Marcel Salinas' life was an enigma.​

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• In an age of fast is best - he advocated not only slow but very slow.

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• In an age of who needs art skills - he spent his whole long-life teaching painting and lithography skills to artists all over the world. 

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• In an age where we tend to accept mediocre on our walls to satisfy "interior design" - he always fought for the best art to be created, with painstaking precision and care by artists both of note and unknown. 

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He started his life in Egypt but was not Egyptian. He was born in Alexandria as a fluke with European parents residing in Egypt.  He never felt fully at home there but it shaped his life for the next 96 years.

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With the movie-star looks of Valentino - tall, thin, charming.  With an adventurous spirit, he was probably totally out of place and probably having a great time!

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He was trained in Egypt to see light  - to see color - to see harmony and it never left his work or his life. 

 

He found his real world and real artistic world when he arrived in Paris in the 1950s, where he continued his studies with the artist Andre L’Hote.  There he struggled with paying the bills with his art, like so many others before and after him.

 

With his innate artistic talents, he was able to use his prodigious abilities in all forms:  paintings - oil, watercolor, gouache; printmaking and photography. 

 

His sophisticated creations in lithography soon gave him the reputation as the "Grand Master" of that specialty - the most elite printing technique created which is almost totally non-existent today. 

 

He met artists in Paris...worked with them...struggled with them…drank wine with them and became a citizen of the world in every sense.

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• He married – twice. 

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• He traveled – extensively. 

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• He saw every museum, he ever found and every artist’s studio there was. Freezing cold ateliers and boiling hot attics filled with as yet unsold art and…

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• He was there!

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Everybody wanted Marcel to work with them - to help them create everything they could - even Pablo Picasso.

 

Picasso so celebrated the creation of the "Imaginary Portraits" portfolio, that he allowed both of their names to be on the lithographs... unheard of for Picasso and a great compliment to Marcel.

 

 

by: Carolyn Solomon, Fine Art Publisher

 

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