ORANGE ARTIST’S GRANT APPROVED

Emigdio Vasquez doesn’t like meetings. Nevertheless, the 46-year-old painter was in the audience last week when the California Arts Council convened in Costa Mesa to consider and approve grant applications.

Four hours later, Vasquez gave up. “They didn’t announce anything,” he said. “I went home kind of discouraged.”

But Vasquez left too soon. He learned later that the Sacramento-based state agency that supports artists working in schools, communities or social institutions under its artists-in-residence program had awarded him a grant of $9,000.

Of 10 Orange County artists who applied for artist-in-residence grants, Vasquez, an Orange resident, was the only one selected.

The council last week awarded about $1.67 million in residency grants to 180 artists throughout the state. The program constitutes about 14% of the Arts Council’s overall budget of $11.69 million for 1985-86. (Additional Arts Council grants, to organizations and touring programs, will be awarded at council meetings in Sacramento in late August and September.) Vasquez will become artist-in-residence at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana. Starting in October, he will conduct Saturday painting classes at the museum and, aided by volunteers, will create an 8-by-125-foot mural depicting the history of Orange County on the museum’s east wall.

Although Vasquez explained his project in a lengthy application for the grant, the artist said he doesn’t know what scenes he will paint.

“I really haven’t sat down and started some sketches,” he said in an interview earlier this week. “I have to do a lot of reading, pore over a lot of books to get ideas.”

Vasquez said he plans to do research for this mural the same way he has researched seven other historical murals that he has painted over the past eight years for the City of Anaheim.

A former construction worker who has been painting since his teens, Vasquez calls himself “a super-realist.”

In addition to painting murals that depict Anaheim in 1854, showing prominent citizens of the day growing grapes and surveying land, Vasquez uses oils and acrylic to depict contemporary images on canvas: people grocery shopping or “hanging around bars,” scenes he describes as “life in the barrio.” Some of these works have been displayed in the Goez Gallery, a Los Angeles gallery that showcases Chicano artists.

Tere Romo, who directs the Arts Council’s artists-in-communities program, said the council selected Vasquez because members were impressed by slides of his paintings as well as his murals.

“They really liked his artistic work,” she said. “And they liked the design of the project, where the public was going to be actively involved (in helping paint the mural). And they liked the sponsor; the Bowers Museum had had an artist-in-residence before.”

Navajo painter Paul Apodaca, the current Bowers’ artist-in-residence who will continue in that capacity under a different program, helped Vasquez write his grant application and will be helping him with the mural.

“We want to create something monumental,” Apodaca said.

Vasquez said he planned to spend September working on the design of the mural and would start painting workshops and possibly the mural itself in October. It will probably take 10 months to finish the mural, Vasquez said.