OUT OF THE SHADOWS

When he paints, when he talks about painting, John Sonsini gives himself most completely to one subject: guys.

He’s explored it in his work for more than 30 years: gay guys, not-gay guys, working-class guys, Latino guys, the Mexican guy he lives with, the Latino immigrant guys he hires from L.A. street corners and whom he’s painted to increasing acclaim these past four years -- about 250 of them so far.

He’s talked lately about the guy from the New York Times who recently called his art “Whitman-esque,” Whitman being someone he really likes to talk about, of whom he says that “if you boiled Walt Whitman down to a syrup you’d have to label it: ‘All Belong Here.’ ”

We’re in Sonsini’s second-floor studio overlooking the subdued early afternoon bustle near the corner of Vermont Avenue and 7th Street, a neighborhood where faded store signs in Korean and Spanish hang above pushed-back security gates, declaring beauty salons, meat markets, bakeries and bars. Sonsini is about to paint Jorge, from El Salvador. It will take him six days, with one day off for a 55th birthday party thrown by his parents.

He stands on one side of an easel. Jorge sits on the other, beaming calm focus across the longish room, one hand folded over the other in his lap. Mixing paints with a palette knife, mixing English and “so-so Spanish,” Sonsini tells how he noticed Jorge in 2002, drawn to him by the design on his shirt.

“I met Jorge on Olympic and Mariposa,” Sonsini says, referring to a corner about half a mile away from the studio. He ponders Jorge, then blank canvas. “Esta dia, I needed to meet a new sitter, so I drove down to that intersection. But, oh, I see at least 50 people at that corner. I’ll have to talk to those guys, make my pitch. And then I see this guy in the distance. I see his amazing shirt -- black, with a huge turquoise triangle wrapped around from front to back .... “

It’s quite a long story, a juncture of languages (“ ‘Wow! That camisa is fantastic!’ I say”) that Sonsini crossed effectively because his partner, a Mexican American immigrant named Gabriel, mapped out what the artist said to Jorge that day. The language was Sonsini’s unpolished improvisation. “Disculpame. Excuse me. ¿Tu estas buscando trabajo? You’re looking for work? I am a painter, soy un pintor. Necesito un hombre para pintar su cara. I need a man to sit while I paint his face.”

Jorge, smiling now at Sonsini’s retelling, breaks in: “Yo pense, es una broma.” I thought it was a joke.

Three years and nine paintings of Jorge later, as anyone who visited New York’s Anthony Grant gallery during five weeks this spring could see, it’s clear Sonsini wasn’t joking. On white walls above Manhattan’s 57th Street, in soft shades of blue-green, rose and brown, 10 large Sonsini portraits showed Jorge, his younger brother Pedro and other day laborers in the modest clothes they wear while waiting on L.A. street corners for people to drive up and hire them. Their poses -- hands in pockets, arms crossed -- suggest men barely at ease. The titles, first names only, reflect their fear of the immigration authorities: “Jorge and Pedro,” “Jesus,” “Louis and Fidel.”

Sometimes, he paints the men alone, sometimes with up to six in a group portrait; sometimes he paints canvases a foot or so short of life-size, like this one of Jorge. The show at the Grant closed in early April. That month, he also had his first museum show, a group of facial portraits at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art. Called “DayLabor,” it depicted workers he painted at a Hollywood job center, where sitters were chosen through the same sort of lottery that selects them for tile jobs or roofing.

Jorge now earns Sonsini’s new rate of $15 an hour, up from $10 because Sonsini’s New York show was a near sellout, with prices in the $20,000 to $50,000 range. That’s relatively modest in art world terms, but it marked a new level of success for an artist who has shown in L.A., grew up in a working-class Italian American family in North Hollywood and trained in art at Cal State Northridge.

“Hey, we’re both content, two guys working,” the artist tells Jorge, as he picks up an ordinary house painting brush -- he says one reason he uses such brushes is “they hold a lot of paint” -- and paints on the first, raw shapes of Jorge’s pose. The first color is the charcoal of the sitter’s pants.

