My friend Jimmy O'Rourke is creating quite a stir with his piece originally named Beergin...which I think is funny. Apparently a lot of people don't! You can read the article at the end of this post and read some pissed off comments. There were lots more comments, but they have been scourged from public consumption. My friends call Jimmy "Eldon" based on the Murphy Brown painter who never leaves. Why, you ask? Jimmy is painting a mural on my bedroom walls based on my drapery fabric. It was supposed to take a month...it's been 2 years. I don't mind, he keeps me company and he likes my dogs...what's not to like...he also makes a great party guest.Jimmy will discuss his creation in an "Art Talk" at 7 p.m. tonight at the Hal Marus gallery.
EL PASO - Look around artist Jimmy O'Rourke's crammed garage near Burges High School, and you'll see a 5-foot-tall Mardi Gras harlequin's head in one corner; leaping leprechauns all over the place; a drawing table bearing an "I Love Teaching" sticker; a couple of plastic folding tables with poster board and slick, colorful magazine pages scattered around; and a wall filled with whimsical pen-and-ink drawings of belly dancers, banditos (and banditas) and a guitar-playing, sombr! ero-wearing guitar player.
It's that fertile imagination - goosed by a little deadline pressure - that gave the artist a unique vision of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
So he created it. Out of cardboard Budweiser boxes, scraps of wood and more than a dozen beer and pop cans. Miller High Life containers became the radiant light around her head. Shreds of shaped Bud, Bud Light, Red Bull, Coca-Cola, Coke Zero, Tecate and Fanta Orange cans are formed into her robe, shoulders and arms.
"I wanted to use the logos and colors to incorporate the feel of a painting," O'Rourke said of his aluminum medium.
His Guadalupe's face and hands are painted cardboard, made from a case of Budweiser. "I wanted her face to be like a Picasso, where she's looking at you and to the side," O'Rourke said.
O'Rourke knows the mixture of cerveza and Catholicism titled "La Reyna" - which is part of the "El Paso Pop Art" exhibit opening Thursday at the Hal Marcus Gallery - could offend some devout Catholics, but the 45-year-old artist, a Catholic himself, said that wasn't his design.
He wanted to create something iconic and local out of recyclable materials.
"I made the Virgin Mary out of beer cans. Upsetting anybody was the last thing I wanted to do," he said. "So I ask the public to please excuse my medium. I didn't intend to offend anyone."
If anything, his work, two months in the making, was meant to "reflect the spirituality of this lady," taking an image found commonly around here - not just at local churches, but on car window stickers, grocery store votive candles, wall murals, even tattoos - and create her out of reusable materials. "You can't go to Home Depot to get that," he said of his unusual palette.
Plus, O'Rourke said, he remembers vividly seeing an image of the Virgin Mary next to a beer sign in a local store not long ago.
Such irony perfectly fits the spirit of pop art, a movement that started in Britain in the 1950s and spread to America in the 1960s, celebrating pop culture by elevating common commercial images into fine art. Think Andy Warhol and his colored celebrity photos and Campbell's Soup cans, and Roy Lichtenstein's comic book panels.
The Marcus Gallery exhibit is designed to celebrate some of the Sun City's most familiar images, from the star on the mountain to the alligators in San Jacinto Plaza, in a kitschy sort of way.
"I think of it as bright, iconic, making something commercial," said Kelly Foss, Marcus Gallery manager and one of the artists in the show. "Pop art uses elements of pop culture, such as magazines, movies, pop music, even bottles and cans, and makes them into art. In our sense, it takes elements of popular El Paso culture and makes it into commercial art."
Gallery owner Marcus, who broke from his traditional medium of painting to create a digital image of a stop sign, said the invitational exhibit was designed to break from the norm, bring some fresh blood into the gallery sphere, and add to the ongoing dialogue of what the Sun City's identity is.
"What we're trying to do as a community is find something we can latch on to, that's ours, unique," said Marcus, whose gallery features only works by local artists and includes a room devoted to early El Paso artists.
"It's cool. It's an image no one else has. We're still searching for that type of thing. Hopefully, through the arts we'll be able to identify with something that's pop, El Paso, clicky, something that puts us on the map. We're all looking for that."
The stop sign he created was a chance to do something different. "I've never done anything like this, putting metal on plastic, not painting. It's all digital photography," Marcus said. "It challenged me. I didn't want to paint a picture. I've been painting since I was 15.
"But people have been going, 'What? That's not art!' "
He's especially excited about some of the newer or unheralded artists who are participating in the show:
"Blackbird" comic creator Rudy Vasquez contributed a black-and-white comic panel of his Blackbird character with the star on the mountain behind him.
New York transplant Ronnie Dukes combines political commentary and Fort Bliss-inspired imagery in his cartoons.
Mark Rojas created a Sunset Heights street sign that's classic pop art, if there is such a term.
"It's a real good opportunity to see some stuff by people we don't even know," Marcus said.
But there are people they do know, too, including painter Candy Mayer, who created a variation on Robert Indiana's iconic Love sculpture in Philadelphia, positioning the name "El Paso" in stacked, block letters over local images. Also in the show are Bob Adams, Arturo Enriquez, Vallarie Enriquez, Paul Hoylen Jr., Lisa Matta-Brown, Daniel Padilla, Tony Padilla, Francisco Romero, El Paso Times artist and blogger Keith Allyn Spencer, Corinne Abeyta Spinnler and Ruben Valenzuela.
"Pretty much every artist is being stretched," gallery manager Foss said of the challenge these creative types willingly accepted.
Several of the artists will discuss their creations in an "Art Talk" at 7 p.m. June 25 at the gallery.
The show is augmented by "Making Downtown Pop," about a dozen photos by local photographer Mark Paulda, who's known for finding unusual images in familiar Downtown landmarks. Paulda will lead a walking tour of some of those landmarks from 10 a.m. to noon June 27.
Marcus calls O'Rourke, who recently won an award from the El Paso Independent School District for his work as a volunteer art tutor at Cielo Vista Elementary School, as the guy to go to for the unusual.
"James is kind of a wild-man type of guy. ... His thing is really construction. He's the type of guy that, if you have a bar mitzvah with a basketball theme or an out-of-the-ocean theme and you need an 8-foot whale, who you gonna call? Jimmy O'Rourke," Marcus said with a laugh.
O'Rourke, a 1983 Burges High School grad who studied at the Art Institute of Dallas, said his 10 years creating props, scenery and even Willie Nelson stage designs in Dallas factors into his work. So when he got the call to create something for the "El Paso Pop Art" exhibit, he brought his own touch to the proceedings, drawing some inspiration from a Red Bull-sponsored can art contest he entered in 2006.
He dubbed an early version of the Virgin construction the "Beergin."
"When I'm thinking of pop art, I think of the old guys, like Warhol logos and cans, like the tomato soup can," O'Rourke said. "I wanted to bring that aspect into the work, but make it different, too."
Posts
