Family’s Peru Roots Tint Art Differently : Father Strives to Bring Out Subtleties, Son Goes for Colorful Passion of Murals

Guillermo Acevedo sat in Acevedo Gallery, surrounded by his art--delicate yet intense drawings, finely rendered and detailed paintings. Whether they are of a Navajo woman or a tile rooftop, they reflect Acevedo’s interpretation of the human spirit.

The gallery bearing his name is owned by his son--who uses the name Mario Torero--and Mario’s wife, Rita, a former associate professor of literature at San Diego State University.

It was a hot day and Acevedo’s collar was tucked inside his shirt. His gray hair was tied back--only one wispy strand flew free on one side.

The Peruvian artist first caused a stir in San Diego’s art world in the ‘60s with his drawings of the dignified, noble faces and of the expressive hands of the Peruvian Indians. Even his drawings of San Diego’s old houses, the waterfront, telephone poles and garbage cans, were executed with the same care and feeling.

The lines of the objects, as well as the people he drew, recorded human feeling, because they are, after all, as Acevedo has said, “artifacts of man,” and it is humanity which the now 66-year-old Acevedo has always been interested in capturing.

“I am an observer,” he said, “and have been since I was a small child in kindergarten and observed the other children hitting, playing.” He would stand back from the others he said, and “look and look and look. My life is pure observation.”

This sense of aloneness and separation had deep roots in Acevedo’s childhood. “In 1879,” he said, “there was a war between Chile and Peru. My family had been from Chile, and later they lived in Peru (Acevedo was the youngest of 10 children. He and a sister were the only children from his family born in Peru). There were always signs--’Chileans, go home.’ This put a mark on me.

“(As a child) I was always thinking, reflecting, not taking it so hard--knowing it was a condition of being human.

“I am a natural observer. If you look naturally, you look with both eyes. You look with care, not with love. It is impersonal. I never learned this. I just knew it.

“And when I read Carlos Castaneda, I understood Don Juan, and I also knew the six keys (to knowledge, expressed in the book ‘Journey to Ixtlan’).”

Acevedo was born in Arequipa, 8,000 feet above sea level in the south of Peru. “Two (Peruvian) presidents came from Arequipa--also poets--and it looks like everyone is an artist there. And the food,” he kisses his fingers, “is the best.”

The son of an architect and a mother who was “inclined to the theater, very sensitive,” Acevedo ran a successful commercial art business and studio for 25 years in Lima, before coming to San Diego in 1959 on a tuna boat with a friend. Though he had hoped to go to the East Coast, the trip to San Diego was financially easier.

“On the second day, I discovered it is like my native place--eternal spring.

“I was born sad, melancholic. I came to the U.S. in love with the Depression. I’d read so much about the jazz music and the gangsters. I was in love with the idea of New York, Chicago, Detroit. I didn’t know then that San Diego existed.”

Once in San Diego, he worked for various companies as a commercial artist and started exhibiting his work on weekends. It is only natural that some of his first San Diego studies were of tuna fishermen (Acevedo works in ink, acrylic and grease pencil and does lithographs).

“I met a Bolivian artist who told me about a ‘starving artists’ show. No work could be priced over $10. I took my drawings to the show, and in two days I made as much as I could in a week at my job. This was the beginning. I quit work and started exhibiting in galleries and with other artists.”

Noted San Diego artist Frederic Whitaker was impressed with Acevedo and wrote a cover story about him in the September, 1969, issue of “American Artist.” This brought Acevedo national attention.

Today, Acevedo divides his time between his San Francisco studio and San Diego, but since 1980 he has lived primarily in San Francisco. He is planning to spend more time in San Diego and open a studio with his son here.

In the late ‘60s Acevedo took a trip to New Mexico to exhibit and became enthralled with Indians.

“I discovered the beautiful Navajo people, and the atmosphere.”

After this trip, he did his now well-known print of “Solitario,” a lone, slim Indian man with a broad hat, gazing out toward distant mesas, surrounded by white space. “He is the aloof, lonely one--a man of vast land, alone, a gypsy.”

Acevedo, who said he has been influenced by Toulouse-Lautrec and by Ben Shahn, who also spent time intensely observing life, spent more time in Taos, visiting, photographing and sketching the Indians. From his observation and drawings, he has continued to represent the downtrodden.

This sensitivity to the Indians has led Acevedo to become involved with the forced relocation of the Navajo people at Big Mountain, Ariz. His recent retrospective at the gallery was titled “In the Spirit of Peace” and dedicated to the Big Mountain relocation resistance effort.

Acevedo and Torero share a love of art and a need to create, but also a need to record the human condition, to link art with people and the community, and with political causes.

Torero was born Guillermo Acevedo in Lima but has chosen to use his mother’s maiden name of Torero. He learned about the life of artists while still a child when he joined and listened to his father’s Bohemian friends talk about philosophy, politics and art.

The boy showed artistic skill by the age of 10 and soon was earning money selling tile paintings of bullfighters to tourists.

“By the time I came to the United States at age 13, I had enough money to buy a bike,” Torero said.

Torero is perhaps best known in San Diego as the painter of the 40-by-60-foot “Eyes of Picasso” mural, which graced the southern side of the Community Arts Building in the Gaslamp Quarter in 1978 and was destroyed by a wrecking ball when Horton Plaza was built.

For a short time, the dramatic penetrating eyes gazed out upon the city, “questioning us, asking us--what are you going to do--about art, and about people?” Torero said.

While Acevedo’s art often expresses an introverted, intimate communication with life, Torero’s art is extroverted, full of color, power and often outrageous emotional intensity.

