The image is sparse, almost purposefully blank.
On first glance, it’s just a bench, seemingly nondescript against a pink and white background that loosely begins to form the shape of a building. A cross peaks out from over the top.
Artist Lori Slater, a former Lompoc resident who now lives and works in Cambria, painted the mural, known as Mission Abstract, for Lompoc back in 1989. She was one of three muralists asked to participate in the beginnings of what is now the Lompoc Mural Society. Her project: to create a mural of the entrance to the original La Purisima Mission, which was destroyed almost a century before.
“My project was to depict the original mission,” Slater said. “There is no record of it; there’s just some foundation left and some artists’ sketches of it. No one knows what it looked like.”
The message of Slater’s work is an open summons; the piece invites the viewer to become an active participant. Slater’s simple and bare design, highlighting a solitary bench, encourages the viewer to come contemplate and “complete the design in their own mind,” as the description on the Mural Society’s website states.
“It was about inviting someone in and making them a participant in deciding what meanings those simple designs have for them,” Slater explained. “And not giving them too much detail. Another kind of quality is the quality of silence that you get now. It’s a sanctuary.”
Decades since muralists such as Slater began painting murals in Lompoc, more and more artists have joined the effort to bring art to large public spaces in the city and far beyond. Northern Santa Barbara County is home to dozens of murals, both publicly and privately commissioned to beautify urban areas or to celebrate the region’s thriving Latino/Hispanic community and farming culture in a unique and vibrant way.
Artists emerge
The city of Lompoc continues to have one of the most thriving public mural programs on the Central Coast. Responsible for the bulk of the art on display is the Lompoc Mural Society, founded in 1988 with the idea of boosting economic rebuilding efforts through tourism sparked by an interest in public murals.
The first mural, Flower Industry, was painted in the late 1980s by Art Mortimer. Since then, more than 30 murals both publicly and privately commissioned, have sprung up over the city. Dozens of artists have participated in the effort to beautify the city.
One of the emerging muralists that organizations like the society has been able to support over the years is an artist who goes by the name VanTsa. A past member of the society, VanTsa was commissioned by a private homeowner in 2013 to paint a mural on a wall on her Lompoc property.
VanTsa, a Lompoc resident who began drawing as a child and was heavily influenced by graffiti culture, said he approached the project from an entirely freestyle point of view. He was assisted on the project by his girlfriend and fellow artist Kalli “Bumzigana” McCandless.
The mural, called A Lovely Murder, is a sprawling and stunning piece depicting crows emerging from a beautiful woman’s voluminous hair. The work is an homage to love, showing how “love is void of time, love is in the past, present, and future. Love can evoke the light and the dark from a person. Love can bury and it can also resurrect,” according to an artist’s statement on the society’s website.
It took more than five months of work for the artists to complete the mural, VanTsa explained.
“I didn’t have a sketch,” he said. “I didn’t really have anything in mind. I just came up with the idea as I worked. The day before, it had been vandalized. [The owner] had primed it and it sat there for a month, and then some kids drew all over all the wall. When we got there, we just started painting over the graffiti. It was one of those things where you just imagine as you paint.”
VanTsa said that as a member of Lompoc Mural Society, he was exposed to a variety of types of styles of artwork and subject matter. For him, A Lovely Murder was about bridging the gap between the older generations and younger generations of residents in Lompoc.
“A lot of the time it’s an us-versus-them type of thing,” he said. “So with this, I created a project where a lot of the youth can gravitate to it, but the older generation can still find something beautiful in it as well.”
Now, VanTsa is set to complete another privately commissioned mural in Lompoc, this time for PJ’s Deli. He started the work in January and plans to have it completed sometime in December. The piece is called LPC, both a reference to “love, peace, and creativity” as well as a shortened version of the word “Lompoc.”
“It’s kind of about changing the undertone,” VanTsa said of the mural’s theme. “A lot of times, people have negative thoughts about Lompoc. But there is so much going on in the community, and that perspective needs to change. We need something new. Let’s move forward with a different narrative than what we’ve been using.”
Embracing history
Slater had just began her career as an artist, living in Lompoc and commuting from the town to Santa Barbara for art shows, when she found out about the project to bring murals to Lompoc in the late 1980s.
“When I heard Lompoc had envisioned a town of murals, I had never done a mural before and it just sounded very exciting,” Slater said of her La Purisima Mission mural. “I am very familiar with the general architecture [of missions], so I wanted to pare it down to the essentials—a certain kind of bench we see at the missions, a certain kind of archway, a courtyard—distilling it down to the basic mission qualities.”
Now a successful working artist based in Cambria, Slater said her work with the mural made a significant impact on her career. She said she reached a wider audience than she ever had before with other projects.
“People from all walks of life see that mural, and they don’t have to be anywhere but out in that area to see it and participate in it,” she said. “They don’t have to be going to a gallery or museum or my home.”
One of the artists responsible for some of the most recognizable murals throughout the city is Lompoc artist Leonardo Nunez. Nunez, a soft-spoken and quietly reflective artist, has been painting murals in and around Lompoc for the past 30 years. Several of his works, including Rudolph Mansion, La Purisima Mission, and Latino Espreción are all popular sites to visit in Lompoc.
