Campello for Christmas

This past week, for those of you who don't already know, my daughter Elise has been busy recording a Christmas Album by Sony Masterworks and Steinway Artist Andrew T. Miller.

Elise, along with a few other very talented artists, are featured on this album and you should pre-order yours today since it will be out this coming weekend!

Go to www.andrewtmiller.org for more info!

If you're in NYC today and wanna do something in Chelsea...

While I'm in Nevada, the Affordable Art Fair NYC has its VIP opening tomorrow at the Met Pavillion in Chelsea!

Three Campellos in front of Jeff Koons' Popeye
Wynn Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas, NV
Circa 2017, Lenny Campello, Anderson Campello and Elise Campello

Fair runs March 30-April 2 with a VIP Preview on March 29th - Come see fab new pieces by Jodi Walsh as well as terrific new work by Georgia Nassikas and Ned Martin! 

Need passes? Send me a note!

Sixties Chicks


Left to Right: LaVone Hardison, Elise Campello, Jenny Shotwell, Melissa Fleming

Matt Nagle on Campello

Another Campello gets reviewed... this time my daughter Elise gets reviewed by Matt Nagle of the Tacoma Weekly.

Read the review here. That's her to the left.

Campelloing on...

Proud papa bragging on:

People who work with Campello say her desire to take on challenging roles is evidence of another essential quality among successful actors. It’s why she landed a recent role with the Seattle’s 5th Avenue Theatre’s Touring company, and why she has upcoming roles with theaters in Issaquah and Olympia.

“She has a lot of drive,” said Jon Rake, managing artistic director of TMP. “She’s gonna go places. She has a lot of talent. She takes it seriously.”

Read a profile on my daughter Elise Campello by Paige Richmond here.

I'd like to see her audition for some roles in Washington, DC soon.

Hire this model... please!

Need a Cuban-American fashion model? Hire my daughter Elise!


Contact her here.

Help Fund Elise's Wedding

So... I've romanced the stone and pulled the first litho proof of this new set of 10 signed and numbered Frida Kahlo portraits. It is matted in a white, pH-balanced acid free museum mat and then framed under glass in an austere black wood frame to a 16x12 inches size. 

Want it? 

Then help fund my daughter Elise Campello's wedding and send her an offer via email and the highest offer by May 25th gets it! As the first proof, this piece is thus unique.

Email her here.

Elise Campello nominated for best actress!

Congrats to my Klingon daughter Elise L Tor-Cam, who just got nominated for "Best Actress" in a South Sound (Tacoma, WA area) theatrical performance during the 2014/15 season!
Details here.

Wanna own a Campello?

The Hopkinton Senior Center in Hopkinton, Massachusetts has inherited (from a very well-known collector) two of my drawings from the early 1990s. They are both original charcoal and conte drawings.

One is a portrait of Picasso and the other of my daughter Elise. If you are interested make them an offer on both or either one by calling Judi Allessio at (508) 497-9730 or email her at jallessio@hopkinton.org. Images below.

Rapture in a Dark Church

Tacoma Little Theatre's 'Off The Shelf' Presents a Reading of AMONG MANY WORLDS and my daughter Elise Campello is in it!

RAPTURE IN A DARK CHURCH

Book by Deanna Martinez - Music by Daniel J. F. Wolfert - Lyrics by Daniel J. R. Wolfert and Deanna Martine

Featuring: Arron Rorick Clark, Andreya Pro, Elise Campello, Richard Cubi Diaz, Chandler Thomas, Ariona Thompson & Keoni Dilay

Directed by Deanna Martinez

When Tabitha invites Amy to her youth group's overnight lock-in, skeptical Amy takes a chance on it. Instead of the clean, Christian fun she expected, Amy is met with an overzealous youth group leader and an adrenaline fueled game where she has the honor of playing the antichrist herself. Over one night and a groovy score with retro, Christian rock inspirations, Amy and the youth group will question what exactly being a good Christian kid means.

Gig Harbor Gallery Walk Through

My daughter Elise lives in picturesque Gig Harbor, a beautiful waterfront small town about 45 minutes from Seattle, and yesterday I walked through its waterfront business district to see what the locals offer in the form of art.

I will admit that I expected to find what one finds in Annapolis: a couple of galleries and other artsy venues selling watercolors of sailboats, sunsets and seagulls.

And I found some of those, but I also found a surprising, and obviously vibrant, local art scene.

