click images to enlarge                       Biography Camilo Jose Kerrigan is a Spanish-born American painter who began winning international recognition at an early age.  At age 18, he won second prize in the Joan Miro Competition for Young Painters in Spain.  The next year, he had his first major exhibition in Cork, Ireland.  Since then he has exhibited in galeries in Ireland, Canada, Spain, and United States and his work has appeared on the covers of novels and literary magazines such as Exile and The Malahat Review.  He is listed in Art in America magazine. Kerrigan's work is best described as figurative portraiture of the imagination.  One senses the struggling and resolution of ideas in his paintings.  According to the artist himself, "The source of my painting is my subconscious mind.  Rather than start with a preconceived image, I begin physically on the canvas.  Figures appear as I paint and I work to capture the image that begins to reveal itself.  Through impulse and accident the original image is developed and bettered in ways that I cannot consciously account for or preplan."  Coming from a family of writers and musicians, Kerrigan has been raised in the tradition of arts and letters.  Colleagues and friends of the family included Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, Jorge Luis Borges, Robert Graves, and Saul Bellow.  Camilo Jose Kerrigan is the godson of Camilo Jose Cela, 1989 winner of The Nobel Prize for Literature. Robin Skelton, editor of The Malahat Review, Canada, an international quarterly of life and letters, wrote:  "It is clear that Camilo Kerrigan's handling of his medium is so impressive and his wry and sensual observation so acute, that it would not be unduly absurd to prophesy that he will become recognized as one of the finest painters of both his countries."