A new portrait of the artist

THE San Francisco Art Institute sits on a hill overlooking North Beach with a sweeping view of the bay, from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Bay Bridge, and of a community still straining to be hip.

On this particular day, a storm has scrubbed the sky clean, and the sun gleams with special radiance over a scene that is as familiar to me as my own backyard.

We walked North Beach as college kids, Cinelli and I, when you could still buy a spaghetti dinner for a few dollars and listen to jazz after midnight for the price of a beer. That was in the ‘50s, before the clubs went topless and the beat poets went underground.

Although much of the bohemian look remains and the houses on the hillsides haven’t changed much, the high-priced restaurants have moved in, and tourists are clogging Broadway and Columbus like herds of hungry wildebeests.

We weren’t there as cultural critics but to witness the transition of Teengirl from a rebellious kid to a young adult. You remember Nicole. She’s 20 now and soon to be 21, back from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to begin anew in the city by the bay.

She gave up Chicago and a first love with considerable emotional pain to enroll at the graceful, 136-year-old San Francisco Art Institute, where budding artists learn to use the tools and techniques that will someday fashion images of the soul.

Twentygirl came under our care during her last year in high school when a family clash sent her scurrying off like a tiger cub seeking its turn in the jungle. Demanding independence, she thrust herself too soon into a world of adulthood and came away with tears in her eyes. She learned, as we all learn, that pain is often the price of independence.

She has her own apartment now just off Oakland’s Telegraph Avenue and catches a BART train to the city three days a week for classes. The rest of her time is taken up working at a video store and, of course, painting.

It’s not just Grandpa talking when I tell you that she was born with a talent to draw that manifested itself at age 6, when she was creating fantasy figures and cartoon characters with whatever sketching equipment was handy. Teachers let her follow her heart when it came to drawing, and now she’s refining what emerges from secret inner places and being noticed beyond the confines of art school. A gallery in the U.K. has already asked to exhibit her work.

With her artistic talent came a mercurial nature that often exploded into flashes of rockets and Roman candles, and a defiance of authority represented by anyone who could tell her no and mean it. A chaotic room, late nights and indolent days became expressions of what she considered her right of independence.

We all learn that life comes with a price and that talent demands payments of time and concentration to fulfill its destiny. Moving to Chicago, she learned during her year there how hard it could be in the winters of her growing up and walked away from a first serious relationship to begin anew in San Francisco, older and steadier.

Except for paintings-in-progress leaning against a wall and a collection of paints, brushes and other tools of her art piled on a living-room table, her small apartment is tidy and well-kept, which in itself is a departure from the earlier life she seems to have abandoned. She’d left her room at home looking as if it had been jolted by an 8.6 earthquake, throwing everything to the floor. By comparison, her apartment is pristine.

Art reflects what’s going on inside an artist’s head, and I noticed in Twentygirl’s self-portraits a change from the pink-haired rebel under siege by an adult world to more mature portraits, darker and with a somber mien.

The fact that she has only one of her paintings on the wall of her apartment, and it’s an almost classical self-portrait of the new and more serious Twentygirl, speaks for her maturation process. She’s growing up.

One views these kinds of moments with different emotions. Both Cinelli and I and her parents are glad she’s reaching for adulthood, but there’s much of the little girl she was that one longs for. Before teenage years sent her marching to the barricades of personal revolution, there was the sweetness of the early years, when she didn’t feel as if she knew everything there was to know, when questions fluttered like butterflies at the edges of her limited vision. She walked with a hand in ours, uncertain of the trail.

Now she strides with the self-confidence of experience but realizes also how much there is to learn. The newest self-portrait wears an expression of uncertainty amid the shadowy tones that surround it, while announcing by the skill of its creation that Twentygirl is at last exploring the artist within the woman within the girl, and slowly discovering exactly who she is.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at al.martinez@latimes.com.