As its title suggests, the album is a musical tribute to the actual Latino community in Los angeles, California, that was demolished to make way for Dodger stadium. so it seems fitting that Cooder, a Duke’s Car Club member and lowrider aficionado, would continue to memorialize the long gone neighborhood, but this time using a ‘53 Chevrolet ice cream truck as his canvas.

“This is the action scene right here,” explains Cooder, as he points to a brilliant oilbrushed image on his truck of a woman being forcefully carried out of her home by law enforcement. “Five minutes after she was brought down and all her stuff was thrown out on the street, a big tractor came down and just took out her little wooden house.”

That woman, further explains Cooder, was aurora arechiga. she was just one of the thousands of residents who were removed from their land during the “battle of Chavez Ravine.” throughout the early 1900s, Chavez Ravine was a tight-knit community populated by generations of immigrant and native Mexicans. but by 1949, the city of Los angeles labeled the area as an “eyesore” and identified it as a prime location for redevelopment.

A year later, the residents of Chavez Ravine received letters from the city stating that they would have to leave their homes to make way for a more “attractive” housing. the city promised that they would have the first chance to move back to the new development once it was built, but instead the city sold the land to baseball owner Walter o’Malley, who eventually built Dodger stadium on the site.

Appropriately dubbed “el Chavez Ravine,” the truck artistically expresses the socially complex story of Chavez Ravine and the many indignities suffered by the Latino community. the chopped, dropped and mural-clad vehicle is currently housed at the petersen automotive Museum in Los angeles, where it made its debut at the opening of “La vida Lowrider: Cruising the City of angels.” Cooder says that having his truck in such a prestigious exhibit is an honor and no small feat, but then again neither was refurbishing the classic chunk of metal.

“It was my job to get it customized, to get it restored and to get it running,” says Duke’s founder Fernando Ruelas, who was commissioned by Cooder to take on the massive reconstruction of the ride. “It took me about a year, but I was involved since day one.”

LRM met up with legendary guitarist Cooder and legendary lowrider builder Ruelas to get the lowdown on the making of el Chavez Ravine. you can check out the vehicle at the petersen automotive Museum until June 8, 2008.

LRM: Why have you been so fascinated with the history of Chavez Ravine? RC: Well, I was born and raised in the Los angeles area and I can remember my parents and their friends discussing ways in which the people who lived there were being evicted from Chavez Ravine and their land being handed over to developers. the land was supposed to be redeveloped to make way for affordable housing for its residents, but of course that never happened. I’ve always found it interesting how people in power talk about “progress.” to me, it’s just an amusing word to describe paving over things of beauty. the story of Chavez Ravine is basically the story of corruption and greed… what was going on in L.a. then and is still going on now.

LRM: so you decided to transfer that history onto a lowrider? RC: Yeah, to me it was the perfect subject to mural on a lowrider. I felt that if the image was presented on a lowrider I could really preserve it, unlike on a building that could be vandalized or knocked down. I was just puzzled as to why no one had done it, so I just pursued it. also, Chicano art and the lowriding culture just go together so it made sense to preserve it in this manner. I wanted people to be pulled into it in an emotional and fundamental way.

LRM: Where did you find the truck? RC: Fernando had it in his shop. I couldn’t find one myself, these trucks are basically extinct. FR: the truck was owned by my son, who later gave it to my wife. I met Ry a few years back. He was looking to do a project vehicle because he had just cut the Chavez Ravine CD. but it actually took me about three months to decide if I wanted to do this project, but he kept calling and asking, “Did you find my truck?” I asked my wife if she wanted to get rid of hers because at the time I couldn’t find a truck in good enough shape to work on. My wife agreed to sell it and I finally told him that I found him a truck.

LRM: How much money have you put into building the truck? RC: I can’t even tell you, but somewhere in the six figures. the truck cost me $1,500, but the rest was quite a heroic and expensive undertaking. I had to find someone to mural the car and that could only be done by vincent valdez; he’s the only human being who could do it. If he hadn’t have done it, I probably would have abandoned the project.

LRM: How did you hook up with vincent? RC: It was hard because he was out in texas. I basically had to import the guy here and set him up in a studio in boyle Heights. It took him two years of his life, but vincent found a way to visualize this in a rather poetic manner. the mural isn’t linear like a series of photographs; it’s not a map, it’s an impressionistic thing. He did a fantastic job. I mean, he had to deal with the shape of the truck, which isn’t like painting on a flat surface or the side of a building.

LRM: And the mural was all done by hand with oil paints? RC: That’s the thing to know about this truck. It was all done with oil paint and that’s why it took him two years. But that’s his technique. He’s not an acrylic spray gun guy. It was quite an undertaking people said it would never work, but we ignored them and pressed on.

LRM: How was he able to recreate the images? RC: Well, he researched the pictures that were taken in 1949 by Don Normark, who spent a year photographing the neighborhood for a class project. I also took vincent up to the Dodger stadium and had him overlook the city so he could get a feel for it. and I gave him a bunch of historical material that I had collected over the years and he took it and studied it.

