An Artist Resurrects a Freeway Landmark and Message of Faith

When I wrote here several weeks ago about the slow deterioration and final demise of the “Jesus wall” in Highland Park, I hoped to receive a call from the anonymous muralist who painted its message of redemption.

I wanted to ask him the meaning of the escaping dove and the exclamation “Jesus Set Me Free.” I wanted to know what power it had to repel the graffiti writers who had for years infected that humble stucco wall alongside the Pasadena Freeway at Avenue 39.

And, of course, I hoped that the notoriety might induce him to paint the message again, giving the garage wall and its environs, as well as my fellow commuters, a new respite from the nighttime graffiti battles between gang members.

I misperceived the young man. He didn’t call.

Had he moved away? Dropped out? Perished in a gang battle? Or was he so removed from the cares of temporal life that publicity held no allure for him?

I surmised the answers to some of these questions a couple of weeks later as I observed one Monday morning that the wall was changing. Somebody had scraped away a section of the cracking, peeling paint that consisted of layers of graffiti between layers of murky civic whitewash.

Each Monday after that I saw more progress. The day a coat of blue paint appeared I wondered whether it was the work of the artist or merely a landlord with a taste for rich colors. Finally the proof appeared: the outlines of the letters “Jesus Set Me Free.” I began to stop by the wall on weekends hoping to catch the muralist at work. But my timing was bad.

One day I knocked on the door of the house attached to the garage and left my card with the man who answered.

“If you see him, tell him to call me,” I pleaded, with little hope.

A few days later, the phone rang.

*

“This is Ricardo Ochoa,” he said. I knew it was him. He said I could catch him about 2 p.m. on Sunday, the only free time in his week.

At the appointed hour, he drove up in an aging black Camaro loaded with an assortment of paint cans under its hatchback. He rolled a 50-gallon drum out of a backyard to use as a stool and began to work on the dove, while telling me his story.

I had expected a tough guy: streetwise, forceful, charismatic and probably hustling a government grant. That isn’t Ochoa at all. He has a shy smile and a quiet manner. He went to the same schools in Highland Park--quite a few years later--that I did. He still lives nearby in Lincoln Heights.

For the past eight years he has worked for Pacific Bell. He started as an information operator, and now he’s in collections. He works in a large room of hundreds of computers and telephones, calling with gentle reminders, working out payment schedules and placing service restrictions on accounts that allow poor clients to go on using their phones while they pay up. It’s a large, multicultural shop where people exchange personal tidbits between calls and nurture friendships with hugs.

Ochoa paints on his own time and at his own expense, though he once sought backing from Councilman Mike Hernandez. The lawmaker was sympathetic but didn’t think the constitutional separation between church and state allowed him to finance a Christian message, the artist said.

Ochoa isn’t a zealot. He’s not formally attending church at the moment, though he has. He simply paints from the Scriptures because their messages are what he wants to convey.

Bondage is the theme that interests him. Not that he’s railing against oppression. He believes that people fall into bondage by their own habits: credit cards, alcohol, graffiti.

“They could be in captivity from different things,” he said. “Sometimes even their jobs. You could be captive to your job. Anything that takes up your time and your devotion.”

He is suggesting that freedom is attainable with Jesus’ help.

Another mural he painted at Five Points in Lincoln Heights says: “For Whom the Son Sets Free Shall Be Free Indeed.”

Ochoa has conceived his next mural, showing a clown with a tear falling from his eye. It will say: “The Sovereign Lord Will Wipe Away the Tears From All Faces.”

The artist doesn’t know why his paintings command the respect of the gangs. He used to suppose it was because they knew he was from Highland Park. But the mural in Lincoln Heights, where he isn’t known, has remained graffiti-free. The best explanation appears to be the power in the message.

As we both learned, though, the message isn’t indelible. As soon as the paint of his original Jesus mural faded and began to flake, the graffiti reappeared.

Ochoa noticed this as well. He had planned to touch it up but hadn’t made time until my story ran. Whether it was the story that finally precipitated action is a question not worthy of deliberation.

More important to me is that I have indirectly become invested in the wall.

*

Among the tools that Ochoa used--a sponge brush for shadowing, spray paint for mottling, a black felt marker for the corner of the dove’s eye--he also brought a Polaroid camera to photograph a model for the hands.

He had used his own hands in painting the first mural, with unsatisfactory results. The problem was: He couldn’t pose the right hand while painting with it. He had to repeatedly put the brush down while he raised the hand into the proper gesture, and then pick the brush up again to paint.

Anyone who watched the new painting progress will know that he had trouble with the hands again. He said it was his fault--bad shadowing.

I know better. The hands were too bony. They were mine.

At the expense of a good ending, I must add this epilogue:

A single scrawl of graffiti appeared on the wall a couple of weekends ago. By prearrangement, the man who lives in the house called Ochoa. During the week Ochoa stopped by and blocked it out with his surplus blue paint. That is how things stand today.

Let us pray they stay that way.