Avid Art Collectors Find Latino Painter Has a Lot on His Platters

When he failed at acting, singing and bullfighting as a youth, Miguel Paredes, now 34, of Huntington Beach turned to art and, more recently, to collector plates. Now his original paintings of innocent childhood moments have brought him a measure of notice.

“What I like about my art on plates,” said Paredes, who was selling pencil sketches at age 7 in Mexico City, “is the advertisement I get from them. It puts me in the eyes of the public so people will get to know me.”

The public he refers to are the estimated 5 million plate collectors nationwide who find art on a plate can be not only an investment but also an affordable way to own limited edition artwork. Art on a plate can cost $37.50, instead of the $6,000 Paredes might charge for a portrait.

“My work is in everything,” said Paredes, during an interview in his second story studio overlooking the ocean. That “everything” includes nudes, portraits, murals and sculpture he creates from live models or from pictures he snaps himself, sometimes on the adjacent beach. Paredes said he has done a number of murals on ceilings of Orange County homes.

The handsome Latino artist feels most at ease painting older people and young children. He said: “What better is there to see than a child’s face.” He said he once tracked down an old man to a market parking lot and urged him to pose for a portrait. “He had an interesting face,” said Paredes, a bachelor and a self-taught artist.

Mostly, young children are “his forte” for the plates, said David Armstrong, president of a Pomona-based porcelain company that features Paredes’ work on many of its plates. The most popular scenes on plates for collectors--70% of whom are women--are children or a combination of a mother and a child.

Parades said he finds “beauty in everyone I see.” He often spends hours with his camera documenting expressions of people he meets, then sketching a composite that he later reproduces in oil.

Paredes was featured at the recent fourth annual California Plate and Collectible Show in Pasadena, where two of his childhood paintings were displayed. They will be part of a four-plate collection.

Rosalinda Roberts, 28, a UC Irvine graduate student, received a $500 award from the American Epilepsy Society for best manuscript related to epilepsy by a student or postgraduate. Presented at the society’s annual meeting in New York, the paper was titled “Increased Numbers of GABAergic Neurons Occur in the Inferior Colliculus of an Audiogenic Model of Genetic Epilepsy.”

Kevin Doud, 24, of Irvine is a pretty good amateur tennis player, able to handle most any weekend player. And then he walked to the court and out popped Ivan Lendl, the top-rated tennis player in the world.

Here’s how it happened: Doud and several others paid $100 to the Big Brothers/Big Sisters of Orange County for the opportunity to play Lendl. “It was a chance of a lifetime,” he said of his five-minute match, which helped raise $5,000 for the group.

“We rallied with one another,” said Doud, himself a Big Brother, “but I managed to hit a couple by him on the base line,” no doubt an experience he will relate forever.

Doud preserved the moment by making a video recording of it.

Imagine, hitting one by Lendl.

A less savory charity event was held recently in Barstow, where L.A. Ram players Jim Collins, Johnnie Johnson, Russ Bollinger and Duvall Love were overmatched in their exhibition with a world-class spit team.

“It really does sound disgusting, doesn’t it,” said spit-off spokesman Don V. Tucker. He noted, however, that $20,000 was raised through the Rams contest and other events in nearby Calico Ghost Town.

“The Rams really didn’t stand a chance,” Tucker added. “First of all, they were trying to out-spit Randy Ober,” the Guinness record holder at 51 feet, 3 3/4 inches.

And even though accuracy was a factor in the final score, which, mercifully, was not released, the Rams failed miserably.

Oh, yuck!

Acknowledgments: Eighth-graders Harvey Aguilar and Christina Sanchez of Old Mission School were named King and Queen of the March 19 St. Joseph’s Day fiesta at Mission San Juan Capistrano. Family therapist Lulu Diggs, of Orange (not Biggs as originally printed) was named to state Board of Behavioral Science Examiners.