Four with flair

Though the precise moment is uncertain, the modern Los Angeles public mural was born sometime in 1968 within the concurrent shock waves of era-defining political assassinations, Nixon’s presidential election victory and the Cesar Chavez-led United Farm Workers boycott of table grapes.

“A lot of young artists did murals as guerrilla theater--that kind of youthful energy--and followed an idea that public space belongs to the people,” says Bill Lasarow, president and co-founder of the Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles. “It was oftentimes culturally motivated with a self-conscious rebelliousness and was connected to a lot of minority rights movements.”

By Lasarow’s estimation there were perhaps only 100 murals in Los Angeles by the end of the ‘60s. “Now it varies,” he says. “If you just take murals in exterior spaces, there are 1,000 to 1,500. If you include murals that are in school playgrounds, or if you take legitimate murals that are in interior spaces that have fairly good public access, there may be at least another 1,000 to 2,000.”

The last 35 years have seen a series of developments, kinks and mutations within the city’s mural movement. In 1976, SPARC (Social and Public Art Resource Center), the group behind the Great Wall mural that covers more than half a mile of the Tujunga Wash in the San Fernando Valley, was founded. The Olympic freeway mural appeared in 1984, and the ‘80s saw the rise and evolution of tagging and graffiti, which many considered both indefensible vandalism and a vital component in L.A.’s mural diversity.

Today, many of the artists who gave birth to the movement in the ‘60s continue to work, sharing the city’s collective wall space with the renegades of aerosol art, loose-cannon visionaries, commercial painters and splinter artists whose motives range from personal to political and spiritual. In the following pages, four of Southern California’s leading muralists share their contrasting agendas, methods and sources of inspiration for an often-controversial art form that is consistent only in its diversity.

POP CULTURE VULTURE

“I can duplicate anything that anybody hands me,” says Nick Heflinger, 57, who runs A Better Sign Service out of mid-Wilshire and works at the precise point where sign-writing intersects urban mural art. For the past 14 years, Heflinger has been duplicating record sleeves and promotional flyers with photographic realism on the same south-facing wall at Melrose and Ogden. The details--every stump of stubble on Lenny Kravitz’s chin, every glint of hair gel in Robbie Williams’ Mohawk--are never less than astounding.

Virgin Records owns the space and pays for Heflinger’s copyist talents. “The starving artist thing really doesn’t appeal to me too much,” he says with half a smile. “I like to eat, and enjoy the fruits of my labor.” Heflinger’s assistants have been handpicked from the talent pool of street muralists and graffiti artists or “writers.” “These guys are real artists, some of them are as good as any artist that ever lived,” Heflinger says.The path to the Melrose wall--Heflinger’s longest-standing commission and his “main bread and butter these days”--began in Redondo Beach. “Through grade school and high school I never took any art classes, ever. But I used to pinstripe cars.” In 1966 he joined the Air Force as an illustrator (“mostly charts and graphs”), and in the early ‘70s he learned sign graphics at L.A. Trade-Tech. “I decided signs were a good commercial outlet for doing art. You’ve got to focus and do what the people want you to do.”

After a stint in Ferndale during the ‘70s, where he excelled at mock-Victorian sign writing, Heflinger diversified into home design and restoration. In the late ‘70s he created a flamboyant “art nouveau” exterior for a home on Rodeo Drive for Beverly Hills antique dealer Don O’Neill (still known to passersby as “the Gaudi house”), and in 1994 he restored the fire-damaged ceiling of the Wilshire United Methodist Church. Here he recruited some of the talent that would give his sign-painting an authentic, urban mural edge.

“I worked with a guy named Hex,” says Heflinger. “He had a hip-hop store, and I told him, ‘Why don’t you just lay the spray can down and pick up a brush? People will start calling you an artist instead of a criminal.’ We put 10,000 man-hours into that church and it came out pretty nice.”

