Everyone Deserves a Portrait: Carlos Gamez de Francisco
On discipline, memory, and the art of honoring the everyday
Carlos’s work lives at the intersection of the historical and the contemporary, where opulent aesthetics of the past meet irreverent nods to modern life. When I sat down with him recently, it quickly became clear that this blending of eras is no accident—it’s rooted in a deep reverence for classical art, balanced by a personal mission to challenge the exclusivity of that tradition.
His early training in Cuba was steeped in the discipline of academic portraiture. "My teachers pushed me to memorize every proportion of the human body," he explained. "I had to repeat drawings of noses, eyes—hundreds of them—until I could recreate them from memory." As a teenager, he found it tedious, but over time, that rigor laid the foundation for his technical mastery. When Carlos discovered Picasso’s work ethic—producing thousands of pieces over a lifetime—he set his own bar high: eight hours of painting a day, every day.
That work ethic followed him to the U.S., where he studied at the Art Institute of Chicago. There, everything changed. The education was open-ended, unstructured. "At first, I didn’t understand what I was doing there," he said. But that unfamiliar freedom cracked something open. "I began to see art from a different perspective. I was free to experiment, to break the rules I’d learned."
This personal rebellion didn’t mean abandoning classical methods—it meant using them as a platform to challenge expectations. His subjects, often dressed in everyday materials like doilies or plastic bags, appear regal, nonetheless. “Everyone has the right to be in the portrait,” Carlos told me. That ethos—honoring everyday life as something worth depicting with grandeur—has become a defining feature of his work.
Carlos’s fascination with theater and alternate realities is no accident, either. Before becoming a painter, he trained as a modern dancer from age 11, practicing for seven hours a day. "It wasn’t just about movement—it was about expressing emotion through the body and the face," he recalled. That emotional storytelling is visible in his paintings, where figures often occupy dreamlike or theatrical spaces, immersive and slightly surreal.
One standout series, Keep Pets Off the Furniture, came from a collision of memory and observation. As a boy, Carlos watched his mother save for two years to buy a sofa she then covered in plastic and forbade anyone to sit on. Years later in Kentucky, he saw a couch beside a horse pen—and imagined the animal jumping on it, reclaiming the forbidden throne. The resulting painting, shared on Facebook, immediately drew attention—especially in Kentucky.
Fashion, too, plays a powerful role in his paintings. At the Art Institute, Carlos gravitated toward the fashion department as much as the painting studio. "Fashion tells the story of a moment in time," he explained. In his work, it helps define the identity of his subjects, bridging eras in a way that feels both timeless and hyper-current. “When people see our Instagram photos in 300 years,” he laughed, “they’ll know exactly what time we were living in.”
That spirit of narrative extends to the symbols he uses—like insects representing freedom, chaos, or balance, and flowers obscuring a face as a nod to post-pandemic mystery. "I had a conversation with someone in a mask and never saw her face," he said. "That stuck with me." Now, flowers have come to represent blooming ideas—many of which were nurtured in his own garden when he needed a break from the studio.
And yet, even the most personal work often returns to something more universal. Dogs, for instance, are frequent companions in his paintings. “They’re a symbol of loyalty,” Carlos said, noting how often they appear alongside portraits of his wife.
This loyalty extends to his own discipline as well. Years ago, Carlos created a vision board. He wanted four dogs. A partner. A child. And partnerships with 25 galleries. Today, he’s nearly reached all of those goals. He paints six days a week, often twelve hours a day, producing nearly 100 paintings per year. From salvaging cardboard in Cuba and painting with toothpaste, to exhibiting internationally, his journey has been grounded not only in talent, but in persistence and belief.
"Some goals take two months," he told me. "Some take ten years. But if you have faith and the discipline to keep moving in that direction, you’ll get there."
Sitting with Carlos, it’s hard not to feel moved by that steady fire. His work is a mirror of that inner world—rich, layered, occasionally humorous, but always rooted in something deeply human. It’s not just about kings and queens anymore. It’s about all of us.