Artist Giving a Face Lift to Mural of Mexican Hero : Art: Willie Herron races to restore his image of Miguel Hidalgo in time for the L.A. Festival.

Something eerie and peculiar happened after Willie Herron painted Mexican Revolutionary leader Miguel Hidalgo on the facade of an East Los Angeles pharmacy 14 years ago.

Evoking the mystical realism of writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Herron described how “odd” that he unwittingly positioned the face of the “Father of Mexican Independence” directly over a weak area on the aging farmacia wall.

Odd, he explained, because 18 months later, the face of the priest--decapitated by Spanish soldiers--fell off the mural wall.

“Just before I began working, they had freshly plastered the whole building, but I wasn’t aware there was substructure damage where I painted Hidalgo’s face,” said Herron, noting that over the years the mural remained stripped of its powerful focal countenance--until now.

Since December, Herron has been restoring “La Doliente de Hidalgo” (Hidalgo’s Pain), a project he plans to complete Sept. 1, when the Los Angeles Festival opens.

The work will be featured in its visual arts component after $3,000 for its restoration was contributed from the festival, $4,500 from “Neighborhood Pride: Great Walls Unlimited” (a mural program run by the Social and Public Arts Resource Center in Venice) and $3,000 from present owners of the building.

“A huge part of the identity of Los Angeles, both as a community at large and within the art world, is the presense of these murals all over the city,” festival director Peter Sellars said. “One of the most important artists in the whole mural movement is Willie.”

Completed in 1976, the mural wraps around what is now a small market at City Terrace Drive and Miller Avenue in City Terrace. “It is a tribute to ‘El Grito’ (the scream), “the original cry for independence and liberty of the Mexican Indians against the rule of Spain,” Herron said.

A mighty, white-haired Hidalgo, said to have shouted the freedom demand on Sept. 15, 1810, after clanging the bells of a village church, is depicted with his mouth agape, waving a flaming torch beside a crowd of rebellious followers echoing his call for action. A stylized Spanish soldier with bayonets for arms hovers nearby.

“I used (David Alfaro) Siqueiros’ mural of Hidalgo as a reference,” said Herron, 38, who rose to prominence in the early 1970s with the “blood and guts and fists” style he uses to portray the barrio where he was raised and began drawing and painting.

Just three years out of high school, Herron was commissioned to paint the mural by Luis Duarte, who bought the pharmacy across the street from Herron’s home. Duarte wanted to name the building after the Mexican priest.

“He told me, ‘It will be called “Farmacia Hidalgo” and I’d like you to do a mural about Hidalgo and the struggle of Mexico against Spain,’ ” said Herron, who was paid $900 for the job. “After a couple of years, the mural faded very fast because $900 for a wall that size doesn’t pay for the best kind of paint.”

Restoring the work with a rainbow of durable acrylics isn’t like painting by numbers. Some areas were so badly faded that restoration “verged on re-creation,” he said, “because I had nothing to work with other than photographs that were taken right after the mural was completed.”

Graffiti, the muralist’s scourge, posed another challenge. Surprisingly, over the past 16 years, only 1% of the mural had been hit, said Herron, who has completed 14 other murals throughout Los Angeles, including one of 12 commissioned in connection with the 1984 Olympic Games.

The 160-foot-long artwork itself is still largely spray-paint free, but since the plastering and painting began, Herron said “local guys” have coated a three-foot-thick section of brick running along its base.

He doesn’t mind. In 1988, the former co-founder of a ‘70s anti-Establishment performance collective named ASCO (Spanish for nausea) moved from the barrio to upscale Laguna Hills in Orange County. For most of 10 years, Herron had been working on graphic design in a commercial studio he co-owned, on interior murals for hotels and private homes and on paintings he’s shown in Laguna Beach and San Diego galleries.

But his feel for the grittier reality of his past, including the ability to cope in a community where he has sometimes had to dodge bullets between brush strokes, isn’t lost. He plans to incorporate the graffiti into his mural rather than eradicate the urban iconography.

“Since it’s now been sort of resurrected or reawakened by its restoration, the mural has become a focal point in the community and (if) the local graffiti artists feel they need to put their ‘John Hancock’ on it so they can be noticed too, it’s fine by me,” Herron said. “Now I just have to figure out a creative way to make the two sort of marry each other.”