Heflinger’s current crew includes Peter Calderon and the Rico Brothers, Albert and Anthony. “Peter Calderon is a very talented guy: he can mix colors like it was going out of style. Albert I’m trying to mentor into the business; he went to the same trade school that I did. His brother Anthony is still in the graffiti game a little bit. Graffiti, I’m not all for it,” Heflinger adds. “But I can appreciate the guys who are really good. I can see their potential, and it’s unlimited.”

GRAFFITI DRIFTER

“I have it in my heart,” says the 26-year-old artist who goes by the name Resek. “This is what I’m here to do, it’s part of my destiny. I’ve been beat up, knocked out, shot at--I can’t stop. I know it’s something I’m supposed to be doing, because I know I’m not crazy and it doesn’t give me any materialistic gain. I’m not benefiting from it, man.”

Resek speaks softly, with an intense conviction, about his street art. “Graffiti taught me how to eat, how to live every day. If you’re a [graffiti] writer you can survive anywhere. You can go anywhere in the world and get by, know how to get from point A to point B.”

Inspired by innovative underground graffiti crews such as the WCA--West Coast Artists--Resek quickly graduated from “tagging” (the art of the signature) to more elaborate painting and was impressed by the bonds of community that still underscore the street muralist’s sometimes illegal pursuit. “I saw something that was beautiful. People were doing something for their community or for others,” he says. “I feel like a lot of people aren’t humble and don’t give back to the community. The reason the community’s all messed up right now is a lot of the older writers didn’t bring up the new generation.” And some of the new writers, he feels, have turned to crime.

Resek is self-taught and highly dedicated. “I wanted to stop writing. I tried but I couldn’t. I’m addicted no matter what. I’m always going to be walking down the street seeing that landmark.” From his perspective, it’s not about commissions. “If I’m mad at the world, I go paint, or do a song. I talk about my experiences in the system, talk about the resistance to society, the system, the government. I see myself as a freedom fighter.”

Los Angeles is Resek’s home, but he likes to travel, to give his work a national dimension. “I’ve been all around the United States and I can go anywhere in the world and feel at home. That’s part of the game. I paint my name, advertise my music, promote my brothers. I make sure all my former soldiers are remembered.”

Resek has spray-painted memorials to SK8, a.k.a. Aaron Seth Anderson, the street muralist who founded the graffiti crew CBS (Cali Bomb Squad) and was killed by a train in 1993; and to DJ/musician Rob One, birth name Robert Cory, who died of cancer in 2000. “He was a big hip-hop part of my life,” says Resek, whose works of remembrance are perhaps the strongest indication of his communal motives. “You’ve got to be able to take care of yourself. You can be solo or you can be in a crew and your crew can help you go through your trials and tribulations. Graffiti is good and bad. It can eat you up and spit you out the next day, or it can really benefit you. Graffiti is its own world with no rules and no laws.”

SPIRITUAL CALLING

“I’m a classical Christian,” says Kent Twitchell, 61, one of Los Angeles’ most celebrated muralists. “My heroes are probably the Michelangelos and Raphaels, Rembrandts and Rubenses. They painted to the glory of God. That was the impetus behind their work. It doesn’t mean everything I do is a Christian tract. How boring. I do it because it’s the only thing I know how to do, either that or watch TV all day. That’s the gift that God has given me.”

Twitchell cut his teeth as an artist in the Air Force, stationed in London, England, in the early ‘60s. “I got to go to Stonehenge, the National Gallery, and being among that stuff was the germination. In England, every minute there are these dramatic changes of the sky and the sea. I actually got sick to my stomach because it was so intense. I had never seen tree trunks of such dark and vivid greens. It was wonderful but more intense than I had ever experienced in my life.”

In 1971, Twitchell painted Steve McQueen on the side of a house on Union Street and followed it with a portrait of character actor Strother Martin (“Cool Hand Luke,” “The Wild Bunch”) at Fountain and Kingsley. Martin saw the mural, liked it and phoned Twitchell to offer his thanks. The men became friends until Martin’s death in 1980. “I would go back to the Strother Martin mural and add pieces to it, take pieces off,” he says of his technique. “You didn’t know what it was like from one week to the next. We called it ‘stream of consciousness,’ the same way Paul Simon used to write his songs.”

