Whimsical Art Offers Window on Yule Cheer

The dentist thinks it would be good to show that even Santa Claus gets his teeth cleaned. So Dr. Dianne Applegate’s sketch for her office window painting shows Santa in the chair with Dr. Applegate approaching for the treatment.

How merry. How painless.

The window-painting artist, Vicki Ramirez, shows up.

Maybe it would be better, Ramirez offers, to show Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer getting his teeth brushed by an elf. Or by one of Applegate’s many child patients.

No--perhaps the elf should be cleaning Santa’s teeth. Or would the elf himself get a cleaning? In any event, Rudolph with his teeth bared might look less than friendly.

Ramirez gently notes that real-life likenesses--such as that involving the painting of Applegate herself--can be risky when window painting is actually a form of cartoon, or caricature. Often, the individuals don’t recognize themselves as themselves, and that makes them unhappy. Maybe, Ramirez suggests, the simplest is best: Santa laughing in the dentist’s chair with a tree and decorations all about.

Applegate nods: Go for it. Whatever.

Ramirez goes outside, puts a piece of spattered cardboard on the concrete sidewalk, and sets up her paint “palette:” open jars of red, sky blue, cobalt, tangerine, flesh-tone, brown, black. Within three minutes she is slathering the window with white paint--an outline of Santa in the chair and a Christmas tree in the corner. The image will be large--perhaps 3-by-4 feet--and occur quickly, in less than an hour if all goes well.

Suddenly, Applegate appears. She’s reconsidered. Back to the original sketch. She wants in the image.

“Sure,” says Ramirez, without missing a beat.

Turning to a visitor, Ramirez notes, “Well, this might be a little more difficult than planned.”

Ramirez is probably the region’s busiest artist at this time of year. She rents her considerable talents out for a minimum of $50 and often gets $400 or more for large-scale holiday depictions on plate glass.

Some stores want holly and snowmen. Some want choo-choo trains with Santa hanging on for dear life. Others want images that reveal the hobbies of employees within: a beach bum under a palm tree, a surfer. Whatever.

Ramirez has been doing this for 19 years and has never advertised. From a week before Thanksgiving till today , she paints Ventura County storefront and office-front windows for six days a week and up to 10 hours a day. It’s a word-of-mouth business. This year she turned down dozens of jobs.

“I can’t take anymore,” she says, “though I do hate to say no, particularly to friends.”

The rest of the year, Ramirez is a self-employed, Oxnard-based commercial artist, painting signs and doing illustrations. She went to college and taught studio art to elementary and high school students before going on her own. “What I like to do most of all is paint,” she says.

The current holiday business is a special joy, however, because the results are so immediate, so positive. People look at the finished job and, like their customers, are amazed. “It’s like getting a pat on the back all day,” she says, painting glasses onto a rapidly forming Dr. Applegate.

It’s easy to see why. The images are at once fantastic and kitsch, beautiful and silly, well-wrought and rough-hewn. They are neither finished, permanent art pieces nor so crude as to be considered mere decoration by an amateur. They are inspired but ephemeral pieces of a seasonal vocabulary.

In this particular case, Santa is smiling broadly but displays two teeth the color of day-old French’s mustard. Ever the sport, he’s brandishing his own blue toothbrush, and approaching him with outstretched arms is a bespectacled Dr. Applegate.

Propaganda never looked so good. It would make any kid want to hop into the dreaded chair.

Dr. Applegate reappears. The painting-- whoosh --is done, 52 minutes flat. Ramirez is about to pack up and head to Thousand Oaks for the next job.

Applegate looks only sort of happy, however. She’s fixed on herself on the glass.

“I don’t wear glasses,” she says, feigning good cheer. (She wears them for protection while working.) “And where are my eyes? Can you put blue eyes in? Can you make me look like a model?”

“Sure,” says Ramirez, without missing a beat. Whatever.

And she commences to slop on the flesh tone, erasing Applegate No. 1 and creating a blank face. Waiting for this new base to dry, she jokes with Applegate: “I’ll make you fat for this!”

She doesn’t. But the overworking of the image does mar things. Applegate No. 2, in its strain for likeness, becomes a haunting apparition, a blue-eyed zombie with outstretched arms.

Santa doesn’t seem to notice. Neither, likely, will the children who view it.

Only the image maker, Vicki Ramirez, and the dentist, Dianne Applegate, really know how complex and difficult it can be to do something simple and fitting in the name of holiday cheer.