Laguna Hills Artist Shown Everywhere but Orange County : Art: Although muralist Willie Herron’s works are internationally known--and are evident here--he’s never had an exhibit in a local museum or gallery.

Willie Herron has painted some of Los Angeles’ foremost murals and has shown his art in that city’s top institutions as well as in Europe, South America and Mexico. Yet Herron, who has lived in Laguna Hills for two years and worked mostly in Orange County for 10, has never been shown in an Orange County museum or gallery.

To see Herron’s work locally, you’ll have to drop in at an El Torito restaurant or check out such Newport Beach locales as the Sheraton Hotel and the recently renovated Lido Cinema.

But the artist isn’t complaining.

Herron, who will be one of several Orange County artists featured in September’s Los Angeles Festival, has, since high school, supported his fine art and himself with jobs in commercial graphic art and design. That’s why he moved from East Los Angeles--where he achieved prominence in the early 1970s painting powerful symbols of the barrio--to the upscale community where he lives with his wife and three young children.

“I realized I was getting so much (commercial) work over here, it’d be easier to live here,” he said in a recent interview. “Traffic from 1979 to 1988 became almost unbearable.”

Herron, whose bold, energetic murals (about 15 are still intact around Los Angeles) and paintings often deal with racial tension and oppression, first worked commercially in Orange County in 1979. That year, the Irvine-based El Torito restaurant chain hired him to illustrate its Southwestern-themed menus and advertising logos, he said.

After that, things snowballed. He has been commissioned by Sheraton Hotels to paint several interior murals to fit a nautical theme at their Newport Beach hotel, for example. More recently, he designed interior murals for the Art Deco Lido Cinema in Newport Beach, which was renovated for its 50th anniversary in November.

Co-owner of Herron Roberts Design, a Laguna Hills commercial graphics studio, Herron, 37, says the lack of exposure for his fine art in Orange County galleries and museums is really his own doing.

Since moving here, he has shown his paintings at the Acevedo Gallery in San Diego, a city where he had friends and connections in the gallery arena. But he has not approached galleries here (he says he believes that most are too lightweight for his “violent” imagery) or the Newport Harbor Art Museum or Laguna Art Museum because, he said, he is busy with his commercial design work and isn’t familiar with the local art scene.

“As far as my fine art is concerned, I’m mainly concentrating in San Diego because I really have no connections with Orange County museums,” he said.

And although he wouldn’t mind starting a relationship with the area’s two major museums, he isn’t bothered that it hasn’t happened yet. “I’ve spent primarily all my life in East L.A., and three or four generations of my family are from East L.A.,” said Herron, who also was a founding member of Asco (Spanish for nausea or loath ), an Anti-Establishment, East L.A. performance group. “I’m just sort of a pioneer in Orange County.”

Nor does Herron believe that the abundance of commercial work he does demeans his standing as a fine artist.

“I have a lot of different sides,” said the artist, one of 10 commissioned to paint a mural along Los Angeles freeways for the 1984 Olympic Games. “I don’t perform in one certain way all the time, and I get very bored doing the same thing. And I’ve always relied on (income from) my commercial work to eat and to have a roof over my head. My fine art and public art have not supported me. I use (those media) as a voice to say what I really want to say.”

Still, at least one Times art critic has suggested that since Herron moved to Orange County, his painting has lost some of its passion. Herron himself says he is less prone these days to what he describes as the “blood and guts and fists” sensibility that has long characterized his work.

Conceding that his work has evolved over time, Herron believes that it is for the better.

“The change has a lot to do with maturing, and traveling around and meeting different people,” he said. “But I wouldn’t go so far as to say I lost the strength and the power, because I feel my work is very emotional, I just address levels of emotion I didn’t and couldn’t address 20 years ago.”