Local artist returns to his first love: painting
BY KEN ODOR


Jul 30, 2008

His ‘painterly realism’ enjoys success at the gallery

If you should see a fellow with a wide brimmed hat and a beard, painting a landscape out in the open air in Goochland County, chances are you may have happened upon Andre Reynaldo Lucero plying his trade.

That is, if you could call creating art a trade.

Lucero paints in oil, in a style he calls “painterly realism.”

In an interview last week at his home on Turner Road in central Goochland, Lucero, 41, talked about his work and his move to Goochland County two years ago.

Just back from the opening of an exhibition at the J.M. Stringer Gallery in Bernardsville, N.J., Lucero and his wife Erin, who works in the development office at Virginia Commonwealth’s School of Medicine, were home for just a few days before a trip to Maine.

Next year Italy is on their schedule, where Lucero hopes to capture the famous Tuscany countryside on canvas.

Although he paints in oils, there is little of the deliberate, slow technique sometime associated with that medium in Lucero’s work.

“I start and finish a painting on the spot,” said Lucero, who often works outdoors, often in Goochland.

No applying pigment and coming back the next day with the palette knife to scrape it off for this artist.

“I try to paint something and leave it,” he explained.

Lucero, whose father was a career U. S. Air Force officer, was born in Teheran, Iran. He grew up in Northern Virginia, and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, cum laude, from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1989.

“I was pragmatic - I switched to illustration at VCU,” said Lucero, who began his degree at Northern Virginia Community College.

Following graduation, Lucero embarked on a successful freelance career in illustration, with clients such as the New York Times, Virginia Business Magazine, Government Executive and Playboy magazine.

He spent 10 years making a good living, but he wasn’t happy.

“Why not do what you would really like to do?” was the question he posed to himself before making the decision to return to painting.

“It was one of the best moves I ever made to come back to my true love, painting,” said Lucero.

Now he is where he wants to be, since moving to Goochland, after living in the Fan area in Richmond for 10 years and then Short Pump for eight.

“We had talked about moving here for retirement,” he explained, but when he saw the house he and Erin now live on the Internet, the die was cast.

“We fell in love with the property,” said Lucero.

Lucero said the realistic style of painting has made a comeback after decades of abstract ascendancy.

“When I got out of college there was a bias against representational art.”

Lucero said the elite in the art world may have given up on representational art, but the general public never did.

These days, representational art has made a comeback, said Lucero.

“Now the whole spectrum is represented in the art world,” he said.

Lucero credits John Bannon with being the major influence on his painting. Bannon taught him how to use the Maroger Medium, pioneered by Jacques Maroger; who was the curator of the restoration department at the Louvre Museum in Paris in the 1930s, which involves adding white lead to oil paint.

“Maroger bestowed to us what the masters of the past achieved in their paintings, a way to combine permanence with luminous glazes, controlled drying time and fluid paint handling,” explains Lucero in an entry on technique on his web site.

Lucero is one of five artists whose work is featured at the Stringer gallery in its ‘Summer Sojourn” show, running through Sept. 6.

“I think he has phenomenal talent,” said gallery owner John Stringer, who said a gallery has to believe in the talent of the artists it represents.

“He has a great future,” said Stringer, who praised Lucero’s professionalism.

Lucero’s work can also be seen at Suitable for Framing, at the corner of Grove and Libbie avenues in Richmond, or visit his web site at http://www.andrelucero.com.

Photo by Maria Reardon
This canvas, painted by Lucero, shows a Goochland wildflower scene.

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