ARTISANS: Spotlighting Makers of Hand-Crafted Goods : Traditional Sofa Furnishes Artist With a Canvas to Stretch Out On
Don Marble, general manager of Villa Hallmark Furniture in Anaheim, isn’t really sure how it all came about.
All he knows is that the company was looking for a showstopper for this weekend’s Restaurant, Hotel, International Design Exposition Conference (RHIDEC for the short of breath) in Los Angeles.
And he’s a little fuzzy on how--or why--that led to internationally acclaimed artist Armando Alvarez, known for his monumental acrylic canvases celebrating the environment.
“But I can’t tell you how delighted I am it did,” he says as he slowly, almost reverently, circles the result--a traditional flaired-arm Chippendale sofa not so traditionally swathed in brilliant strokes of color.
Villa Hallmark workers had stretched canvas over the frame and cushions and Alvarez had turned it into what he calls a three-dimensional “tangible abstract work of art.”
And it has to be seen to be appreciated--or believed, for that matter.
“Love Seat 2000” is the name he gave it. The front represents our planetary system, complete with the Earth (a tennis ball that sits on one cushion) and the sun (a huge orange pillow that can be used as a footstool) in proper scale to the real orbs.
The back of the love seat, says Alvarez, 51, “is the Tunnel of Time, into which we all disappear.”
“My philosophy of life is in all my works,” says the Mexican-born artist who now lives in San Diego. “My passion is saving our civilization from ourselves. We must work with nature and not against it.
“People in the environmental movement talk about ‘saving the Earth.’ That’s nonsense. We can’t kill Earth any more than we can kill the sun. We can kill ourselves, but the Earth will still be here.
“The Earth does not belong to me; I belong to it. We brought nothing into it and we will take nothing out.”
“Love Seat 2000,” which will be displayed at RHIDEC today through Monday at the Los Angeles Convention Center, is Alvarez’s first three-dimensional piece, but he says it won’t be his last.
“I like the idea that people can feel and touch and even sit on or lie down on one of my works. There’s something intensely personal about that.”
His dream, he says, is to paint a building. Not in the conventional sense, of course. “I want to find an innovative developer who will just turn over a 10- or 15-story building to me that I can turn into a giant work of art--one that can be seen and photographed from a space satellite and seen from every airplane that passes over,” he says.
Until that happens, those interested in viewing his works must visit museums or garner invitations from private collectors around the world (in Orange County, five of his paintings are displayed in the lobby of the Beckman Laser Institute at UC Irvine).
Some of his works will be seen in upcoming issues of Sports Illustrated and Cosmopolitan magazines, interestingly enough, in features not on him but on his wife, Barbara.
Barbara Alvarez, 47, a clinical psychologist who specializes in working with athletes and herself a champion triathlete, recently shattered the record for the grueling 146-mile race from the bottom of Death Valley to the top of Mt. Whitney.
In many triathlons and marathons, she competes with her twin sister, Angelika Casteneda, and it is their astonishing feats that attracted the attention of the major national magazines.
But when the Sports Illustrated writer and photographer came to interview her, their attention was also drawn to her husband’s artworks, both finished and unfinished, at their home, so the decision was made to include the paintings as backgrounds.
Armando Alvarez’s training was in music, not art. He was born to an influential Mexican family (his uncle is former President Luis Alvarez Echeverrea) and studied piano at the Conservatorio Nacional de Musica in Mexico City and became an accomplished concert pianist. He was accepted for further study at Juilliard in New York, but declined, “because I was not being creatively fulfilled by music.”
He began dabbling in art, and his works came to the attention of famed Mexican artists Francisco Corzas and Rudolfo Nieto, both of whom hailed him as a genius. Remarkably, they insisted he not seek training in art because, as Corzas said, “formal schooling could destroy his untamed spirit on canvas.”
One art critic, Alen Hollander of Horizon magazine, described Alvarez’s works as “prayers in paint.”
Villa Hallmark’s Marble is not quite sure what the company--which produces furniture for hotels and restaurants--will do with “Love Seat 2000” when the RHIDEC show ends Monday.
“We may just keep it at our showroom or we could auction it off. For now, though, we’re just going to enjoy it.”
And protect it. He said the work has been insured for $25,000.
