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July 16, 2010
Art sales aid housing options
Luis Guincher pays tribute to his late friend, Samuel Frid.
SUSAN J. KATZ
Colors and Form, a joint exhibition of work by Luis Guincher and the recently deceased Samuel Frid, was on display at the Sidney and Gertrude Zack Gallery earlier this month. Inspired by a shared search for artistic expression and a commitment to social action and philanthropy, the exhibit featured Guincher’s oil and acrylic paintings and Frid’s stone and silver sculptures.
At a fundraising evening on July 5, both Guincher and Frid’s widow, Esther, spoke about how the themes in the show reflected their shared cultural experiences of residing in both North and Latin America, as well as their enjoyment of nature and the outdoors, their mutual encouragement as artists and Guincher’s personal connections with philanthropy and the Tikvah Housing Society.
Guincher was born in Cordoba, Argentina, and grew up in Concepcion, Chile. He studied construction management and traveled to Israel in 1953, where he spent a year at an institute for young Zionist leaders from the Diaspora. He was a builder and developer before his retirement, and worked on projects in Chile, Israel, Canada and the United States.
Guincher began a second career after his retirement, as an artist, in Scottsdale, Ariz., where he had begun to spend the winter in 2000. He took his first art classes in 2005 at the Scottsdale Artists School. He began with pastels, perfecting his technique with paint, brush and composition, and began to paint still life in oil. He then moved on to follow his passion for color, studying at Vancouver’s Emily Carr University of Art and Design and at private studios, learning how to use dilutions of acrylics to achieve the bright colors and textures of his expressive abstract paintings.
It was natural for Guincher, as a builder, to extend his commitment to philanthropy to housing and, in June 2006, Guincher attended Tikvah Housing Society’s first forum. In an address at the Colors and Forms opening, Sam Cukier, president of Tikvah, said of Guincher: “Lito attended our first housing forum, where he heard of the critical need in the community for affordable housing. Marrying his convictions he had since he was young and his professional activities as a developer, at the end of the forum, he decided he wanted to make a contribution to the Vancouver Jewish community.”
With the help of Guincher’s ongoing support, Tikvah dedicated an 11-unit apartment building in May 2008, named for his late brother, Dany, who, Guincher said, at its dedication, “went out of his way to help those in distress.”
Frid and Guincher met in Vancouver, and developed a great friendship. Both loved nature and hiked regularly. They developed their artistic interests in unison, both following their passion for art after retiring from successful careers.
In an interview with the Jewish Independent, Esther Frid spoke of her late husband’s beginnings in Mexico, where he was a businessman and an entrepreneur. “He grew up in downtown Mexico City, and he ran into art museums and cathedrals as a child, just to see the art. His mother was creative and worked with her hands,” she said.
He had a large Mexican art collection, said Frid, and opened galleries in Vancouver, first in Gastown, and then in South Granville. Always curious about how artists create their art and the use of specialized tools, his curiosity led him to turn his retirement into a quest for realizing his 3-D designs, and he traveled back to the area of Mexico he loved, to Teotihuacan near Mexico City, where he grew up.
Samuel Frid, who loved Vancouver as much as his native Mexico, drew inspiration for his sculptures from the indigenous themes of both Mexico and Canada, said his wife. In Mexico, he enlisted the Martinez family, local artists in Teotihuacan, to sculpt local obsidian and quartz to his designs. Frid fondly called the Martinez family “Artisans of the Sun.” He also established a relationship with a silversmith who helped integrate silver work into the carved obsidian pieces. The themes of the pieces have symbolic elements of Haida and coastal First Nations, such as an obsidian box with animal-shaped abalone inlays, sculpted in the form of a traditional peaked Haida hat.
Cukier said of the two artist friends: “Samuel and Lito met in Vancouver and developed a great friendship.... [They] dreamed about having this exhibit together.” Frid passed away in Vancouver on May 21, after a battle with pancreatic cancer. The pieces that comprise the exhibition are part of the legacy he left behind.
In November 2007, Frid wrote the following for an exhibition of his work at the Jewish Sports Centre in Mexico City: “At the beginning of the 21st century, I chose to work in a technique that is rooted many centuries in the past. I came to this practice by means of an inner creative calling that had been repressed for many years due to the obligations of work. I felt the urge and passion that arises from simply having to express creativity without the pressures of financial ends. I wanted to understand the works of the past by making them alive in a present-day context.”
“Sam and Lito always challenged each other to look at the inner self,” said Esther Frid. Her husband’s search for connection came in stone sculpture; Guincher’s with bright and contrasting color. Together, they worked to realize their quest for inner discovery, friendship, the outdoors and philanthropy.
Proceeds from the sale of Guincher’s paintings will be donated to the Tikvah Housing Society to provide low-income housing to people in need in the Jewish and Greater Vancouver communities – statistics show that 14 percent of all local Jewish residents live below the “poverty line.”
For more information on the Tikvah Housing Society, visit tikvahousing.org. To contact Guincher, call 604-731-1850, and Frid can be reached at [email protected].
Susan J. Katz is a freelance writer/editor/educator and award-winning poet, living in Vancouver.
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