LRM: Can you talk about some of the images on the truck? RC: There’s lots of stuff, ghost figures taken from photographs of people who were from Chavez Ravine. One of my favorite things is the image of a copy the original eviction notice, which was given to the families before they were thrown out. you can see that he positioned the notice in front of some mailboxes that seem to be reading it, like a family of people looking at it saying, “What are we going to do? What’s happening to us and our world?” He also populated it with key players of the time, like Walter o’Malley, J. edgar Hoover and Fritz burns, who was the evil nemesis of the whole thing.

LRM: And of course, the Dodger stadium is also featured on the car. RC:That’s the final scene. the final product is the scene where the junk of the neighborhood spills over to the Dodger stadium baseball field. there’s a Latino man sitting in his chair on third base as though he was sitting in his house. By The way, there’s an old saying that these old timers who were originally from the ravine used to say: “I’m from third base or I’m from home plate.” all the city did when they razed over Chavez Ravine was pour cement over the town. It’s still down there… the school and the houses. there’s a whole city underneath Dodger stadium. I wrote a song about it called “third base, Dodger stadium.”

LRM: But before all the murals could be painted on the truck, it had to be restored. Can you talk a bit about the construction of the truck? FR: Well, we wanted to make this in the style of an ice cream truck, so we took an actual model of a Good Humor truck and worked from there.

LRM: How long did it take you to rebuild the truck? FR: It took me about 12 months to do all the body work. the truck was in good shape, but it needed work. The engine was all there, but it needed to be worked on, the whole drive train and the wiring. the interior isn’t stock either. I got the seat off a sedan Delivery. I also did lots of other things like install fog lamps taken from a ‘40 Chevy, installed dual pipes and Fenton headers. It just took a lot of restoration work.

LRM: What was most challenging part? FR: Cutting the roof and fixing the doors. the doors are all welded and everything is molded in, the back fenders, the front fenders. I didn’t really see this as a challenge. this project was just another notch in the belt. but, it definitely couldn’t have been done without the support of my wife, Gloria, my sons, my nephew and “Chivo,” who did all of the transmission work. and, of course my fellow Duke’s Car Club members had a helping hand, too. They all did something.

LRM: so where’s the car going next? RC: I don’t know. there’s a big art museum in san antonio, texas, that wants it for display for a while. that would be cool, but I certainly like it being here, part of the petersen Museum. It’s an honor for me to be in the show in the first place, among all these exceptionally dedicated and focused people who build lowriders. I dig it.

Rubio gave Valdez his first lessons in painting while working on a peace-themed mural that still stands, in vibrant color, to this day. Over the next several years, the two young artists deepened their mentor-student relationship as they worked on other public art projects around town.

Today, the artwork of Rubio and Valdez is not only visible in our city’s murals — it has traveled to Paris, New York, New Zealand, Los Angeles, and Mexico City. It hangs on the walls of prestigious galleries and museums, and in the homes of big-name collectors.

Although they have influenced and inspired one another with their art for most of their lives, until now they have never had an extensive art show together. Presented by the Museo Alameda, the exhibit San Anto: Pride of the Southside / En El Mero Hueso focuses on the working relationship Valdez and Rubio have enjoyed for so long.

The Current caught up with the artists a week before opening night, at their fourth-floor studios above the old Alameda theater downtown.

Tell me more about the day you two met.

Vincent Valdez: I’ll never forget when I first met Alex. He had long hair, a bandana real low, a hanging cigarette, tattoos, and sunglasses even though it was December time. I was a really quiet kid, so I kind of freaked out when I saw him.

I really wanted to impress him, and I showed him this little folder with all my notebook drawings. He said, “OK, I’m willing to give you your own chunk of wall. Let’s see what you can do.”

I had never painted before, and he made it look so easy. He showed me how to do a little bit of blending, and then he left me alone. I whipped it out, and he said, “OK, that’s good.” And then he gave me another piece of wall. That was it. Then I opened up and started talking to him. And the rest is history.

Alex Rubio: After that I would call his mom and ask if Vince could participate in other projects, after school or on weekends. We were always working on something. We would take breaks and go downtown, where we’d sit around and draw from life. We’d draw nature studies at the Botanical Garden. It was fun.

What made you take interest in a kid like Vincent?

AR: I started making art at 13, doing tattoo designs in the neighborhood. That led me to large-scale drawings on the housing-project walls with a can of black spray paint. Eventually the Community Cultural Arts program came through, saw the drawings, and started asking around the neighborhood until they finally caught up with me. That opportunity came to me, and I just wanted to pass it on. I knew Vince was naturally talented, and I thought this was a good way for him to get started.

VV: I would also do dirty work like washing the brushes and mixing colors. Now I look back at all that free child labor (laughs). But I was just so honored to work with this guy. He would show me how to paint and techniques on drawing. It took a while until he let me on the scaffolding, then onto the second level of the scaffolding. I really loved it.

What else can viewers expect to see in the show?

VV: One thing that is going to be super-evident is this influence that we’ve had on each other, as individuals and as working artists. It’s going to be really interesting to see how this work relates to each other and how it differs.