The studio goes quiet for several minutes, as he lays on smooth strokes of rich brown -- arms beginning, hands. “I am never looking at an arm only as an arm. Sometimes, I lose interest, not because I’m bored with it, but because my interest gets triggered into something else.” He worked the arm’s color against the contrasting paleness of Jorge’s shirt. At first, he says, he told Jorge he didn’t like its elusive shade of lime green, but ended up painting it anyway.

Sonsini often alludes to the give-and-take between him and his sitters -- “These are my co-workers, we’re doing this together.” He says that most of the colors in the paintings stem from the sitters’ choices of clothing.

“Jorge came by the studio yesterday wearing that shirt, and I said, ‘We’ll probably want another shirt,’ but he came today with this shirt,” Sonsini explains. “I just couldn’t see how amazing that shirt is, and the way it changes into the arm. It keeps changing, and I love that. I cannot be literal with that shirt, so thank you very much.

“OK, Jorge?” he calls around the canvas. “¿’Ta bien?” he asks. Jorge smiles, nods. Sonsini quickly pulls a swath of the lime-colored paint against the muscular top of the arm.

He works “wet on wet,” an approach that exploits the fluid, slow-drying properties of oil paint. Painting Jorge, he rapidly strokes, dabs, sometimes briefly finger-paints his gentle colors into shapes and textures. “I think we’ve got a painting,” he says to Jorge, about 20 minutes after starting: “Let’s take a break.”

Jorge, turning his head side-to-side to work out kinks in his neck, answers questions about himself reluctantly. He says he arrived in the United States 3 1/2 years ago, from a small city in El Salvador called Usulutan. He’s 28. He crossed the border into Texas. “It was easy,” he says. “I just walked across and somebody met me on the other side.”

Most of his jobs since then have involved construction or landscaping, but he says his favorite is painting houses.

What’s his view of Sonsini? “In the beginning it was just that of worker to employer,” he says. “But it has become more than that, more like friends. But it is still that of worker to employer.”

The clothing connection

We speak with the help of Gabriel, 32, a Michoacan native who also crossed the border in Texas, a year before he met Sonsini in 1995. For six years, Sonsini painted him hundreds of times, exclusively, usually nude or half-dressed in poses with a subtle but clear homoerotic resonance. The Gabriel nudes had their last full-scale exhibit in 2000, at the ACME gallery, which represents Sonsini in Los Angeles. Even the show’s name was “Gabriel.”

In November 2001, Sonsini’s emphasis on nudity vanished with one portrait.

Gabriel was taking off his shirt to pose yet again. “Keep it on,” Sonsini remembers telling him.

“Painting him nude had always been difficult for me,” Sonsini says, nodding toward Gabriel. “Painting the clothing made the brush strokes looser, freer. I was more relaxed.”

Says Gabriel: “With the clothes, you look at everything, at the whole person.”

Sonsini adds: “When I painted Gabriel nude, I painted him as he appeared to only me. When I painted him clothed, I painted him as he appeared to the world.”

Once he could imaginatively place Gabriel in the public sphere, he could begin to see him as part of a larger group of men with similar backgrounds. Painting clothes created a bridge from the erotic aspect suggested by one gay guy painting another to a more inclusive connection free of the focus on whether the men were gay or straight.

The idea to hire the Latino day laborers was Gabriel’s. He’s also taken a central role in almost every aspect of the street-corner project, whether it’s urging Sonsini to paint more quickly or the soft-cover Spanish-language novelas and newspapers he puts in a rack for sitters or the enchiladas or pizza he makes for his fellow Latinos. The two speak of their work as “a collaboration.”

Asked if his motive was in some way political, Gabriel shyly says, “Yes.” Then, he switches. “No, it is more than politics. It is about art,” he adds in careful English. “Art is bigger than politics.”

