Flashy Neon Sure Lit Up Their Lives

A neon romance? Well, sort of.

Ceramist Susie Ketchum and art-major-turned-schoolteacher George Viramontes were brought together by art. Although it was in their pre-neon periods, a shared love of neon and other things artistic provides one of the bonds of their relationship.

Viramontes had been collecting Ketchum’s works for years before meeting her in 1985; he dusted off his own artistic skills after a long hiatus when together they signed up for a “Neon Design & Technique” class taught by Museum of Neon Art founder Lili Lakich.

“I’m not a veteran with neon, but I’ve always been interested in it,” said Ketchum, 32. “I saw Lili’s retrospective--’Neon Lovers Glow in the Dark’--and it piqued my interest, so I wanted to take a class. It really surprised me when she said she was a fan of my work.”

Ketchum, who supports herself full time from sales of her ceramics, paid her fee for the class with one of her “skeleton plates”--black ceramic plates adorned with skulls and skeletons.

In fact, one of the two neon mirrors she is showing at La Luz de Jesus Gallery on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles was created as a project for the class: “I haven’t played with it that much, but I like the qualities it has. It gives the mirrors sort of a carnival feel.”

While Ketchum’s plans with neon include incorporating it into architectural design projects, Viramontes’ piece de resistance for the same class came straight from the heart.

Before Viramontes designed and built his eye-catching piece, it had been 10 years since he had done anything significant with the art he studied in the early ‘70s at UC Irvine. Titled “Cisco & Diablo (or The Cisco Kid Was Really My Father),” his sculpture features a black-and-white rendering of the Cisco Kid and his horse on sheet metal, accented in neon. Green neon forms a bridle, orange neon traces Diablo’s nose, the brim of Cisco’s sombrero is circled in red neon, while a blue neon strip runs the length of Cisco’s left arm. When switched on, it lights up the dining room and living room of the house the artists share in Santa Ana.

“The Cisco Kid saved my self-esteem as a kid,” said Viramontes, 40. “There were all these TV shows like Roy Rogers and Wild Bill Hickock (starring Anglo actors) that all the kids watched. But when the Cisco Kid came along, that was really important to me, since my grandparents were from Mexico, and I’m a Chicano.

“As a child, my father was my real hero,” he said. “I didn’t realize the physical resemblance between him and the Cisco Kid until I blew up the photo--then I saw how similar they were.

“I did something very traditional. . . . It was important for me to tell my father what it was all about. He’s 73 and a man of very few words. About 6 months after I showed it to him, he finally hemmed and hawed something that told me how much it meant to him.”

Viramontes teaches bilingual arts to grades 4-6 at Oak View School in Huntington Beach in “a very low-income neighborhood, with a big Mexican and Vietnamese population. . . . Nobody knows it,” he said with a grin, “but I am an artist--I just express it in the classroom.”