“Albert Contreras, who was born during Franklin Roosevelt’s first term as President, is a lean and cheerful man around eighty years old. He lives and works in a small apartment two blocks from the Pacific Ocean. At least once a day he walks down to the water to look at what’s going on – joggers, surfers, bicyclists, sunbathers and people walking their dogs. The rest of the time he seems to stay in his apartment, happily working.”
Contreras initially found success as a painter in Stockholm, Sweden, in the 1960s. His art then was focused on circles. “They were very serious,” he said. The circles he painted became smaller and smaller until the canvas became, in his words, “blank.” So he stopped painting in 1972 and moved back to LA. He was in his mid-60s when he took up painting again, in 1997, after a hiatus of twenty-five years during which time he worked for the city as a trash truck driver. Click here for a visit to his Santa Monica studio and a look at his latest art.