We’ve included text and historical facts about where we’re from, who we are, and what we’ve done together and on our own. There’s also a visual timeline of photographs, some of them a little embarrassing. You see us growing up, the last 20 years of our life together, working on scaffolds and in the studio. All of my works are meant to be some sort of self-portrait, always an extension of me. They are my stories. They’re who I am and where I’m from, who my family is, what I’m concerned with in the world.

About 90 percent of my part is new work, fresh off the easel. They’re technically very different, with more experimentation, and the most detailed stuff that I’ve done to date. I think it’s the prime of my painting career so far.

AR: I’m including a lot of early works, but also quite a few new paintings that I did especially for this show. They’re mostly customized views of the West Side – actual events and environments, but stylized and somewhat exaggerated. You’re gonna see a lot of familia, a lot of places that you’ll recognize. It’s all about growing up in San Antonio, so anybody from any side of town can relate to it.

My paintings are hard copies of my memories and experiences growing up, reminding me of the good times, of youth, and being secure where you are. I’m hoping that those feelings are preserved in the works so that people can relate to them. I want them to walk away telling their own stories and re-living their memories growing up in their own neighborhood.

Alex, you’ve always served the local community as an artist-mentor with several non-profit organizations. What is it about the barrio that keeps you coming back?

AR: That’s my life, my memories. The West Side is and always will be my barrio, no matter where I live. I grew up with this old school Chicano slang, hearing, “Hey, you’re from the West Side. You come from deep within the bone, en el mero hueso de San Anto.” I always want to preserve that history in my art, so I thought it would be a great title for my part.

For me, it’s always been about that community, collaborating with people, working with students, being a good teacher and mentor, and a good friend to people who drop in on our mural works. I think that’s what’s kept me honest.

Vince, you’ve been living part-time in LA for two years now. How do you maintain your San Anto roots?

VV: Whenever I leave home, that’s when it becomes most clear to me, when it’s so easy for me to figure out what it means to be from this place. It’s such a strange and unique place, such a small big city. It’ll always be home, no matter how far I go.

It will always be an important element in my work. This is who I am. This is what I know. This is what I love to paint. I can see these faces and these houses and these sunsets in these wide-open Texas skies. I don’t think I’ll ever, ever get tired of it.

To be precise, it wasn’t just any truck but a custom-built, low rider ice cream truck — a commission from Ry Cooder intended to help promote Cooder’s 2005 album, “Chavez Ravine.” It was to be, literally, a vehicle for keeping the story alive and vivid. A way not to forget.

Valdez has seen how easily the forgetting happens; how in the absence of hard facts there’s an impulse to invent or embellish — to fill in the gaps. Holes open up in the timeline and new stories rush in, overtaking the truth. For him, art’s always been a way of guarding against erasure, setting the record straight.

Until the truck, he thought of the cycle — erase/revise/restore — as something removed from him. But recently he’s had a close-up view of just how, and how quickly, history can rewrite itself.

His trajectory was white-hot when Cooder called. Valdez had made his first big splash in 2001 with a piece called “Kill the Pachuco Bastard!,” a visually raucous painting re-imagining the 2043 Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles. The work became one of more talked about centerpieces of a touring exhibition called “Chicano Visions: American Painters on the Verge,” and Valdez, then 22, a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, followed up with a solo exhibition at the McNay Museum in his home town of San Antonio. “Stations,” a series of large-scale, epic charcoal drawings that cast Christ as a boxer and the crucifixion as a boxing match, has been touring since its debut in 2004. As for Valdez himself, well, he fell off the map. Conjecture abounded, he says, reeling off the reports: “The local newspapers wrote, ‘The pressure was too much,’ that I ‘fled town.’ People were saying I had a breakdown. . . . Others said I had so much success that I was ready for the big time and I went to Los Angeles.”

That was the only shred of truth — the L.A. part. As for the rest, “They turned into all these little urban myths,” he says on a recent August afternoon, standing in the very spot where he has spent much of the last 18 months. Not club crawling, lunching or networking but in a bare-bones 1,700-square-foot live/work studio in Boyle Heights not more than 5 feet away from the very thing that actually lured him to Los Angeles — that truck, that all-consuming ice cream truck: El Chavez Ravine.

Veering off course

AS Cooder envisioned it, the truck would chronicle the battle over Chavez Ravine, a hard-scrabble, mostly Mexican American, working-class neighborhood that was plowed away to make room for the sleek, state-of-art stadium that the Brooklyn Dodgers would come to call home. The evolution of the neighborhood, from 2049 to present day, would un-spool along the panels of the truck. It seemed straightforward enough, Valdez says. “I told Ry six, eight months tops.”

Now, nearly two years later, the truck still sits. Lurks really. And though Valdez says that he — as of just a few weeks ago, “at 12:57 a.m., Sunday, Aug. 5th” to be exact — is finally finished, the truck sits in his studio’s center space; his few personal belongings remain pushed to the margins where he lives: a crate of LPs, a turntable, a laptop, a trumpet case and a few scattered books — mostly photography and history.

