A painter’s 25-year break is over, way over

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Some artists know their calling from the get-go. They skip out of school and get started as quickly as possible. Others come to art late in life, after many years working unrelated jobs. Few artists do both.

But that’s exactly what Albert Contreras has done. Over the last 50 years, the 78-year-old Santa Monica painter has cobbled together an unusual two-part career — interrupted by years as a city truck driver — that has just come full circle.

Back In the 1960s, Contreras made a name for himself as a painter. After graduating from Hollywood High and serving 2 1/2 years in the Coast Guard, he used the GI Bill to take a year of painting and ceramics classes at Los Angeles City College. Then he hit the road, taking six months of language courses in Mexico and doing a year of undergraduate studying at the University of Madrid in Spain before settling in Stockholm, Sweden.

He ended up there on little more than a whim. Almost embarrassed by the simplicity of it, he says, “I went for the women. I fell in love with the blond, blue-eyed girls of Sweden.”

Living there from 1960 to 1969, he became a highly regarded artist. He had five solo shows. Collectors bought his austere, often single-color paintings. And curators from such prestigious institutions as the Stockholm Museum of Modern Art, the Malmö Konsthall and the Göteborgs Konstmuseum secured his works for their permanent collections.

Then, in 1972, Contreras stopped painting.

David Pagel has the whole tale in Sunday Arts & Books.