The following text was submitted and written by Jean Ershler Schatz, artist and researcher from Laguna Woods, California:

Julio Galan was born in 1959, the son of an influential family in Monterrey, Mexico. He was something of a child prodigy, surrounding himself with a wall-to-wall make believe world of dolls. His outrageous paintings based on colorful Mexican folklore combine a Frida Kahlo-like frankness with his own acute sense of melodrama.

Galan spent a large part of his childhood on his grandfather's mining estate in Muzquiz, in the northern state of Coahuila, which has one of the largest bear preserves in the world. That accounts for the powerful animism in his early work, along wit...