The Velvet Touch : Tijuana Artists Lure Tourists With Colorful Paintings

Jorge Avalos, his face protected from the sun by the brim of his cowboy hat, bounces from his battered Volkswagen van and examines his paintings, spread out along a sidewalk.

“The dogs and the cats that say ‘I love you,’ they sell a lot, so I make a lot of them,” Avalos said, displaying a portrait of a fuzzy, blue-eyed kitten with the love vow emblazoned in a heart next to it. “In this business, if they don’t sell, you stop making them. Can’t afford it otherwise.”

Although he admires Cezanne--”I can get ideas from his paintings”--Avalos has no pretensions about being a great artist. He is, in fact, a velvet painter, one of several dozen who make their living here by painting portraits, landscapes, animals--and whatever else catches their fancy--on velvet. The paintings are hawked on the streets and in shops, mostly to American tourists.

Velvet artists, who thrive in Mexican border cities from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico, represent a tiny minority among the hundreds of street vendors here who cater to tourtists.

Nonetheless, their works, derided by many as garish, are among the highest-profile items sold here, representing to some the quintessence of border raffishness, kitsch and just plain bad taste.

“Ugh,” is a frequent comment made by passers-by as they glimpse the paintings.

Yet people buy them. Every day, Americans can be seen returning to the United States with color portraits on velvet of subjects ranging from Jesus Christ to John Wayne to Fernando Valenzuela, with landscapes ranging from snow-covered peaks to tropical beaches, with paintings of a variety of animals from lions in jungles to unicorns galloping on moonscapes.

There are few Tijuana shops that cater to tourists that don’t have a velvet painting somewhere.

“I think it’s beautiful,” said David Loera of Tijuana, admiring one of Avalos’ landscapes, in a row next to the dog and cat portraits and a picture of Snoopy playing baseball.

“My work is in famous houses all over America,” said Avalos, 44, a bouncy man who works out of his van, generally parked on a street favored by velvet artists near the city’s artisan’s market.

How does he know his work hangs in famous houses?

“That’s what I hear, anyway. I know that people buy it and bring it back to the United States.”

Like many, perhaps most, velvet painters, Avalos has no formal training, although he said he always had natural aptitude. “When I was little I used to draw pictures of Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse and things like that,” he said while standing behind two dozen paintings arranged on the sidewalk.

“Hi,” Avalos said to a potential customer, “You see something you like?”

The man walked away, a bemused grin on his face.

“A slow day,” Avalos said with a shrug.

Businessman First

Like other velvet painters, Avalos considers himself an artist but stresses that he is a businessman first. He proudly points out that some of his better work has appeared in scattered art exhibits. He shows a visitor the rumpled business card from his former Tijuana gallery, which featured “Original Black Velvet Oil Paintings.”

“This is art, but it’s also a business,” he said.

Avalos said he earns between $150 and $200 a week selling paintings for $5 to $15 apiece, depending on size and the amount of effort they took.

On a good day, Avalos said, he can sell as many as 30 paintings but the cost of material, such as frames and paint, consumes a third of his earnings.

“I need to eat. That’s the most important thing,” said Avalos, who is also an avid guitarist and singer of northern Mexican ballads. “Here, you have to be a businessman and an artist at the same time. Look at Vincent van Gogh. He couldn’t sell a painting when he was alive. Now he gets so much. . . . If someone wants art, they have to pay a little more money for it. This is commercial; it’s for making a living.”

Alfredo Rodriguez, a Tijuana velvet painter known for his portraits of movie stars like Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson, agreed that sales are the most important thing. Rodriguez, who paints under the name “Argo,” spoke with envy of acquaintances and friends of friends who have become successful painters.

“I see myself as an artist but I have to make a living, and in Mexico during the crisis, that’s not easy,” said Rodriguez, who sells his work alongside Avalos’ paintings.

Four Hours to Complete

Rodriguez, 40, is proud of his multicolored velvet portraits, which he said take four hours to complete. (They sell for about $25, though the price is always negotiable.) He complains that many American buyers don’t appreciate the amount of labor that goes into the paintings and want to pay next to nothing for them. Rodrigduez also complained that the falling value of the peso and rising cost of living in Mexico have cut into the living he makes from his paintings.

“I like to paint very much,” Rodriguez said, “but if an opportunity arises to do something else--in Mexico or on the other side (the United States)--I would probably take it.”

Like his colleague Rodriguez, Avalos is a native of Colima state on the west coast of Mexico. He has held various jobs--including being a rock-splitter in a construction crew and an English teacher--before becoming a velvet painter. After moving to Tijuana, he sold paintings, among other items, and in the process learned by imitation how they were done. Soon he was turning out his own paintings.

“I watched for a while and I found out it wasn’t that hard,” Avalos said.

Tijuana painters, Avalos notes, are now organized in a union named after the ancient Mexican deity Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent who served as a symbol of death and resurrection, Avalos said.

Tourist Attraction

Avalos can usually be found on the small street near the artisan’s market, his paintings on display on the sidewalk near his parked van. The inside of the van is crammed with painting materials, newspaper clippings, a guitar, and two rare dogs known in Mexico as Tepezcuintles , or, in the United States, as Mexican hairless. The almost furless miniature dogs, whose kind were once part of the diet of Mexican Indians, are a source of fascination to tourists and other visitors.

“They are my loves,” Avalos said.

Avalos rents a small studio not far from where he sell his pictures but he said he does much of his painting on an easel set up on the street near his van. On weekends, when the tourist trade is at its peak, his three children often lend a hand with sales.

On a recent afternoon, a group of onlookers gathered as Avalos painted and rock music blared from a nearby disco.

Working on blue-black velvet applied over a 12-by-18-inch frame, Avalos mixed blue and white paints on a metal plate on a shelf inside his van. For speed, he painted with a wide brush, like those used by house painters.

In five minutes, with broad strokes and working mechanically, Avalos produced a moon-lit, tropical-beach scene with palms swaying in a breeze. A couple of sea gulls are added as a final touch, along with his signature.

“Sometimes I don’t have time to sign them,” he explains.

High Volume

In Avalos’ kind of high-volume business, there is little time for artistic contemplation. Velvet painters routinely whip out dozens of versions of the same painting. Original ideas that have success are quickly copied by other artists, a fact that explains the recurrence of similar works under the signatures of different painters. Ideas can come from newspapers, the movies, television--even a burst of inspiration.

“If something works, we all copy it,” Avalos frankly explained. “If it doesn’t sell, we stop making it.”

Avalos said he plans to keep painting for another couple of years before moving on to some other kind of work. He said he has earned enough to own a house, two cars and care for his family, but added that the long hours he puts in sometimes leave him fatigued.

“I plan to do something different; I can do a lot of things,” he said. “But right now, I need the dollars. I need to eat.”