For starters, the galleries all have a 20 page full color publication called Art Gig Harbor that puts anything that we have (actually we don't have anything similar) in the DC area to shame.

The second thing: everyone knows that the Pacific Northwest is the center of the universe for fine art glass. And even in a small town like Gig Harbor, in the smallest of galleries located inside a quaint B&B, one finds terrific selections of glass.

The third thing: Sales. In talking to the various gallerists, it is obvious that around here, people are actively buying art. In fact, since most of the art galleries are withing walking distance of each other, during my Sunday afternoon walkthrough, I kept running into the same four or five sets of people. I asked one couple if they were locals, and they answered that they were, and that they came to the galleries once a month or so to buy a piece of original art.

The first place that I visited was The Harbor Gallery, located on the waterfront and kind of the mix of various artists and framing and gifts that one expects in a touristy town.

Almost across the street there's a really nice B&B and inside as one enters there's a tiny gallery called Fire N Light, and here's the first place where one finds some first rate artwork. This is the Pacific Northwest, and this tiny gallery represents and briskly sells the work of Tim O'Niell, whose "Dory Dreams" series made from gaffer glass was an unexpected find in a genre dominated by vessels. O'Neill is the casting coordinator at nearby Pilchuck.

Down the street, Gallery Row is a co-op representing 14 artists. My favorites among these were some of the works of Barbara Patterson and Rebecca Baumgartner.

The Ebb Tide Gallery is also a co-op of 22 local artists, and a naive artist named Emilie Corbin stands out from the work that I saw.

S.C. Elliott Fine Art is probably the best looking gallery in town, in the sense that it doesn't have that cluttered, horror vaccuui sense to its presentation, and the first place that I recall seeing an abstract artist. Here the artists who stood out were W.F. Stone, Jr., some of the landscapes of Mark Farina and the Rothkoish abstracts of Laura Taylor.

Every gallery that visited (there are a few more) had original fine art glass, even the cluttered Birdnest Gallery, more of the typical framing-shop-become-art-gallery space that I had expected to find everywhere. And yet Birdnest Gallery offers a pretty decent range of original glass by an Iraqui artist named Hassan, who apparently is now a local and is currently in Iraq searching for a bride.

Overall a very pleasant and unexpected series of surprises in the art scene in this beautiful seaside town. Their art walk is called "First Saturday Art Walk" and takes place once a month on the first Saturday (duh!) of the month from 1-5PM.

There are also some great cafes and restaurants in the area, and where else can one get a double expresso for 99 cents? (At Kelly's).

My daughter will soon be moving to a new house, and thus to finish the day, I went to a place called Art & Soul Pottery and Painting Studios, one of those pottery and ceramic studios (in this case co-located inside a nice cafe) where anyone can create a piece. I made Elise a ceramic plate for a housewarming gift; my first attempt to ceramics since I finished art school!

This is why...

If posting has been a little slow lately, it is because my youngest daughter Elise was getting married over the weekend and we've been hanging out in gorgeous Gig Harbor, Washington!

And here's the bride and now Mrs. Elise Torralbo Campello

Anyone near Tacoma, WA?

Then go see my daughter ELISE CAMPELLO TORRALBO, who is playing Olive Ostrovsky, the quiet only child with the absent father, and who makes her return to the Tacoma Musical Playhouse. Elise was last seen in Shout! The Mod Musical (Blue Girl) at TMP exactly a year ago!

This weekend shows include:
Friday, January 16 | 8PM - Opening Night
Saturday, January 17 | 8PM
Sunday, January 18 | 2PM

Get your tickets online http://tmp.org/index.php/mainstage-shows-or-2014-15-season/

Wanna go to an opening tomorrow?

CultureScape opens at Addison / Ripley! On Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m., Addison/Ripley Fine Art will host a free opening reception for the artists.

CultureScape, curated by my good friend Isabel Manalo, runs June 18 - July 30, 2011 and includes work by:

Mei Mei Chang
Elise Richman
Lisa Blas
Hedieh Ilchi
Bridget Sue Lambert

MIA Day Four - The Weekend begins

0800 - I'm up and about as I need to get some new video cables to see if I can make the digital player work and project Tate's videos onto the wall. First I stop by a new bakery and grab three Capresse empanadas for breakfast. Then I drop by a Radio Shack and get a new video cable. Sounds easy, but it actually involved going to two Radio Shacks and one Office Depot before I found the friggin' video cable.

