Over the past 40 years, Los Angeles-based portrait artist, Juan Fernando Bastos, has executed several hundred portrait and landscape commissions in North and South America, Europe, and Asia. These oil paintings and pastel drawings hang in private homes, corporate offices, government buildings, embassies, libraries, churches, and universities. Examples can be viewed by selecting from the menu on the left. There are also a limited number of landscapes and still lifes for sale.
Bastos' work is also represented in a number of public collections, including the Baltimore Museum of Art, the City of Baltimore, the Hebrew Home of Greater Washington, the Inter-American Development Bank (Washington, D.C.), The Baldwin School (Philadelphia), the Marlborough School (Los Angeles), The Archer School for Girls (Los Angeles), the Los Angeles Jewish Home for the Aging, Good Samaritan Hospital (Los Angeles), Cedars-Sinai Medical Center (Los Angeles), the University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine, Viterbi School of Engineering, Price School of Public Policy, and Gould School of Law, George Washington University, and Harvard University.
In private collections, Bastos is notably represented with commissioned portraits of high-profile art collectors Philip Niarchos, Eugenio Lopez, and Pamela Joyner.
Born in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1958, Bastos and his family returned to Bolivia, their homeland, eleven years later. Surrounded by relatives who were painters, Bastos grew up in an artistic environment. After studying fine arts and architecture at the University of San Andres in La Paz, he came to the United States where he enrolled at Georgetown University in 1979. He later obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Cum Laude, and a Master of Fine Arts from Towson University.
Bastos has traveled extensively throughout Europe, South America, Central America, Asia, and the United States and, as a result, has exhibited widely. He has had one-man shows in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Lima, La Paz, and a Los Angeles retrospective of his California portraits. In addition, he has been included in group shows in New York, Paris, Madrid, Los Angeles, Essex, England, and a biennial in Cairo, Egypt. His works have been widely reviewed by the press. Bastos is often invited to give lectures and demonstrations at universities, colleges, art institutions, fraternal organizations, and social clubs. Throughout the year, he conducts private art lessons. He has also been featured in numerous television appearances throughout the Americas. Along with several other well-known artists, Bastos was profiled by The New York Times in a 1999 Sunday Style Section feature article about the reemergence of high-end portraiture. Bastos has lived in Los Angeles since 1996.
Juan Bastos works both from photographs and from live sittings, and often travels to the client to complete commissions.
To request further information on prices and commissioning a work of art, please contact the artist.