Of murals and mystics

In the five decades since Carlos Loarca first picked up a paint brush, art has served him as a hobby, a vocation, a means of self-expression and something far more valuable and elusive—the key to understanding the universe.

“Painting formed me completely into what I am today,” Loarca said last week in a phone interview from his home in the Bay Area. “And what I think that I am is an individual of the world, and of this Earth, and I am part of a creator.”

Loarca, today in his 70s and an internationally known painter and muralist, spoke at length—his voice still retaining a thick Central American accent—about how painting began as a lark and grew into his life’s work and the means of finding personal enlightenment. A collection of his works will be on display at Avenue 9 Gallery June 13-July 19, with an opening reception Friday, June 13, and a presentation by the artist the following week, Saturday, June 21.

Raised in the largely Mayan mountain village of Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, Loarca moved to the United States in 1955 at the age of 18 and, after several years of working odd jobs, wanted to see more of the world.

“I decided to join the Army with the idea they would send me to Europe, and they did so,” he said, explaining that most of his three-year stint was served just outside Paris, his weekends spent soaking in the city’s museums, cathedrals and monuments.

It was also in France where Loarca ran across a sergeant who’d grown frustrated with a paint-by-numbers set and was ready to throw the kit away.

“I said I’d put it in the trash for him, but my first thought was it was an opportunity to try painting,” he recalled. “I didn’t have any idea what or how to paint, but that was OK, because I figured after I was done I could just put it in the trash where it was going anyway.”

Loarca remembered a postcard he’d picked up in a Paris museum of Henri Matisse’s “The Dance” and, inspired by its simple color scheme and free-flowing human forms, began to copy it from memory. To his surprise he liked the results, as did a bar owner near the military base who asked if she could keep it. Upon returning to San Francisco, he bought another paint-by-numbers (“I remember all they had was clowns,” he said with a laugh), flipped it over and executed another from-memory loose copy, this time of Pablo Picasso’s “Woman With a Blue Veil.” He also enrolled in an art class, but soon found his “dimensions were too powerful for the size of the paper.”

Loarca’s paintings remain large, and he’s painted murals in San Francisco’s Mission Cultural Center, General Hospital and airport. He’s also done murals with homeless children in Guatemala City, Honduras and the former USSR.

Since early in his career, Loarca has incorporated the folklore of his native country and its indigenous Mayan population into his art, most notably through the appearance of “El Cadejo,” a dog-like animal spirit, part of whose duties included guiding drunks home from bars. Loarca credits the spirit with helping him beat his own alcoholism, and the artist’s depiction of El Cadejo has changed and aged as Loarca himself has.

As his career progressed, so did his philosophy, Loarca said: “Little by little, I put together my interest and desire and discoveries and worked in my head how I was related to the infinite, how I was related to eternity. By painting I began to realize I could use any color, any form I wanted, I could use any direction of land or space, and I didn’t have to give an explanation of what I was doing, even to myself. … I realized if I made a line, I was creating something that was not part of this world before. It was my own line.”

Loarca explained that making art led him to a humbling realization that he was at once a creator and a part of creation, that all living things are unique and connected and much more that he’ll likely touch upon during his June 21 presentation.

“All these things come from learning the discipline of painting,” Loarca said. “There are elements in painting, like space and form and light—these elements help you understand better the formation of things in life.”