Juan Carlos Bravo
Juan Carlos Bravo arrived in Miami from Peru at age 8, and soon after began playing marbles. "We'd play on the sidewalk and in the grass and compete," he remembers. "If you win, you get another marble and you keep collecting them."
Marbles and pearls appeared in most of the paintings featured in the now-32-year-old Biscayne Park artist's first solo show, held in April at Arcoart in Coral Gables. The marbles symbolize childhood and innocence, and the pearls represent maturity, love, beauty and vanity. The exhibit also included Bravo's paintings of "cabezones," which he says means "large head" in Spanish but in Latin American culture refers to a stubborn, foolish person.
At the show, Bravo says the "cabezones" paintings were selling "like hot tomatoes," while the larger more-detailed paintings weren't as popular among buyers. He now has three paintings in a show at Opera Gallery in Budapest and is set to participate in an exhibit next year in Germany.