Valdez would be the first to admit that he might have taken a wrong turn and disappeared into his creation. “I had no idea what I was in for,” he says, arms folded, eyeing the crouching machine. Traced along its sloping doors, its curved fenders, is a winding, deeply rutted dirt road, a few wooden houses rising from it. There’s a view of a 2040s downtown, then a sleepy neighborhood waking up, and later, faces familiar from the Chavez Ravine battle — then-Dodgers President Walter O’Malley, former LAPD Chief William H. Parker. This day in the life of a neighborhood, a time-tripping panorama spanning 2049 to 2059, looks almost like an intricate tattoo, but in the glowing, concentrated hues of a Los Angeles sky in summer — blood orange, violets, lipstick reds — all of it done in oil paints on metal applied meticulously by brush, painted and repainted, layer upon layer.

Valdez points out tire tracks here, a disrupted house plant there, “all my little obsessions,” which he knows, over time, became bigger and bigger. But each stroke, each erasure, each layer turned folly into actuality. He’s still haunted by it, having dreams.

“Some mornings, I would walk down these stairs and I couldn’t look at the thing. You know those stereotypical stories of the crazed, dramatic artists who are just a little bit nutty? Well, some of those are true,” he says. “I was locked up here for hours. . . always just me in here with the truck. And I would find myself talking to this thing. I’d come down the stairs and I’d grunt at it. I would literally say, ‘I just don’t want to see you right now.’

“I’d turn my back to it. It was like a partner. It was really wacky when you step outside and realize, ‘Am I talking to this thing?’ But worse, he admits, would be the imagined answer, “when even the grill opens up and says, ‘Finish me. Finish me.’ ”

Hopelessly stalled

Most days and most nights, Valdez could be found crouched on the concrete floor, a wooden cart pulled close, cluttered with tubes of oil paint, brushes and rags that also now look like a Los Angeles sunrise. He could spend half a day staring at a wheel well or a front fender, making corrections or additions. Or painting out another panel until it was once again a gray patch that resembled the primer. “I didn’t want it just to be a timeline. I didn’t want it to look hokey.” About six months ago, the truck still felt too vague, not balanced. It was a patchwork of intricate details, but some areas still felt empty or not sharply enough expressed, as if he had begun to lose steam on the other side. Cooder tried a gentle prod: “I’m not getting any younger Vincent. . . . ” To which Valdez responded, “And Ry, I’m getting older, man. This thing is making me old.” Cooder admits, “Well, I started to think we almost lost Vincent there.”

For all this time, the truck has been the first thing Valdez glimpses in the morning, the last thing he takes in at night. “I wish I had logged the exact hours,” he says, as if that might clarify the journey.

Cooder well knows there is a fine line between perfection and obsession. It took him three years and many wandering miles down creative side roads to finish telling Chavez Ravine’s story. And really — has he? He was more than halfway through the album when he started to imagine something starkly different from the standard-issue promotional music video, something that was unusual but, most important, lasting. “I knew people wouldn’t want to go back and read history,” he says. He needed a format that would convey the sweep of the story — something in the tradition of Mexican murals, but mobile. “Problem with a wall is you can’t own it, buildings get torn down.” But finally, he says, “I began to see it.”

The task was to get others to see it too. First, he contacted the Ruelas brothers — Julio, Fernando and Ernie — master car builders out of South Los Angeles and founders of the venerable Dukes Car Club, to ask if they knew how to go about finding an old Good Humor truck, something familiar to a neighborhood. But there were none stashed away, so the Ruelases began piecing one together using a 2053 Chevrolet five-window, half-ton truck as the foundation. Next, Cooder set about finding an artist who could render what he was after. “Not what you usually see with car painting. None of these cartoons, silly drawings,” says Cooder. “A highly narrative oil painting — but on metal.”

Another artist, Ruben Ortiz Torres, pointed Cooder to Valdez, who, in spring 2005, was finishing the pieces for “Stations” and took three months to return the call. He knew nothing of the Chavez Ravine incident and couldn’t fathom what an ice cream truck had to do with it, but he was intrigued: “I really couldn’t visualize it at first,” Valdez says. “But he hooked me with the story and his ideas.”

As he approached the Chavez Ravine project, there was the pressure to “get it right,” particularly because he was an outsider. For three months, he disappeared into research — watched documentaries, read documents Cooder had sent him, listened to music of that era. He bought a ticket for a Dodgers game and sat in the “cholo seats,” to soak up stories. He attended Chavez Ravine family reunions, talked to families. He wandered the patches of what was left of the old neighborhood. He let Los Angeles — its culture and its stories, past and present — seep in, little by little.

There were no specific models for the project in terms of scope or medium, but there were precedents. This notion of a lowrider conveying a story is not as way out as it seems. “Low riders have long been used, in a way, as a canvas to tell the stories of the barrio,” says Denise Sandoval, professor of Chicana/o Studies at Cal State Northridge, curator of the upcoming show, “La Vida Lowrider: Cruising the City of Angels,” which opens at the Petersen Automotive Museum on Oct. 27 and will feature Valdez’s truck.