Torero said has painted six or seven murals in San Diego, including one on the lower level of San Diego State University’s Aztec Center, another at the Logan Heights branch of the San Diego Library and one of Martin Luther King Jr. at Christ the King Catholic Church on 32nd Street.

Torero was one of the major forces in painting the Centro Cultural de la Raza in Balboa Park’s Ford Building and the murals in Barrio Logan’s Chicano Park.

A mural at Grossmont Center was torn down when the shopping mall was enlarged. But destruction and rebirth is a theme of Torero’s. His SDSU mural depicts just that. Skeletons break apart and fall in disorder near the bottom, as visionary figures rise above--held in balance by a figure representing the cosmic future, the new person born from struggle and death.

By doing mural art, Torero taps back into his Incan roots. Mural art stems from the classic American civilizations and precedes the Spanish conquistadores. Murals renew ties with the ancient, artistic ancestry and with more recent muralists, as well--Orozco, Siqueiros, Tamayo.

Torero has become one of California’s best known muralists and has painted murals in numerous other areas of the United States, including St. Paul, Minn.; Portland, Ore.; Corpus Christi, Tex., Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles. There are several in the latter two.

Rita Sanchez was a single mother of two girls and teaching at SDSU when she met Mario Torero in 1978. She had put together a border conference on Third World arts and literature, and Torero was a presenter.

“He gave a statement on arts in San Diego and used three slide projectors,” Rita Acevedo said. He was very dramatic--verbal and flamboyant. My sister said, later, ‘You only married him because he wore a cape!’ (Torero used to often wear a Peruvian pancho.) Mario woke everybody up.”

Rita Acevedo had been involved with the Chicano movement. “We brought to each other more than the feeling of oppression and loneliness--but a new consciousness and identity.”

She laughed. “I saw a line once that sounds like us, ‘The couple who do socially conscious art together, stay together.’ ”

The couple now has two children, Lucia, 8, and Pablo, 6. He is named for Picasso, Casals and Neruda. Torero also has 3 children by an earlier marriage. Lucia, was coincidentally born on the day he finished “Eyes of Picasso,” and Pablo was born on the 10th anniversary of Chicano Park Day, April 22, 1980.

Soon after Pablo’s birth, the couple had come to a crisis in their marriage. She was exhausted from teaching at SDSU, while also working on her Ph.D. at UCSD. After spending five years in the program, she dropped out after Pablo’s birth).

Torero had spent effort trying to make a success of El Topo gallery in Old Town and the Acevedo Gallery in the Gaslamp Quarter in 1976 with his father. Later, with his wife, he had opened Solart Gallery in Golden Hill and in 1980 moved Solart to 10th Avenue and E Street downtown. Solart still exists as a community cultural center with ongoing art festivals, music, projects in the street and video programs.

In 1981, Rita Acevedo took a year off to care for her two babies. She and her husband were unemployed.

“Either Mario would go back to street art, and I’d go back to the university, and we’d break up--or we needed to create something new.

“By 1982,” she said, “an incredible experience happened. Mario had a spiritual vision. He is that kind of person. He saw a path of death if he didn’t take a new direction and come to God in a positive sense. He chose instead a path of light, forgiveness, healing, rejuvenation. We both started crying, and we came to the most incredible peace we’d ever had.

“Then, the miracles started happening to us. The gallery which we opened in 1984 has special significance. It’s not something we ran after. It was part of a series of events that brought positive energy into our lives.

“We got married again--this time in church (Christ the King Catholic Church), with family and friends. Mario told the whole congregation the story.

“Now, we are open to the journey in faith that Mario started. We are trying to make a living with what we believe in our hearts. We want to show art that identifies with dignity and the culture of people. We’re more than business people. We’re educators, curators--especially with my background, I feel this.”

Guillermo Acevedo goes back to Peru often, “I have to go at last once a year,” he said. “Lima is primitive but modern. It is behind 50 years in thinking, . . . but what I get from the air, the earth, the atmosphere, adds to me.”

Torero, on the other hand, says he’s been back only once, at age 23. “I made a promise. I’ll go back some day with an art exhibit.”

Torero is changing, he says, moving from the cultural movement to a spiritual movement.

“As Incans, Mayans or Indians, we pay attention to the cosmos. We look at the land. We feel the elements. We are in close contact with the stars.

“Ultimately, what is important is to save the Earth. But how can we save the world unless we save ourselves? It all comes back to me and Rita--developing love--our encounter as a man and woman. And we’ve been doing our homework--our love work--and we’ll never be finished with that.

“This all started with a dream, and the dream is not dead. What gets you out of disillusionment is the dream.”

Besides having a dream of one day re-creating “Picasso’s Eyes,” Torero also wants to do a mural titled “Of the Human Spirit,” on the new convention center.

“It’s only a possibility,” he hastened to add. “I haven’t even proposed it yet.” In the design, a figure in the center, representing, “a spirit of human kindness with no nationality,” holds a ball of light in each outstretched hand, as other figures representing all cultures and nationalities fill the background.

“Once upon a time, my father had an urge to change the world. As he became older, he became tired and reclusive. He had his own struggle, and has been a gypsy, almost a hermit. Now, we’ve come back together. We plan to be together, rather than isolated.”

Guillermo Acevedo is now temporarily back in San Francisco, but his words and spirit still echo in the gallery:

“I don’t go for frontiers--of color--or for prejudice or discrimination--except I discriminate against insensitive people.”

Then, his eyes took on a look that rivaled Picasso’s--a challenging look that seemed to seek understanding for his struggle and dream, and for those of others--a look to challenge others to see as deeply as he does.