Over the past 25 years, Los Angeles-based portrait artist, Juan F. Bastos, has executed several hundred portrait commissions on three continents. These oil paintings and pastel drawings hang in private homes, corporate offices, government buildings, embassies, libraries, churches, and universities.

Bastos' work is also represented in several public collections, including the Baltimore Museum of Art, the City of Baltimore, the Hebrew Home of Greater Washington, the Inter-American Development Bank (Washington, D.C.), the Marlborough School (Los Angeles), the Los Angeles Jewish Home for the Aging, and the University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine and Viterbi School of Engineering.

Born in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1958, Bastos and his family returned to Bolivia, their homeland, eleven years later. Surrounded by relatives who were painters, Bastos grew up in an artistic environment. After studying fine arts and architecture at the University of San Andres in La Paz, he came to the United States where he enrolled at Georgetown University in 1979. He later obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Cum Laude, and a Masters of Painting from Towson State University.

Bastos has traveled extensively throughout Europe, South America, Central America, and the United States and, as a result, has exhibited widely. He has had one-man shows in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Lima, and La Paz. In addition, he has been included in group shows in New York, Paris, Madrid, Los Angeles, Essex, England, and a biennial in Cairo, Egypt. His works have been widely reviewed by the press. Bastos is often invited to give lectures and demonstrations at universities, colleges, and art institutions. He has also been featured in numerous television appearances throughout the Americas. Along with several other well-known artists, Bastos was profiled by The New York Times in a 1999 Sunday Style Section feature article about the reemergence of high-end portraiture. Bastos has lived in Los Angeles for the past twelve years.

Juan Bastos works both from photographs and from live sittings, and often travels to the client to complete portrait commissions.

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