1100 - I arrive at the Convention Center and start fiddling with the video projector. My hunch was right and the video cable was bad. However, I also discovered that the Digiviewer is also bad. I then hunt down a new Digiviewer to replace the bad one. By the time it is noon the damned thing is finally working and the Ophelia video is projecting onto the booth wall.

1200 - 1800 - Yawn. Somewhere in there I sell an Erwin Timmers recycled glass sculpture.

1820 - Someone is interested in buying my Ophelia drawing, but they can't get over the title association with the character.

1915 - A curator from a Central American museum is interested in seeing how she can get some Sandra Ramos and Tim Tates for the museum. She tells me that the museum has no acquisition funds, which makes the issue an usually difficult one. In this case, however, I happen to have two collectors lined up to donate both Tates and Ramos' to museums who want them (hear that museum curators?). We exchange cards. She apologizes by saying that her National museum is privately funded and they don't get any money from their government. I remind her that in the US all museums are privately funded. She looks a little quizzical until I explain that even though some museums are funded by the federal government, the said government gets its funds from private citizens and private companies, and thus, by extension of my logic, all US museums are privately funded as well, with some having the government as a middle man.

2000 - I sell a Ann Plant sculpture, her second sale of the show, which is her first show ever. First sale of the day.

2100 - Day over; they're expecting a really cold rainy day tomorrow... great.

2130 - Dinner at El Chalal again with Frank and Helen. Great seafood as usual and two good Peruvian beers. Then I head back to Little Havana.

2200 - On the drive home I talk to my daughter Elise, who tells me that she just finished doing a song in a CD and will be in DC and NYC soon to do some promotional work on the radio and on TV. All the others in the CD compilation are big names; very impressive! More on that later.

Snap Frida

My daughter Elise as Frida via Snapchat filter... cough, cough...

Campellos in the news

At the dawn of the 1930's in Berlin, the Nazis are rising to power. In the Kit Kat Klub, a seedy cabaret full of interesting characters and decadent celebration, we find the naïve English cabaret performer Sally Bowles (Elise Campello), along with the cabaret girls and boys, and the infamous Emcee (Mauro Bozzo). We follow her relationship with American writer Cliff Bradshaw (Niclas R. Olson) as the Nazis begin their takeover of the city.

Details here.

After 22 years

In 1991, while I was living in wonderful Sonoma, California, my daughters Vanessa and Elise used to take ballet classes at the Sonoma Conservatory of Dance.

It was a great school, which (as most of these places are) back then was run mostly on love and was always short of funds, and running bake sales, etc.

I had this idea to create artwork of the students, and then hold a fund-raising art show somewhere in town. I figured that the parents would love to have a drawing of their little ones, and that would be a great way to raise funds for the conservatory.

The best gallery in town, Chevrier's Presidio Gallery, which was run by a very nice couple, agreed to host the exhibition and donate proceeds, which was a very generous thing.

And so I started to hang around the ballet a lot, getting permission from the parents, sketching the dances, both the little ones and the professionals, and after about a year, I had over a hundred works, of which I selected and framed about 50, and matted and shrink-wrapped the rest.

Opening night was sometime in early 1992.

The buzz had started earlier, and because this is Sonoma, the jewel of California's wine country and the home of its wine aristocracy, there was some interesting issues that arose from the event.

For example, the grandmother of one very famous wine family called the gallery a few days ahead of time, and informed the gallerist that she would like to pre-purchase all of the works where any of her grandchildren were the subject of, or part of (I had done many multi-people drawings). And so it happened that little Amber, who was actually a teen at the time, and a very good ballerina, happened to be in at least 20 different works (both framed and matted) and they all ended up with grandma, before the show opened.

This, unexpectedly, or perhaps predictably, caused a ruckus on opening night, as parents and families filed in to discover that some of the pieces where their loved ones were part of, had been pre-sold and thus gone.

The poor gallerist caught hell from a parent or two, although usually their child could be found in another piece.

The entire show sold out on opening night... every single piece.

A while back, while cleaning the studio, I discovered one piece that had never made it to the show... I recognized the little girl too.

To make a long story short, it is now heading to California, 22 years later!

Campello reviewed

In TMP director/choreographer Jon Douglas Rake’s presentation of “Footloose the Musical,” the dancing and singing are spot-on for all the main actors. Elise Campello is particularly impressive as the sassy yet sometimes sweet Ariel, wooing the boys with her cutoff shorts and sweater dresses when her father is not around.

Details here.

Airborne

Heading to my daughter Elise's wedding reception!