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References:
Peter Hastings Falk, Who was Who in American Art: 1564-1975. Madison, CT: Soundview Press, 1999.
One of Texas’ most celebrated impressionist landscape painters of bluebonnets and prickly cactus, Porfirio Salinas was born in Bastrop, Texas and later moved with his parents to San Antonio. As a young man, he worked in a graphics firm that also sold art supplies on the side. Many notable artists visited the firm, and it was here that Salinas was first introduced to Robert Wood and José Arpa. Wood and Arpa took Salinas on painting excursions and he began painting, earning numerous small commissions.
Salinas’ career began slowly during the Depression until Dewey Bradford, an art dealer who sold his paintings to prominent Texans such as the politician Sam Rayburn, began to represent him. President Lyndon Johnson began to collect his work in the 1940s, and Salinas’ increasing popularity allowed the artist to command increasingly higher prices. Salinas served in the army from 1943 to 1945. He was assigned to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, where he painted murals for the officers' lounge as well as a number of other commissions for Colonel Telesphor Gottchalk. Salinas was allowed to reside at home and was therefore able to continue painting for the entire duration of his tour of duty.
Salinas dedicated himself to painting landscapes of Central Texas with particular attention to the bluebonnets that grow in abundance in the springtime. His work is painted in the spirit of Robert Jenkins Onderdonk and his son Julian Onderdonk, who had a profound impact on Texas painters with their favored subject being fields of bluebonnets.
The city of Austin celebrated a Porfirio Salinas Day in 1973. The painter was honored for having "done much to bring the culture of Mexico and Texas closer together with his paintings."
Salinas’ work resides in the collections of the Sangre DeCristo Arts Center of Pueblo Colorado, the R.W. Norton Art Gallery of Shreveport, Louisiana, and the Panhandle Plains Historical Museum, Canyon, Texas. |