“Low riding, in essence, is performative. Cruising allows people to not only express themselves but transcend the limits of the barrio culture in Los Angeles.” It also ties into a tradition of street aesthetics in Los Angeles that blend tattoos, car painting and wall murals to pass on ancient myth, history or neighborhood legend, sometimes all at the same time. But, says Ortiz, “Vincent, he’s a different story. He comes from a different place. He understands narrative painting from the ’30s. I can see a lot of American art in his work and to a certain degree Mexican muralism and illustration. But what he’s doing is a fresco — working on the contours of a car — in oil. This was big. Ambitious.”

Down the rabbit hole

WHEN the Ruelas brothers wheeled the truck, a primed and ready canvas, into Valdez’s studio, reality set in: “I literally just sat in front of it for about a solid month and a half,” the painter says. “Two months. Then, I would just very timidly apply color.” Just settling on the paint itself was more problematic than he had imagined. “I asked a lot of car guys in San Antonio and here. I talked to the Dukes. To other artists who have done custom work on cars — Magu and other people who knew how [artist] Mister Cartoon had done his vehicles.” Mister Cartoon, the graffiti artist turned street-art impresario, had even done an ice cream truck, though one of a considerably different flavor.

Most everyone recommended airbrush, “but that’s not my work.” Neither was acrylic. He considered car paint, but it dries instantly and he couldn’t blend. “I sat here and thought: ‘Can I do this? Really?’ ”

That was a more open-ended question than even Valdez realized. He went down the rabbit hole. The release of the album came and went. The anniversary of the album did too. And Valdez kept working, adding details — painting fonts to match old documents, even precisely mimicking their hue. “It had to feel like the colors of the album. It had to feel like a Dukes car, and it had to be my work. And I was at such a crossroads with my work.” In retrospect, Valdez says, it wasn’t any one thing that tripped him up, or some spell the truck was working on him. It was something much more prosaic but necessary: his own evolution. “I’ve always had this tug of war with my work. Not just the subject, but the process. You see the fight in it.”

If anything was working its spell on him it was the story that he was retelling about the city, the persistence of an embattled community. “It’s been a complete awakening as far as my work ethic goes,” says Valdez, who has now decided to make a go of it in L.A. “Everybody learns to hustle here. And I don’t mean a street-hustle mentality. I mean like people working to make it,” he says.

It wasn’t simply the city’s burgeoning art scene — the proliferating galleries, new cutting-edge work, the artists’ migration. “There’s an energy to this city, both politically and socially. Everything seems magnified. It’s been a real awakening for me,” says Valdez. “Growing up, I’ve been in tune with my political views, but here I see them acted out — the student walkouts, the protests over the South-Central farm. And that energy has made me see my work, and the purpose of it, in a whole new light. It’s sort of like a punch in the stomach.”

That’s been enough to make him throw himself into the ring, to make a life here. He’s found a place in Boyle Heights and a gallery in Culver City — Western Project. His solo show, which just opened, is up through Oct. 27. He’s even playing trumpet in a band, Ollin.

But soon now, Valdez knows, he’ll wake up and this truck won’t be “the first thing that I see when I start my day and it won’t be the last thing I see when I end my day, and that’s going to be tough.” It will soon be moving to the Petersen for the October show, and Cooder hopes to find it a long-term museum home. As we circle the finished truck, he points out the newest additions — ghost figures, more tire tracks, graffiti here, all those obsessive details. “It’s an ongoing story. It happens to all of us, whatever you want to call it — urban renewal, gentrification. It affects me, it affects all of us,” he says. “The piece, it’s political. Sure it’s cultural, if you want to label it specifically, but I think beyond that, it’s an American theme. That’s America regardless of era.” We make our way to the hood of the truck, the end of the story. The stadium glows in full color, hot-lighted, stands filled. And there Valdez has painted himself in next to Cooder. They sit side by side in the cholo seats, taking in a night game. He didn’t get lost — his footprints are there, an indelible sign. His X marks the spot.

http://articles.latimes.com/2007/sep/16/entertainment/ca-valdez16

The guitarist and Latino-phile hired Valdez to paint the history of Chávez Ravine on the exterior of a vintage Good Humor ice-cream truck—a history-on-wheels extension of Cooder’s 2005 album about the L.A. barrio that was razed in the 1950’s for a never built public housing project and later became the site of Dodger Stadium. But with his work on the truck completed, Valdez is now focused on his first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. “Winner Circle,” which opens September 15 at Western Project, is a coming-out party of sorts for the painter, who has been largely sequestered in his studio painstakingly working on Cooder’s project.

“The ice-cream truck is what brought me here full time,” Valdez says. “For about two years prior, I was coming out here off and on. When I first started coming, it was to print at Self Help Graphics.”

Valdez first exposure to the L.A. art scene came when comedian, actor, and art collector cheech Marin purchased one of his paintings. Valdez painted Kill the Pachuco Bastard! in 2000 while he was still attending the Rhode Island School of Design. Marin included the painting in “Chicano Visions,” a touring exhibition of his significant collection. Cooder then discovered Valdez’s workin in the exhibition catalog, and that paved the way for Valdez to relocate from one mecca of Chicano art to an even larger one.

