Horns of Plenty

Zeus made the cornucopia by removing one horn of a goat-nymph and promising that it would always be full of whatever food or drink its owner desired. Los Angeles is a veritable cornucopia of cornucopias; a census would run in the hundreds. The downtown produce district boasts a cornucopia painted on brick that is soft, blurry and impressionistic. A rendering in West Adams depicts a variety of fruits parading one by one out of a horn, with the bananas, pineapple, orange and the horn itself all a smudgy yellow.

“It’s a fad,” says Rafael Escamilla, who has painted at least 20 cornucopias in the past five years on the outside of Mexican and Central American markets. Escamilla created the intensely colorful and realistic street-level cornucopia on the side of the El Mucho Mas Market at Beverly Boulevard and New Hampshire Avenue. Curling over a farmer’s vast field, the horn overflows with grapes, plums, bananas, a watermelon, a grapefruit, a peach, a green chile, parsnips, a mango, a coconut, lettuce, garlic, a green pepper and a chayote. Unlike most cornucopias, this one also offers a cut of beef, salmon steaks, some packaged cheese and a quart of what appears to be Knudsen milk. Pretty much as Zeus intended it.