Sphere of influences

During breaks, Sonsini invites me to an office behind the artist’s studio. The past lives here. Paintings he’s kept from 30 years of work, periods when he painted different guys and in different ways, lean against the walls.

He spreads a dozen black-and-white photographs over an old desk. They show men, all or mostly nude, in various poses. The lighting, props and bodies are as artfully arranged as in old Hollywood publicity photographs. One would-be Apollo flexes his arms next to a fake Greek column. Another, bare-topped, stands in the jeans of a laborer.

The photographer was Bob Mizer, founder of a magazine called Physique Pictorial, a vital piece of gay culture as it slowly found its voice across the middle of the last century. Mizer worked out of a studio he called the Athletic Model Guild, at the corner of Alvarado and 11th streets, becoming the gay world’s equivalent of Hugh Hefner.

From 1986 to 1992, when Mizer died at age 70, Sonsini dropped out of the L.A. gallery scene to paint backdrops Mizer used and to study how he shot his models. “Notice how these guys look right out at you,” Sonsini says. “How they make a direct connection. That’s what I want to paint.”

He speaks of how Mizer influenced artists such as David Hockney, Robert Mapplethorpe and Andy Warhol, but says his own tie was unusual because “while others learned from his imagery, I learned from the imagery and from being there.”

He says his years at AMG shaped his interest in “men who must fight for a place in the world,” a category in which he places the “drifters and bohemians” of whom Mizer took his pictures and the Latino workers Sonsini paints today. “These men are crossing borders to get to Los Angeles, and the Mizer men crossed all kinds of borders to get here, and the life both groups found wasn’t easy.”

Next to glossy male photography, the other big influence Sonsini talks about is abstract painting, especially work that combines abstraction with the human figure -- Willem de Kooning’s women, Francis Bacon’s distorted figures. A long friendship with Los Angeles artist Don Barchardy ignited his commitment to painting that embodies a personal encounter with a live model, and Mizer’s example deepened that conviction.

Still, Sonsini felt he hadn’t fully found his subject. In 1995, he continued painting the Mizer bodybuilders, sometimes as their bodies withered from AIDS, though many Mizer men were not gay. He also took brooding, erotically charged photos of Latin guys.

One day that year, sent by someone who thought he’d found the artist a fine model, Gabriel walked up his stairs. Sensing a special arrival, Sonsini had him repeat the climb, and took a picture, with Gabriel’s head wrenched toward the studio door. What came next could hearten people in any field who wait for fate to reward years of patient work.

Sonsini’s first full-figure painting of Gabriel took six months, and many days and years in the studio together followed. They talk warmly of their personal attachment, but always stress the joint effort of making art.

Gabriel says that, as they worked, he fulfilled a long-held ambition to become an artist’s muse. Sonsini says decades of work coalesced around his new model: “I discovered that the result to searching for a subject could be as specific as finding one person.”

From time to time, over the days we talk in this room, Gabriel sticks his head in from the other, to say Jorge is helping with work around the studio and it’s OK if we keep talking.

Finally, the portrait is finished. Jorge rushes out, but without fulfilling Sonsini’s custom of having his sitters sign the backs of these paintings. The next morning, we set out for the corner of Olympic and Mariposa in Sonsini’s Isuzu SUV to find Jorge. There he is, wearing a pair of wraparound sunglasses, talking avidly to two others.

Sonsini gets out and talks to them in Spanish about how he’s painted all three, but never together. He wants to do a group portrait of them, maybe include a fourth guy. With the success of his New York show, he can afford more sitters.

He turns to Jorge, who has taken his glasses off for a moment, and smiles his wide smile.

“Oh, Jorge,” Sonsini says. “Recuerda tu tienes que firmar el cuadro. Estoy en mi estudio manana, todo el dia ... OK?” You should come by the studio tomorrow to sign the new painting.

“OK,” says Jorge. He’s still smiling, watching from the sidewalk as Sonsini slides back behind the wheel.