Sitting in front of a fireplace in the home of a friend on an uncommonly chilly night, Luis Villegas pondered his lengthy career as an artist. "This is about it, this is what I can show for it," he said, pointing to an unfinished oil-on-canvas. "And I have an older sculpture in the other room," he added. On the floor near the sculpture in the other room was a mattress and a knap-sack. "This is where I stay," he explained.
The whereabouts of almost all original work by the 61 year-old Villegas is unknown, although with diligence some can be located. The mural in the foyer of the Fox Fine Arts Center on the campus of UTEP is his largest known existing work, and he recently finished a commission to paint three murals on the walls of an office on Texas St. There are some homes around town with paintings on their porch or bathroom ceilings, but he doesn't know what's become of almost all of his other art. "There must be hundreds of people with some of it, but I can't remember who," he shrugs.
"What bothers me isn't the stuff I don't know what happened
to, what bothers me is the stuff that went through my head that I never made."
He's been making stuff since he was growing up near the corner of Pera and
Piedras in the Forties and Fifties. "I had a teacher at Bell Elementary
who used to take us on sketching tours through the neighborhood, and I've
been making one kind of art or another ever since, and I've also always been
a musician."
He played the trombone as a Jefferson Silver Fox, was classified as a musician when he joined the Navy after graduation, and served in the band wherever he was stationed.
Most of the next 20 years were served in the District of Columbia Naval Yard, though he also journeyed around the world twice on aircraft-carriers. "Every time we hit a port anywhere in the world, I'd visit the museums and galleries."
It was his experiences in Washington that proved most formative aesthetically. "I became the graphic artist and set-designer for the Navy Band that performs on the Mall, and I got to design all kinds of sets and learned how to work with all kinds of materials, and I've drawn on what I learned there everyday since."
In the evenings he received a different kind of education. Despite a buzz-cut, he became a regular at a downtown hang-out called Coffee & Confusion where he got to know such underground luminaries as Ginsburg, Corso, Ferlinghetti and Kerouac, and through them he was introduced to the concept of "white writing," a notion that suggests that an artist is only a conduit. "This has been important to all the art and music I've ever made," Villegas attests.
He returned to El Paso In 1978 with a pension in his pocket, a Greco-American wife from Manhattan and a Greco-Hispanic-American daughter at his side. Realizing there might not be sufficient demand for a trombonist to feed the family, Villegas got a job as an exhibition specialist at the Fort Bliss Replica Museum, and he enrolled in the UTEP Art Department.
The arts were teeming in El Paso in the 80's, and Villegas was always involved. Whether on campus, at the Cokehouse, at Art a la Carte, the old Arts Alliance or Southwest Repertory Theater, at one of Gene Wilson's or Manny Acosta's many parties, at openings or fundraisers for the Bridge Center or Juntos, Villegas' work and his infectious laugh were present. It was then that he painted the mural for the Drama Department, placed a large metal sculpture in Civic Center Plaza, and exhibited at the Centro Culturál in the ProNaf.
It was also then that Villegas achieved a notoriety for casting
bronze molds of the torsos of many members of the El Paso arts community,
particularly the shapely, good-looking ones.
After the divorce, he and his wife sold their Eastside home and Villegas put
payment down on eight spacious desert acres near Hueco Tanks, took most of
his work with him and stored the rest of it at a friend's. When his friend
died suddenly, he waited a discrete amount of time to inquire of the family
the whereabouts of his work and discovered that they didn't know anything
about it. Shortly thereafter, thieves looted his desert retreat of most of
his belongings, including the documentation of all of his previous art. Everything
was scattered to the winds, and Villegas walked away.
"I decided I'd become a fine arts handyman, and now I live wherever my work takes me. Working on renovations and installations for other people isn't a way that I mind expressing myself," he contends, and he never has trouble finding work.
"He can do whatever anyone else envisions," says painter Steve Edwards. "If you can think it, Luis can do it."
"In hindsight, it's good that I was never successful selling my art. I'd be tied down to a lot of stuff that I don't care about. Now, I rely on all the information I've ever gathered, and whether it's mine or not, I make at least a little bit of art everyday, and making art is being an artist. My art is made in the spirit of adventure and discovery, and my life is lived in that same spirit. My art and my life are the same."
When asked what one word best describes that life, he matter-of-factly replies, "Oh, I'm still a musician. Everything is music."
© Richard Baron, 2002
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Richard baron is a writer, photographer and long-time arts activist who lives in El Paso. The above article is a slightly edited version of a profile originally published in 2002 in Stanton Street Weekly. Fresh profiles by Mr. Baron will return to The Newspaper Tree after the holidays. He can be reached at rbaron47@hotmail.com.
