His wife’s photographs and her likeness are a nice complement to David Martinez’s little mural
By Theo Douglas

“LA CATRINA” by DAVID A. MARTINEZ

Without the women in painter David Martinez’s show at Picture This Gallery, he’d be nothing. And you wouldn’t have a show. Fortunately, Martinez loves women; and his admiration for them—his students, Picture This owner Mattie Gomez, his wife Velia Garcia-Martinez (whose photographs comprise half the exhibit)—and their influence are what make “Power, Beauty and Grace” a rich, vibrant collaboration.

Start with the gallery owner, Gomez. She met Martinez several years ago at a Dia de los Muertos celebration at Self Help Graphics & Art in East Los Angeles—where, in a nod to the Mexican holiday, her face was made up like a skull and she was dressed in traje de charro, the short black jacket/tight black pants/sombrero outfit of the modern mariachi. Martinez liked the result so much that he took her picture—and used it as the basis for the signature canvas of “Power, Beauty and Grace,” La Catrina.

It’s impressive on the show’s flyer, but in person it’s a stunner. Martinez waxes all painterly on Gomez’s face, in ghastly yellows and greens with soulful brown eyes (though she swears it doesn’t look like her). He then tightens his style into fine graphic form to render her ornate sombrero and clothing. The edges of the sombrero—an intricate mesh of silver and black—resemble those hand-cut tissue paper Day of the Dead scenes that vendors sometimes sell during the celebration. It’s a nice touch.

Catrina sets the tone stylistically for Martinez’s remaining works, which hang on the edge between painting and graphic—with, in some of his other backgrounds, a touch of modern graffiti murals.

Martinez studied with muralist George Yepes at East Los Angeles College, and the science of muralology shows in his Nuestra Madre (Mary), a portrait of—what else?—a proud woman in a long black robe fringed in yellow. She’s framed and softened by glorious, golden light that makes hard contrasts on her indignant face. You could definitely see this replicated, magnified five or 10 times, on a Hollywood Freeway embankment. It’d be perfect. Here, it’s just a perfect little mural.

Elsewhere, on My Angel, My Muse—a woman with the face of Martinez’s wife but the body of one of his students, Gomez says—he gets painterly again, making her face a study in subtlety but silhouetting her against a backdrop of what resembles petrified wood or quartz outcroppings (if painted by the Seventh Letter). It’s a nice juxtaposition.

• • •

Against all her husband’s color, Velia Garcia-Martinez’s black-and-white close-ups of cacti, native plants, and wide-open spaces become even more stark than they already are. All the usual suspects are here: Hojas/Leaves shows something in the spiky-bladed aloe area of the cacti spectrum; Agave/Agave delivers one of those lush, fan-bladed cacti that, given a 30-year head start, will begin to dwarf a man; Cholla/Cholla (many cacti are bilingual) fixates on those spiky little hairballs that are like giant burrs; Nopal/Cactus is that paddle-bladed cactus also seen in traditional Mexican salads—or canned, at a mercado near you (or sometimes at Ralphs).

We’ve all seen cacti—this is, after all, still a desert. And each example here is presented in a gloriously hazy black-and-white that makes you want to kill your lawn and go native (that or the hike in Long Beach water prices). And yet, all that beautiful black-and-white makes you long for something that Garcia-Martinez just doesn’t have: color—which her husband’s art has in abundance. They complement each other. And art imitates life.

POWER, BEAUTY AND GRACE PICTURE THIS GALLERY & CUSTOM FRAMING 4130 NORSE WAY | LONG BEACH 90808 | 562.425.4861 | OPEN TUES-FRI 10 AM-6PM | SAT 10AM-2PM | THROUGH AUG 31