EAST LOS ANGELES : Roosevelt Alum Now on 2nd School Mural

For a beginning artist, Liliana Rosas doesn’t lack for a public.

“You should do a lowrider,” suggest two teen-age boys passing by the mural she is painting in a second-floor hallway of the Roosevelt High School art building.

A swirl of animals, water, trees, flowers and clocks with an environmental theme, the mural might not easily accommodate a gas-guzzling car, but Rosas, 20, takes in stride the unsolicited comments and suggestions. It is hard to miss her or the large canvas she works on--a 63- by 11-foot swatch of wall at the school she graduated from in 1992.

It’s the second time Rosas, now attending East Los Angeles College, has renewed connections with her alma mater through art; another mural she painted adorns the outside of a campus structure.

Roosevelt Principal Henry Ronquillo hopes Rosas will come back again once she has completed “Nature and Time,” which is six months along but still a month from completion.

“It’s important for one of our own to use those kinds of talents, and it increases the pride in our school,” Ronquillo said. “Her murals send a nice message to our students and to staff because she combines history with culture, and with strong messages in education and beauty.”

The aspiring artist works for five hours or more three nights a week, frequently before a strolling audience of night-school students and instructors. Her friend Gamaliel Solis, 18, helps her paint and answer questions about the mural.

Yvette Samaan, an English as a second language teacher, studied a part of the mural where water turns into plants. “I paint, so I know you can’t judge before it’s done. You have to wait until the end. You’ll have to explain a lot,” she commented to Rosas, “but I admire it and I like it anyway.”

Rosas knows it will take time for people to understand or appreciate what she is doing.

“I guess my point is . . . that we depend on nature,” Rosas said recently while on a break. “People need to take care of what we have, because once it’s gone, then they’ll say we should have saved it.”

Rosas is careful to qualify her answers. “Art is not always to the point. I think that’s too easy.”

She takes her cues for her work from dreams and from memories of a childhood in which she spent a lot of time alone and learned to develop her creativity.

The mural portrays water as a life-giver. A woman’s hair turns into a stream, then a wave and a waterfall. Sometimes it looks like an underwater plant.

Rosas learned to paint murals from artist Paul Botello, who hired her as an assistant for a summer mural project called “The Virgin Seed” that he completed across the street from Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in 1991.

“If they have some artistic potential, I want to motivate them, because that’s how I got my motivation when I was younger,” said Botello of the students he brings to his projects. Botello, 33, grew up in East Los Angeles and has completed 22 murals, the most recent a six-story piece in Germany.

“She has a lot of artistic talent,” he said of Rosas. “She was my main helper with the Virgin Mary mural. Some of them come and go, but she’s got the desire and the heart. She’s a true artist.”

Rosas plans to finish off the piece with a quote from Benito Juarez, who was president of Mexico from 1857 to 1872. Translations of the quote will appear in English, Spanish, French, Chinese and possibly another language so all students can understand the message.

In English, the saying is: “Respecting what’s not yours is peace.”