Gregg Stone & Mirta Laurenz

Even Che’ Fades, Gregg Stone

Mr. Stone focuses on the physical environment and the social and political realities of people he came to admire for their resiliency and unabashed joie de vivre. His paintings of once stately but now dilapidated buildings and streets, people at work and at play and the natural beauty of the countryside are more than plain observations. They are further evidence of irrepressible intelligence and wit. For example, his painting depicting a fading mural of Cuban revolutionary Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara titled "Even Che' Fades," is a tongue-in-cheek comment on the temporal nature of political proclivities.

Argentine born, artist Mirta Laurenz also traveled to Cuba along with Gregg Stone and a delegation of artists and writers bring to us another reality of Cuban life. Children holding up huge pods of just picked green grapes from vines on the inland and the wide smile on the face of a native Cuban girl behind a "glassless" window with bars. Laurenz’s work done in her original and unique style evolves right before your eyes, from sentimental observation to powerful,  profound, and emotionally insightful look into to the lives of the Cuban people. Her work celebrates the domestic side of Island life found in the eyes of children and in the faces of mothers and grandmothers selling fruits and flowers at market or talking casually on the street.