“Beyond the Chicano community, the art community here is stronger because of access to more museums and gallery shows,” Valdez says. For this exhibit, he has created large-scale drawings and paintings that continue his ongoing theme of boxing as a metaphor for conflict and struggle. “Wheather it’s a fight for love, justice, territory—this series is the aftermath of that struggle,”Valdez says. “We’re all fighters, whether you’ve been in a ring or not. We sink or swim together.”

It’s a mature world view for an artist who turns 30 this month, but one of Valdez’s local champions says it’s a true reflection. “There’s a kind of humanity in his work that’s missing in so much figurative art,” says Western Project co-owner Cliff Benjamin. “It’s not about a gimmick or style, but about looking at the best of people. Not in a sentimental or romantic way, but by looking at the light and the dark. That’s what makes his work stand out.”

A photo shows a skinny kid in a stairwell looking down at the viewer, dwarfed by a huge mural of two soldiers in camouflage crawling through Vietnamese bush. The painting is sure, with hands and faces fully articulated. The boy has eyes from another age, an ancient, calm, beatific stare. Look again at the work. The kid is a champ. At 10.

Though my first encounter with Vincent Valdez’ Zoot Suit Riot painting was a reproduction, the feeling in my gut, the acid release of jealousy, was unmistakable. As I read the complex painting from left to right, I saw the masterful ease with which it appears to have been orchestrated―fun house perspective couples with part-classical, part-superhero drawing resulting in a poignant historical statement, heartrending, hilarious, and adrenaline pumped. And the light, the type of light painters live for. When Chaz Bojorquez saw this painting, “It made me want to break his fingers,” he said.

I wanted to see the Zoot Suit Riot painting badly, and went to Cheech Marin’s Chicano Visions show at the La Jolla Museum of Art only to be told that the area where the painting was hanging was “being worked on.” Damn. Rumor had it that in the Chicano Visions tour there was some measure of controversy surrounding this painting. Why? It was a scab-scratcher, sure to offend most people. I finally saw it in San Francisco at the de Young Museum, and, at 4 by 6 feet, It held its own against much bigger paintings in Cheech’s collection. The drawing in the painting is sure muscular. The light is sublime. The color is red to blue, with an arch of yellow and a few greens at top. It’s movie poster influenced, like Adan Hernandez, also of San Antonio. I learned the artist was 21 whe he painted it. John Valadez says, “Vincent is old at his age. Everything you see, you just want to see more. The shit kicks ass; it’s relevant, it’s American, it’s got some chili.”

I met with Vincent at his studio for pizza with Chaz, John Valadez, and Christina Ochoa on afternoon to take a peek at the ‘53 Chevy Good Humor Ice Cream truck he was finishing painting from stem to stern. It’s a commission by Ry Cooder depicting the theme for Cooder’s 2005 album Chavez Ravine, a shameful tale of greed, Federal Housing Act money, eminent domain, and red-baiting, ultimately leaving the residents and landowners screwed as Norric Paulson, mayor of Los Angeles in 1953, made and end run around the public housing plan to buy the land back from the Feds and make way for Dodger Stadium, a coup for the coiffeurs of the city of LA. Walter O’Malley, owner of the New York Dodgers, liked the idea, and the rest, especially the hundreds of displaced Chicano residents of Chavez Ravine, is history. Shown blue prints of individual bungalows at a meeting, the Chavez Ravine residents weren’t buying the relocation sales pitch, which did turn out to be bogus. The city of LA threw up some sub-standard housing complexes that were woefully unadequate.

Vincent Valdez is a student if this barnacled history. He’s interested in hidden stories, myths, archetypes, heroes, and what they’re hammered and forgot of. He believes every person has a moment of truth― or defining moment they have been preparing for, or not, all their lives. Valdez is interested in that fated moment and its story. He knows that not every moment occurs in a gladiator arena. A moment of truth might occur for one person at a bakery or in a cab. Inquiry into the nobility of heroism discloses human flaw, and Valdez sifts through obvious, paring and peeling to something real: fear. “Every soldier, fighter, and prophet has the weight of fear in their eyes,” Valdez says. “The larger-than-life subjects are caught in a distant gaze of uncertainty, unsure of their own bravery and strength, unsure of their own bravery and strength, unsure of their own willingness or unwillingness to accept this supposed glorious moment.”

