Air Chavez

Most afternoons you can find Gus Chavez at the Boys & Girls Club of Santa Ana, the same place where 30 years ago he discovered a love of art.

At 37, Chavez has become an artist known locally for teaching children how to paint and for his work on an unusual canvas: T-shirts. He airbrushes glowing portraits onto the thin, white cotton.

Most of his subjects are athletes and musicians he admires--Michael Jordan, B.B. King, Carlos Santana, Ray Charles, Jimi Hendrix and local R&B; singer Derek Bordeaux. He captures them in action, he says, striving to make his subjects look realistic as they shoot baskets, strum guitars or sing into microphones.

“I didn’t want to do portraits because they were so delicate. Just one stroke of the airbrush and you can mess up. There’s no erasing,” Chavez says. “But it just clicked.”

Indeed.

Chavez’s T-shirts sell for about $100 each. Customers call when they see him or someone else wearing his one of his shirts at a concert, mall, Lakers game, art festival or swap meet.

He chose to paint on T-shirts for a practical reason.

“A canvas is $40,” he says. “If I mess up on a T-shirt, it’s only $2.”

Around the Santa Ana neighborhood where Chavez lives, word has spread. Often people drop by his garage-turned-studio, a space cluttered with bikes, surfboards and art supplies, to ask for a shirt. Or they’ll bring a pair of pants or a shirt for him to paint.

Chavez has not forgotten his roots, or that a $100 T-shirt is a luxury many cannot afford.

“Sometimes kids come by, and they want something for their mom. I’d feel bad even charging them $5. I just say, ‘Bring your shirt, and we’ll talk about it.’ Then I just give it to them,” he says. “In return, someone will bring me a big plate of tamales. I know they don’t have any money. This is the way they repay me.”

Chavez learned how to paint and draw as a child while attending art programs at the Boys & Girls Club, but his talent lay dormant until three years ago, when he was laid off from his job in the aerospace industry. At a loss for what to do, Chavez returned to his love of airbrushing, creating images he sells and teaching children at the youth club how to paint.

Chavez “is a pretty positive role model,” says Larry Mireles, program manager for the Santa Ana club. “The kids like him a lot. They look up to him because of his art, and he doesn’t talk down to them. He takes time to show them how to paint.”

Chavez also visits local elementary schools, including Pio Pico in Santa Ana, where his sons--Christian, 10, and Jorell, 7--attend.

“I’ll draw a couple cartoon characters on shirts and give them out. The kids all go, ‘Ooooh,’ ” he says.

Many of his customers treat his shirts like art. Some refuse to wear them. The shirts hang on walls like paintings.

“They might wear it once over another T-shirt, and that’s it,” Chavez says.

Chavez received his first air gun from friend Dolores Rivera after he was laid off from his job as an aerospace assembler.

“It had been 15 or 16 years since I’d painted. At first I couldn’t draw the simplest thing. I had no control,” he says. “It just developed.”

The first shirt he made three years ago was for his son, Christian, who played for the Redskins, a local Pop Warner football team. It depicted a charging Redskin football player amid a backdrop of abstract-looking arrowheads and tomahawks. Soon Chavez was making T-shirts for players and their parents, awarding an airbrushed shirt to one team member a week.

“I tell them, ‘You had a good game. I’m going to give you a shirt,’ ” Chavez says.

Chavez soon graduated to making all kinds of portraits using photographs.

“I thought it was fascinating, the way you could get the realism, that skin tone,” he says.

Eventually he came up with a name for his shirts--Tribal Rags.

He stretches the shirt on an easel and paints every inch of the front, working with an air gun attached to CO2 tanks that can spray the paint in a fine mist or clean lines.

Now he feels confident enough to airbrush on canvas as well. Occasionally, he airbrushes guitars with portraits of Jimi Hendrix and surfboards with Pamela Anderson Lee to sell. A half-finished canvas portrait of artist Frida Kahlo awaits his attention.

Chavez says he has no desire to return to the aerospace industry. He works part time at the youth club, often giving tours of the place he knows so well.

“I’ve been a member since I was 7,” he says. “I grew up with my mom. I’m a first-generation American. She came from Mexico and worked two jobs. I didn’t get out of Santa Ana. I never went anywhere. I didn’t even know about Huntington Beach. My escape was the boys club.”

There, he learned to play basketball and learned about art.

“There was a guy in the art department who said, ‘Here’s the paint; here’s the brushes; here’s the canvas.’ ”

Chavez remembers winning a regional art contest in oil painting when he was young.

Now that he has rediscovered his artistic side, Chavez says he wants to devote his free time to his art, to the club and to his sons.

A single father, Chavez lives with his sons and his mother, Maria, whom he calls his “worst critic.”

“She draws a little herself, and she’s the first one to say, ‘Honey, that looks kind of funny.’ If she thinks it’s good, then it’s good.

“I never draw when I don’t want to draw,” he says. “Right now I have the freedom to raise my sons and paint. I’ve had opportunities to go back [to full-time work], and didn’t take them. I don’t make a lot of money, but a lot of people tell me, ‘I wish I had that freedom.’ This has opened up a whole new world for me.”