Luis Alvarez Roure

Biography

The piano was his first instrument, not the brush. His father enrolled the boy in music lessons in Arecibo, and he treated drawing at first as something he did for himself.

Luis Alvarez Roure was born in 1976 in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. He began drawing in childhood and was largely self-taught. His parents suggested art lessons, but he refused. Music, by contrast, took hold of him: after an undergraduate degree in piano performance in Puerto Rico he moved to New York and continued his studies with the Cuban-American teacher Germán Diez Nieto at the City University of New York, where he took a Master of Arts in music. Alongside his music studies he enrolled at the Art Students League of New York. There the American realist painter Nelson Shanks taught him painting, drawing and anatomy. He studied with Shanks for about six years, and later called this a turning point: in his words, it greatly influenced his approach to painting.

Today Alvarez Roure lives in New Jersey and works as a portrait and figure painter; he also paints still lifes. His sitters include the composer Philip Glass, the violinist Joshua Bell, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Paul Volcker, the actor and director José Ferrer, the percussionist Cándido Camero, Monsignor William Linder, the composer Octavio Vázquez and the former governor of Puerto Rico Pedro Pierluisi. Peter Trippi, editor-in-chief of Fine Art Connoisseur Magazine, wrote of his draftsmanship, taken “directly from the paintings of past masters”, and of the empathy he so evidently feels with his sitters. It seems to me that this verdict also carries something of his musical past: portraits of musicians hold a noticeable place in his work. His work has entered the collections of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, the European Museum of Modern Art in Barcelona, the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, Steinway Hall and The Players club in New York, La Fortaleza, the governor’s residence in San Juan, and the Federal Reserve in Washington. In 2019 he was a finalist in the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, which the National Portrait Gallery holds every three years. His painting “Hidden Wounds” was one of 46 works shown in the exhibition The Outwin: American Portraiture Today. In 2022, at the 24th International Portrait Competition of the Portrait Society of America in Atlanta, Georgia, he won the Draper Grand Prize and the People’s Choice Award.

On 9 May 2024, in the Chancellor Green Rotunda at Princeton University, his portrait of José Ferrer, a member of Princeton’s Class of 1933, was unveiled.