Artist Draws on Circle of Life

Martha Guillen-Paramo is a late bloomer in the field of art. Were it not for the premature birth of her first son, she might not have bloomed at all.

Martha always knew she had artistic ability. Her father, an upholsterer from El Paso, made a fuss over her drawings and sketches ever since she was 6. Yet as an adult, she didn’t develop enough faith in herself to seriously pursue a career as a painter.

Who would care about the work of a girl from Gardena who liked to draw pinatas and pan dulce in the exuberant colors of her childhood? Who would take her seriously?

Martha married when she was 25. Got a job with Pacific Bell, starting as a 411 operator. Good pay, but hardly an outlet for her creativity. She took art classes when she could, but “I wasn’t allowing myself to really go for it.”

Then came Raymond, the boy whose struggle to survive would spark her ambition to succeed.

He was born March 20, 1990, more than two months premature and weighing 3.5 pounds. The infant was torn from his mother and taken to intensive care. And as she watched him fight for his life, she wondered what she was doing with her own to make it more meaningful.

She held her son and talked to him. You have to be strong and so do I, she said. There are great things in this world worth living for, and fighting for. Then Martha made this promise to her fragile infant: “I am going to do something with my life.”

When she graduated with honors from Cypress College a year later, Raymond was taking his first baby steps. When her son was 6 and starting elementary school, Martha earned her bachelor’s in fine art, with an emphasis on drawing and painting, from Cal State Fullerton.

This semester, Mom is completing course work for her master of fine arts degree, also from the Fullerton campus where she now teaches beginning and life drawing classes part time.

In the meantime, in-between time, she had her second son.

And next month, her artwork will be featured in her first public exhibition outside academia. She has been selected as Visiting Artist 2000 by the city of Buena Park, which will display 22 of her paintings in the City Council chambers during May.

The public is invited to an evening reception May 5 for the opening of the exhibit. There will be music, refreshments, and the chance to meet the artist and buy her paintings.

Now that her goal is nearly reached and her promise to Raymond fulfilled, Martha says she feels the relief of the runner at the end of a race.

She just turned 40. Raymond is now 10, also a budding artist who is prematurely poised and articulate.

When I came to the front door of their immaculate Yorba Linda home Wednesday afternoon, this bright boy with glasses stepped forward and put out his hand.

“Very nice to meet you,” said the fourth-grader with a firm shake.

At school he has won honors for his artwork. At home, he shows promise as an illustrator or animator. He watches movies, then reproduces the story in drawings, thick booklets of computer paper picturing “Jurassic Park” and “A Bug’s Life” as well as storyboards of his own imagination.

Plus, Raymond is the family’s art critic.

Closer Look at Canvas May Yield a Surprise

“What do you think of your mother’s work?” I asked as he and his brother, Michael, played Donkey Kong 64 on a Nintendo in the bedroom.

“I love them!” he said with conviction. “I always want to know the mysteries in the paintings.”

One of them, Raymond, is the mystery of life.

Martha has her canvases spread across the floor of her living room, some still waiting to be framed for the exhibit. They are powerful, provocative images washed in rich colors, blended by instinct rather than by theory. They range from self-portraits to still lifes and surreal scenes.

In one, a simple circle with triangular petals looks at first like a sunflower floating in a Prussian blue universe. But look closer. The petals are actually the flat bottoms of little irons, with narrow slits for steam.

She calls it “Ring of Iron.”

On one level, it represents the strength of women through work. It reflects her upbringing in a traditional household where her father expected dinner on the table and her mother served handmade tortillas. Martha was the middle child, sandwiched between two older boys and a younger one. Even now, she finds herself clearing the table and washing dishes for her brothers, all college graduates.

“I still catch myself doing that,” she says, pretending to slap her hand as mock punishment for a bad, old-fashioned habit. “You can’t escape how you’re raised.”

On the contrary. Through her art, she looks closely and honestly at her Latino upbringing.

Martha takes her hyphenated surname from the men in her life: her father, Ruben Guillen, and her husband, Raymond Paramo, an insurance broker. She took strength from her mother, Ofelia, who sewed pillows and purses and sold them out of her car at bowling alleys and beauty shops. Ofelia’s determination, stern yet serene, is reflected in a striking portrait by her daughter.

Martha was raised Catholic, though she now attends a nondenominational Christian church. Her family moved to La Palma when she was 20. As expected of women in many Mexican families, she went straight from her father’s home to her husband’s.

Neither of her parents finished elementary school. Like her son, they’re always trying to decode her paintings too. They ask and ask, but Martha can’t always offer explanations without a twinge of embarrassment.

In “Ring of Iron,” for example, the “sunflower” is surrounded by large sewing needles with loose strings of thread trailing behind them like tails on a kite. The needles are all pointing to the circle in the center, and suddenly they looked to me like sperm about to fertilize an ovum.

“Don’t tell my Mom and Dad! You’ll get me in trouble,” jokes Martha. “I was not raised to talk about sex. It didn’t exist, as far as my parents were concerned.”

Martha works with oil bars, a medium that forces her to get personal with her paintings. They are like hard, cigar-size crayons that yield deep, rich colors without the fumes that would irritate her sons, who both have asthma.

The paint bars require Martha to get aggressive with her art, pushing and pulling to create tones and textures, says Kyung Sun Cho, associate professor of drawing and painting at Cal State.

The result: vibrant paintings reflecting emotions as heightened as the colors. They are the colors of her childhood, blended randomly like the spools of thread and the rolls of fabric lying about her father’s workshop.

Martha has no studio. Her duties as a mother and housewife prevent her from setting up a workshop on campus. So she works out of her family’s two-car garage. Carpeting is the only comfort.

She works mostly at night, sometimes until dawn. She waits until the boys finish their homework and their supper and are put to bed. Then she begins her cold, lonely labor while her family sleeps.

Here, behind the suburban facade, she gives expression to her most inner spirit.

“This is my little world,” she tells me.

It’s not the glamorous world of galleries and receptions to which her younger peers can aspire. They are free to throw themselves into their work, to pursue their big-city opportunities on the East Coast and elsewhere.

She must take a slower path. She must stay home to be who she is: Mother and artist, devoted wife and free spirit.

“I’m rooted in my family and where I am, for now. Within that, I have to make my own way.”

Agustin Gurza’s column appears Tuesday and Saturday. Readers can reach Gurza at (714) 966-7712 or agustin.gurza@latimes.com.