Carlos Gamez de Francisco’s Beautiful Resistance
From secret dollar walls in Cuba to dreamlike canvases in Kentucky, an artist’s life shaped by resilience, imagination, and a relentless belief in beauty.
A World That Demanded Creativity
Carlos Gamez de Francisco was never supposed to be an artist. Not according to the odds, anyway.
Born in post-revolutionary Cuba in 1987, Carlos grew up in a world where creativity wasn’t just a choice — it was survival. Art supplies were nearly impossible to come by. Blank canvases were replaced by scavenged cardboard, and oil paints gave way to ingenious mixtures of toothpaste and diesel. “I had two options," Carlos says, smiling, "quit painting or find a solution. I chose the solution."
By age fifteen, he was spending eight hours a day painting. Not because anyone was standing over him with expectations — his mother, a woman of formidable standards, wouldn’t even hang his work in the living room until she deemed it good enough — but because something inside him refused to quit. “I realized if I could lose myself for a whole day painting,” he says, “then I could do it for the rest of my life.”
"The difficult part isn’t finding an excuse. It’s refusing to use one."
A Family History Written in Escape
The story of Carlos’s family reads like a novel: Spanish roots that fled civil war, a grandfather who escaped a packed Cuban prison every night to sleep at home, parents who studied behind the Iron Curtain in Bulgaria and Russia, listening secretly to banned Beatles records with the volume turned low.
From an early age, Carlos understood two things: freedom was precious, and survival demanded creativity. His father, slipping forbidden U.S. dollars into a false wall of glass bottles; his mother, demanding excellence because survival itself required it.
“I was told America was the enemy,” Carlos recalls. “But when I arrived here, I realized it was the place where all my dreams could happen.”
He landed in the United States at 21 with $650 to his name. He spent $600 on art supplies and the remaining $50 on a pair of Nike Cortez sneakers — the same ones Forrest Gump wore to run across America. “If he could do it, I thought, so could I.”
“I was told America was the enemy. But when I arrived here, I realized it was the place where all my dreams could happen.”
The Discipline of Dreams
Carlos’s education was a fusion of two worlds: the rigorous, technical demands of Soviet-influenced Cuban art schools and the open-ended conceptual explorations he later encountered at the Art Institute of Chicago.
In Cuba, acceptance into the arts academies meant surviving fierce competition: 300 hopefuls would audition; only two dozen made the cut. Discipline wasn’t optional — it was oxygen. As a young dancer, Carlos trained seven hours a day before pivoting fully into visual art.
“My mother always said, ‘Do what you love — but be the best at it,’” he says.
That relentless mindset followed him to America, where he spent his first year working shipping jobs by day, learning 100 English words at night, and painting whenever he could find the time. Within months, he had sold out his first solo gallery show.
But Carlos didn’t view success as arrival. It was just the beginning.
“Do what you love — but be the best at it.”
Painting Stories, Not Just Scenes
Spend a few minutes with one of Carlos’s paintings and you’ll realize: these aren’t just pictures. They’re stories — layered, symbolic, and often laced with sly humor.
His beloved Keep Your Pets Off Furniture series, for example, was inspired by a childhood memory: his mother saving for two years to buy a new couch, only to enshrine it in plastic, untouchable, a symbol of hard-won achievement. After coming to the U.S. — where he saw dogs lounging luxuriously on living room sofas — the idea for the series took shape. Afghan hounds, foxes, and even horses sprawl decadently across ornate couches, upending the old rules.
At some point, Carlos turned to Renaissance portraiture for inspiration — but with a surrealist twist. Animals, not humans, assume center stage, wearing period finery and regal collars. “The Renaissance was about glorifying the individual,” Carlos explains. “I wanted to ask: what if the animals were the ones who deserved to be celebrated?”
And then there are his mysterious women — faces obscured by cascades of flowers, insects, and color. This, too, was born of experience: the isolation of pandemic-era conversations, masked faces hiding full identities. “If the eyes are the window to the soul," Carlos says, "what happens when we cover them?”
Finding Freedom in the Unexpected
Even after twenty years of painting almost daily, Carlos still chases the unknown. Recently, while working on a new, larger series of paintings — ones he admits feel intimidating — he found an unlikely collaborator: his toddler son, Charlie.
“I gave Charlie a brush and let him paint part of the background,” Carlos laughs. “And I realized: this is what it means to create without fear.”
That spirit — an openness to mistakes, to experiments, to failure as a path to something better — is a hallmark of Carlos’s work and life. It’s what allowed him to survive a childhood where creativity was subversion. It’s what carried him across borders, across language barriers, across the intimidating landscapes of art and business.
It’s what keeps his work alive and surprising today.
"Mistakes aren't the end. They're the start of something you couldn't plan."
Lessons from a Lifetime of Reinvention
Carlos is quick to emphasize that success — as an artist or a human being — doesn’t come from genius or luck alone. It comes from repetition, from stubbornness, from refusing to let failure define you.
He speaks warmly about the lessons baked into his story: how a failed gallery call inspired him to memorize English vocabulary until he could negotiate fluently. How a teacher’s tough critique pushed him not to hide behind excuses, but to simply paint better.
It’s not that life hasn’t offered Carlos plenty of reasons to quit. It's that he chose not to take them.
“When you work hard enough and believe deeply enough," he says, "opportunities stop feeling like miracles. They start feeling inevitable.”
The Next Chapter
Today, from his home studio in Kentucky — surrounded by four dogs, flowering gardens, and the occasional wayward rabbit — Carlos Gamez de Francisco continues to build a body of work that fuses past and present, reality and imagination.
He’s preparing his next solo shows, experimenting with larger, more detailed pieces, and continuing to sneak elements of humor, mystery, and history into his paintings.
If there’s a single thread that ties his work together, it might be this: the belief that beauty isn’t a luxury. It’s a form of resistance. It’s survival.
And it's worth chasing — no matter where you start, no matter how many walls you have to break.
Carlos Gamez de Francisco’s work is a regular presence at the Portland Art Gallery, but this May marks a special opportunity to experience a full exhibition dedicated to his art. Join us for the opening reception on Thursday, May 1st, from 5–7 p.m., to meet Carlos in person and explore the depth, range, and imagination of his newest body of work.
Watch the full conversation on Radio Maine with Dr. Lisa Belisle.
I'm sure Carlos would enjoy the recent Raphael exhibit at the Met since he mentioned the Renaissance.