The next morning I meet Valdez and we go to the Boxing Academy if LA on Willow Street, a gymnasium where he is exhibiting a painting, a large drawing, and 12 lithographs that explore the Ashcan lineage of boxing but dig deeper into the psyche of the fighter. In the ring a skinny 10-year-old kid is sparring with a younger boy. He cuts his eyes immediately over to Vincent and nods a hello. We pass into the next room where the work is. It’s my first look at work done since the Zoot Suit Riots, which is now eight years old. There is suite of lithos based on the Stations of the Cross, which track a fighter moving toward his final fight. The light source in the 15 prints operates metaphorically, starting in the first print with a beam entering a high window in a dark boxing gym. It becomes brighter as the fighter moves toward his fate, then dims on the fighter as he moves toward his knock out or death. In the final panel, the fighter glows with the light coming from within as he is resurrected. All the light is harnessed into the buttery crayon on limestone, which Valdez makes shimmer and radiate atmosphere. For complicated works with multiple figures, he usually shoots models alone in a single picture, cobbles then into groups, and then re-invents the light on the facial planes to fit the picture. Most paintings have complex and unusual light sources, something Valdez invents to make the painting fun. I’m hard pressed to think of an Ashcan painter who drew better.

A large oil looks up to a frontal boxer blotting out the horizon of a sunset over LA. It’s Vincent’s brother, the model for most of his boxing art. Mostly in black sulhouette, it hovers like a 7-foot Frankenstein, power and menace coiled within the core. “Is the American icon caught in a cycle of despair, a cycle passed from generation to generation?” Valdez wonders. This haunts his fighter, as well as the American superhero archetype. The looming boxer has pathos, vulnerability, and conflict.

Valdez salutes the warrior and the soldier while divining their purity and tragic flaws. His boxer is wary, wiry, and ropy muscled, his neck holding the swagger of waterfront Brando. The sounds of cars, cockfights, the music of fast dialect, taco carts, and prizefights mingle with the rank smell of blood lust, sweat, fear, and cigar smoke in these drawings and paintings. This boxer is every make who faces his personal fight. He fights for his family’s honor, for the woman he loves, for a righteous reason. Maybe the fighter is fighting for the wrong thing, having that sickening epiphany dawn that the glass silver he’s been digging out if his foot really wasn’t there in the first place. The fighter grasps he’s been duped. He faces his moment of truth. Boxers, Christ, soldiers, and thugs are all “made men,” which Valdez calls “sentenced to life by society,” shown in a row of four portraits that allow the war-shot distant gaze of the quartet to bind then together. “Superman, Frankenstein―all made men,” he says. He looks for the “exact moment where they meet their own fate.” Valdez, who has two siblings, was the one who stayed in at the kitchen table drawing. His father brought home rolls of vellum paper, allowing the youth to trace long freizes of comic superheroes. He would have family to pause a movie on the vcr so he could trace war movies, Lone Ranger, Superman, Rocky, and other tragic-hero themes off the T.V. There were art history books around. At nine he discovered a comic store with a whole wall of Vietnam War comics. With a father who had been drafted into the war, young Valdez had a lot to think about. He says, “I realized pretty early on the cost of war, especially on young minds. My mother was left all alone.” The 10-year-old saw Letters Home from Vietnam, which for him “was an early glance at the brutal and realistic nature of politics and war… also the mental and emotional deterioration that these young men faced on a daily basis.”

With fortuitous luck in meeting 18-year-old muralist Alex Rubio, the 10-year-old Valdez was mentored in painting the Vietnam mural as well as several others. They have since been close friends. San Antonio collector Joe Diaz, who has collected Valdez’ work since he was a teenager, says, “With all the success he’s had, he’s nice and caring, a humble, genuine young man.”

A large elegant drawing titled Laid Out has the boxer prone, knocked out, or maybe dead. The murky atmosphere is cut with vine, compressed charcoal, and eraser in a seamless mix, suggesting a helpless Gulliver. The metaphor of the giant on its back is easy to connect to recent ill-fated American incursions. Valdez has just received a grant from the San Antonio Artist Foundation to execute a large fiberglass sculpture of this theme. We pass back through the room with the young, now in the ring with his father, Al Vasquez, who is working out combinations with boxing pads. Born into a broken and drug addicted family, Mathew, as well as three brothers and sisters, was adopted and raised by Vasquez, orginally from El Salvador. After 15 years of raising the children and opening up countless possibilities to better lives for barrio kids with his Boxing Academy, Al has coached a winner in Mathew, who is fighting as El Pulga. Punch combos are lighting fast and the fierce heart is unmistakable.

There is a nexus between the boy in the photo and this young fighter. They recognize a kinship, and weeks later, Mathew shyly approaches Vincent to paint his white boxing helmet. Valdez is delighted. Born on September 11, 1995, Mathew Vasquez has a dream of getting the gold medal at the Olympics.

No doubt, Mathew will help someone along the way, too.