By the late ‘70s, Twitchell was pursuing his notion of placing celebrity portraiture within a more overtly spiritual context. In 1977, he painted what initially appeared to be a straightforward homage to household TV actors on a wall at the Otis College of Design. He depicted Clayton Moore, the Lone Ranger; Jan Clayton, the kids’ mother from the “Lassie” series; and Billy Gray, who played Bud Anderson Jr. on the 1950s show “Father Knows Best.” Each figure wore a white lab coat and Twitchell called the piece “Holy Trinity With the Virgin.”

Another of Twitchell’s figurative spiritual works was commissioned for the 1984 Olympics, at 7th Street on the Harbor Freeway. “There was a lot of talk about terrorism during the Olympics, so I painted these two people looking through their open hands, kind of the Southwest Indian symbol for no weapons. It had a multiple meaning. And it’s known as the 7th Street Altarpiece. It’s like Christ and Mary Magdalene looking across the freeway at each other.”

Shortly after the 1994 Northridge earthquake, when his studio was destroyed, Twitchell moved to Northern California, but he remains a fixture on L.A.’s muralist scene. He is currently working on a project at Hillside Memorial Park, a Jewish cemetery in Culver City.

HEART OF THE MATTER

“I paint for love,” says Hector Ponce, standing beneath his behemoth-sized Beatles portrait on the corner of Santa Monica and Wilton. “I open my heart for the people. If the people want to paint over my mural, it’s no problem. I can paint another. I paint anything, many kinds of murals: political, romantic, anything.”

Ponce, 50, was raised in El Salvador, where his mother told him he didn’t have to go to school because he was a “born painter.” For six years he lived in Mexico. He moved to California in 1981 and now operates a traditional sign-painting business out of the Valley. Each of his murals is self-financed by his day job--painting signs. “If you have a wall, I can paint a mural for you,” he says. “How much? Nothing. I have to use my own paint and own equipment, thousands of dollars. But I don’t care, I want to paint.”

The range of characters drawn large by Ponce is impressive, and despite what often appears to be a strong political motive, their selection is based primarily on some degree of empathy. “Many people ask me why I paint Marcos,” he says, referring to his portrait of the masked leader of Mexico’s Zapatista National Liberation Army. “He is like me, a good boy. He befriended the farmers in Mexico.”

The Marcos portrait appeared, albeit briefly, alongside one of Emiliano Zapata on a restaurant next to the Ramada Hotel on 6th Street at Westlake. It was painted out after protests from local businesses, who feared that a bright dose of revolutionary politics could jeopardize their trade.

A similar affinity for his subject inspired Ponce to immortalize Monica Lewinsky as “Santa Monica” on Western and 21st, next to the Santa Monica Freeway. “She is a good girl and her father is Salvadoran like me. And Salvadoran blood is hot. She represents sex.”

On the eve of the invasion of Iraq, Ponce found a newspaper photograph showing an American soldier in full battle dress kissing a woman goodbye. “If she says goodbye to him it’s goodbye forever. If he comes back, he comes back very sick and crazy. The problem is nobody likes that kind of picture. In April I started that picture on a building, but the landlord said ‘no.’ I don’t want these soldiers to die. I love them.” But eventually Ponce was able to paint his five-story mural, “The Last Kiss,” on a building on the corner of Westlake and 7th.

Ponce, downplaying the political dimension of his art, hopes that his murals have a positive impact on Hollywood for no other reason than his art is conspicuous and free of charge. “Many tourists come from all around the world because they want to know Hollywood, but they see drunk people and dirty streets. This is not Hollywood. If I paint Hollywood, the people can be happy and they don’t have to go to Universal Studios.”

Often, he says, he wakes up tired. “In my dreams I paint murals. Nobody understands what I think. They say, ‘That man may be on drugs or crazy.’ Those people are crazy, I’m not crazy.”