Elias Rivera

by Edward Lucie-Smith

Elias Rivera is a painter whose work both creates timeless images and displays virtuosity of technique. During his long career, Rivera has painted the human drama as it unfolds in settings as varied as civil-rights demonstrations, subways, rodeos, and the marketplaces of Guatemala, Mexico and Peru. His classical training and Old Master technique evoke a true narrative quality rarely seen in contemporary realist painting. This long-awaited, lavishly illustrated monograph spans forty years of Rivera's work and is the first to document his most recent large-scale paintings of unique marketplace, street scenes, and the people who inspire them. Regardless of the particulars of culture, place and time that appear in each painting, Elias Rivera consistently captures the essence of humanity.

244 pages, Hardcover

First published August 25, 2006

About the author

John Edward McKenzie Lucie-Smith, known as Edward Lucie-Smith, is an English writer, poet, art critic, curator and broadcaster.

Lucie-Smith was born in Kingston, Jamaica, moving to the United Kingdom in 1946. He was educated at The King's School, Canterbury, and, after a little time in Paris, he read History at Merton College, Oxford from 1951 to 1954.

After serving in the Royal Air Force as an Education Officer and working as a copywriter, he became a full-time writer (as well as anthologist and photographer). He succeeded Philip Hobsbaum in organising The Group, a London-centred poets' group.

At the beginning of the 1980s he conducted several series of interviews, Conversations with Artists, for BBC Radio 3. He is also a regular contributor to The London Magazine, in which he writes art reviews. A prolific writer, he has written more than one hundred books in total on a variety of subjects, chiefly art history as well as biographies and poetry.

In addition he has curated a number of art exhibitions, including three Peter Moores projects at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool; the New British Painting (1988–90) and two retrospectives at the New Orleans Museum of Art. He is a curator of the Bermondsey Project Space.