“The Strongest Man in the World is He Who Walks Alone,” the procession scene, serves as a family portrait. His father is a trainer and his mother is a spectator holding a T-shirt with the boxer’s face on it, an echo of St. Veronica who, according to legend, wiped Christ’s face with a cloth that retained his image as he walked toward Calvary. Valdez himself is the beer boy.
In spite of the parallels between the boxer and Christ, Williams believes “It’s too easy to overstate the religiosity” of the drawings.
“I think they are more important as examples of everyday struggles that everyone goes through,” he says. “There’s a certain dignity to the boxer in the ring as he prepares for the fight. I think that’s what Vincent is responding to when he sees the boxer, is that we all have that sense of dignity as we go about our daily routines fighting our battles and slaying our dragons. The boxer is a metaphor for that, as is Christ.”
When Valdez was working on the series, he wanted the drawings to have a cinematic quality. That’s part of the reason he chose to work in charcoal.
“There’s just something about black and whites that I’ve always liked. I really like the velvet-like textures charcoals make,” he says. “I think in this specific series of drawings that Im doing, I really like the idea if it reflecting old footage and old film, like archival film, especially of old school boxing fights.”
Four drawings — “Get Outta There!” “Kill’em!” “No Mercy!” and “Finish Him!” — form a sequence in the series. In the first drawing, valdez puts us in the boxer’s shoes. We look into the ring from his perspective, as his opponent taunts him. In the course of the next three drawings, we see his opponent’s punch connect with the boxer’s jaw and the devastating effect of the blow.
“I’ve always been interested in film, this idea of movies,” Valdez says. “When you watch a movie, you’re able to follow this one character or be in this one person’s shoes for an entire two or three hours. I feel like when you go into the show, you’ll be intoduced to this one character, and you’ll follow his life (through) this one event, and you’ll see his outcome.”
With the fight over, we see the boxer lying still on a table in the locker room. His body is clean. His eyes are shut. He appears dead.
But Valdez says he is only dreaming of future fights and victories. In the final drawing, “Collect’Em All,” he is resurrected on a trading card, an aura of light around his head.
“It’s not as sad as it appears to be, or tragic,” Valdez says. “To me, it’s really about  —  and it sounds kind of cheesy — rebirth. It’s just kind of getting back up. People adapt, and people change, and people survive.”
Valdez is at a turning point of sorts. When he graduated from the Rhode Island school in 2000, he returned to San Antonio, planning to stay five years. That time is almost up. He intends to move to Los Angeles in the near future, then to go on to graduate school abroad. He would like to study at Goldsmiths College in London or the Glasgow School of Art, institutions he says are strong in figurative painting. First, however, there is Paris. In September, Valdez will be in his first European show at Parsons School of Design.
“I definitely feel like those crossroads are coming up again, and now it’s time to figure out where I go next,” he says.

Valdez, known for his stylized images of urban youth, boxers and religious icons, considers drawing essential. “I think that drawing is really a necessity and the foundation of all solid work regardless of what you do, even to the extent of conceptual painting or abstract painting or installation work,” he says.
Both Valdez and Ramos work from photographs. For his digital prints, Ramos first draws, comic book-style, with a pencil and finishes with a Sharpie. He then scans the black-and-white image into the computer, adds color and places it on a photographic background. His portrait of Valdez, for example, depicts the 25-year-old artist standing downtown, anonymous buildings rising behind him. The people in Ramos’ earlier digital prints were flat, but lately he has added shading to achieve dimension.
Ramos likens photographs to memory drawings to imagination. He says the art forms in his digital prints allow for greater expression on his part and for a more complex reaction from his audience. “People react and interpret differently when they are (produced) in combination,” he says.
The pairing of photographs and drawings also allows Ramos to concerntrate on the elements of the print he values most.
“It bores me to draw buildings and cars and that kind of thing,” he says. “I’m interested in drawing people.”
For the show, Ramos enlarged drawings until the image became pixellated then re-drew the subject in it’s pixellated form.
Valdez’s approach to his pastel drawings, on the other hand, is more traditional, though he is less concerned with representing a faithful likeness of his subject that with capturing the essence of the person. In his portrait of Ito Romo, which depicts the artist in profile with a single cloud floating on the horizon, Romo sports scratchy looking stubble that isn’t characteristic, but somehow felt right to Valdez.
“I think as an artist you spend so much time on the piece the face starts to become something else,” Valdez says.
Artist Alex Rubio visited Valdez’ studio as the portrait of Rubio — standing in front of a saloon mural of la Virgen de Guadalupe — was in progress.
“I got so used to seeing that face (in the portrait) that seeing him standing next to it, it was sort if weird to see his real face again,” Valdez says. “Because we become so involved in the drawing, that’s what you start to memorize and start to know.”
Though both Valdez and Ramos have drawn and painted people they know, creating portraits is a different matter.
Valdez has depicted his brother in several drawings and paintings, including “Yo Soy-ee Blaxican!” But those works, such as Ramos’ “Secret City” and “Ghost Story” series, “are more about the story,” Valdez says. and the figures are “only there to play character roles. So, this was a lot different for me.”
Valdez and Ramos’ work couldn’t be more different, but both deal with issues of ethnicity and identity in their art and are influenced by pop culture, particularly music — influences shared by many other young artists. However, unlike the previous generation of Mexican American or Chicano artists, young urban artists everywhere are depicting the broader world in which they live, Valdez says.
“I think what is happening now is that artists like (Romos) as well as others are saving, “Well, OK, I’m that,’but’I also love the Beatles; Im also a hip-hopper; I’ve also got Chinese tattoos, Valdez says. “And it’s sort of this mixing pot, and I think a lot of that is becoming evident in a lot of work around town.”