Nunez said Latino Espreción, completed in 1995, was made in cooperation with volunteers from Lompoc High School. The mural highlights some of the complex history of the relationship between Mexican Americans and the United States.
“It’s a Mexican American historical theme,” he explained. “It’s divided between a history of Mexico and California and Mexican American experiences in America. … That gave me a little bit of recognition, put me on a list of people the mural society would contact if they had another project.”
From there, he was commissioned to work on a mural depicting the long history of the La Purisima Mission and its reconstruction by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s, a job he got thanks to a local business owner who strongly recommended him. He said the steady mural work led to a strong following and a better reputation as an accomplished artist.
Nunez, who still continues to work on restoration of his now decades-old murals from time to time, said one of the things that surprised him most was the impact on Lompoc’s popularity following the installation of the murals.
“I never realized what an effect it had on tourism,” he said. “When I was out there restoring, there were many people who came from out of town. They had guidebooks and they were walking around checking out the murals.
“It was really good to be out there and meeting and talking with them. Some of them were international travellers and they were just out there looking for something to do and came to check out the art in Lompoc,” Nunez said. “And it seemed like they were really happy to see it.”
Beyond Lompoc
It’s not just Lompoc where murals are used as an expression of culture and history.
In Guadalupe, a series of mural projects started in 1990 has helped stake out its reputation as a home for important artwork as well. In Guadalupe—a rigidly proud agricultural community with deep Mexican American roots, roots buried deep in the soil of local farmlands—murals celebrate the pride and heritage there with a strong connection to the past.
At the heart of the effort is the Guadalupe Murals Project, which enlisted the aid of artist Judy Baca. Baca created four plywood panel murals, The Founders of Guadalupe, The Ethnic Contributions, The Farmworkers of Guadalupe, and The Future of Guadalupe. Each one focuses on a different aspect of the community’s history, with The Ethnic Contributions taking specific aim at ethnic conflict inside the small farming town.
In October, Guadalupe’s Dunes Center announced a partner with the Squire Foundation of Santa Barbara to create a new mural within the city. Photographer Lindsey Ross was selected to create a photo mural of local women on the wall of what was once the Far Western Tavern, soon to be the Dunes Center’s new home.
Santa Maria and Orcutt have also felt the influence of muralists, some of whom not only aspire to create community art but also have an impact on local activism.
On Sept. 30, with the wild noise of the Orcutt Children’s Arts Foundation’s sixth annual chalk festival in Orcutt whirring behind him, Ruben Espinoza remained unfazed and solidly focused. His eye was trained on several figure drawings he had sketched out, and he referred to them as his hand formed images on a large panel on an easel.
The artist meticulously crafted out the figure shapes for what he hopes will become another public mural. As he painted, he stood in front of a recently completed project of his—a mural on a wall depicting local scenery from Highway 101, commissioned by the owner of the barbershop housed in the building and completed in September.
Espinoza, who hails from Santa Maria originally, recently moved back to the area after a long stint working in Los Angeles as an animator. He had one major observation of his hometown after living away for so long.
“I had not visited Santa Maria in the 10 years I was gone,” he said. “That’s when you realize there’s no art here. I wondered, ‘Why isn’t there any art, and who can I talk to about it?’ I made it my goal to have murals or some sort of art project here.”
Espinoza has painted several murals in Los Angeles and other parts of California. The artist connects with local business owners to pitch them ideas on his vision for a mural and collaborates with them on the final idea. He said the process to bring art to a community like Santa Maria can be a bit more arduous.
“It just seems like in those areas and in larger cities, they’re more open to art,” he said. “I think it’s because they see it out in public so much more often. Once you see something like that, it makes sense to you. Whereas here, it’s so vague, what I’m showing to them. Even though I’m showing them images of my vision, sometimes they just don’t get how it works for or applies to them.”
Permits to get the work done are also challenging because Santa Maria has no direct ordinance that applies to public murals, he said. The business owners are reluctant to start work without a permit, but when approaching civic officials, artists are directed to just go ahead and paint, Espinoza said. He added that it ends up creating a “chicken or the egg” situation that can stall some projects.
“But if you get a complaint from another business or individual, you will have to remove [the mural],” he said. “That doesn’t really give a business much incentive to move forward with it.”
Espinoza said a lack of funding and an absence of a strong community art advocates like the Lompoc Mural Society, who can navigate civic issues and bring in established or emerging artists, can play a role in keeping murals out of areas like Santa Maria.
“It’s also a cultural thing,” he said. “People don’t see art as a necessity. They see it as a luxury that people frankly can’t afford. It’s not on their priority list because their priorities are things like putting food on the table. I just don’t think they see public art as as important as many other things.”
But as murals continue to pop up throughout the region, artists like VanTsa, Espinoza, Slater, and others will continue to push the public at large to see their overall value. For the artists themselves, it’s an opportunity to bring their work to brand new eyes and reinvigorate the perceptions of familiar ones.
“It’s about catching people unaware,” Slater said. “There are no barriers. It’s the idea of art for everyday people.”
Arts and Lifestyle Writer Rebecca Rose can be contacted at rrose@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Nov 30 – Dec 7, 2017.