American conceptual artist of the 70s and 80s. He paved the way for other artists with large displays of conceptual art in public places, not to mention his performance art work with the " NADA" group (conceptual performance artists) which created original impromptu conceptual and performance art in public places like train stations, fronts of restaurants etc.
Since 2006, the project has been collecting photographs of Fernando's artwork held in private collections and documenting his two decade career as an artist and want to document every work of art produced in his lifetime. Please help us and send stories and photographs of Fernando's work for the Project so we can preserve the his memory and his art legacy.

Sunday, May 29, 2011

(Repost from  April 2006)

April 2006
A Letter from Wayne Powell on a “ Daylight Series” Painting he purchased from Fernando Garcia. Iam sending you a digital photo of the painting I bought from Fernando Garcia, sometime around 1983.

Fernando was living and creating his art in a little house on Sunset Drive in the South Miami area that he rented from a botanist. His landlord the botanist had surrounded the little wood frame house with a sub-tropical jungle; a vast assortment of bamboo stands, ferns, bromeliads, carambola trees (star fruit), strangler fig ficus trees that towered over the house, and a profusion of other exotic plants that completely concealed the house from Sunset Drive.
Inside the house, the walls held two of his “Daylight Series” paintings. Fernando had an academic background in mathematics and he never lost his love for numbers, time, space and seasons. He explained to me that he had created these paintings to visually document the half-hour intervals of daylight and darkness during one 24-hour period. Each large painting has 48 vertical intervals, beginning on the left with the black half-hours of darkness, followed by colored intervals to represent the half-hours of daylight. The right portion of each painting shows the black half-hours of darkness that complete the day.
One of the paintings I saw on the wall of Fernando’s little house portrayed the daylight intervals in blue, the other one used orange paint to signify daylight. It was this painting that Fernando offered to sell to me for a heavily discounted price during a “lean” financial period. He needed funds to pay his bills and I loved the big black-and-orange painting.
The dimension of this painting is 48″ X 72″.
It is signed “Fernando Garcia” on the wooden frame behind the canvas and dated “June 21, 1979″ to identify the specific day depicted in the painting. This happens to be the summer solstice, the day of the year with the longest daylight period and the shortest night. Fernando had also sprawled a hand-written note on the wooden frame that specifies the sunrise and sunset times for that day: “SR 5:30 SS 7:15″.
I have lived with this painting displayed on a wall of every one of the many places I have lived over the past 24 years of my life. It is one of my favorite things and a constant reminder of my friendship with Fernando. He was a truly unique and wonderful human being.
(Please see the attached photo.)
Warmly,
Wayne

Posted by at