Talking Walls: The Murals of George Chacón

"Wonders of Water" detail (Photo and copyright by George Chacón)

November 23, 2011

In the caves of Southern France, beasts gallop across the limestone, finally arriving 30,000 years later.

The tenderness of lovers lingers in the ancient Roman frescos of Pompeii.

Propaganda shouts from multi-story images of Chairman Mao and Calvin Klein ads, while Diego Rivera leads us through the history of Mexico and portrays its struggles with class inequity.

"Man, Controller of the Universe" (By Diego Rivera)

For millennia, people have scratched, drawn and painted on walls, making their mark on the world. George Chacón is one of them. On public buildings and in private homes, his colorful murals in Taos, New Mexico take us up to the mountains and under the sea, back to the past and here to what is right before us.

"Ama Dablan Khumbu Range, Nepal Himalaya" San Cristóbal, New Mexico (Photo and copyright by George Chacón)

George has been making art all his life. And he was doing just that when I met him 30 years ago in a summer oil-painting class at Western Washington University in Bellingham. Here I was, my first crack at this, awkwardly dabbing muddy mauves into starfish shapes, while a few easels down, this guy’s swift, confident brushstrokes made those boulders of his punch right through the canvas. One afternoon, we played around with my oil pastels. I don’t know whatever became of the drawing I did, but I still have George’s.

(Detail of untitled drawing and copyright by George Chacón)

“What an old piece . . . and one of those drawn from the wellspring of my subconscious,” he says of this picture that he hadn’t seen since that day, until I emailed it to him three decades later. We never stayed in touch once we both left town at summer’s end, then a few months ago I Googled him. I was so happy to see he was still doing his art.

Born in Saguache, Colorado, George inherited his father’s and grandfather’s “good hands,” as he says in a YouTube interview. Since childhood, those hands have gripped crayons, held paintbrushes, and cut through stone and wood. He studied art at Colorado State University and Western Washington University, but is basically self-taught.

Over 70 of George’s murals grace vertical surfaces in Taos. His “El Santero,” in the heart of town, is a 22-year-old landmark, and has appeared in Skiing magazine and Collier’s Encyclopedia Yearbook (1991), among other publications.

"El Santero" 1989 (Photo by Jill Caven and copyright by George Chacón)

Walls at Taos Ski Valley, Taos Middle School and the Taos Public Library also have welcomed his brushes. In 1998, he was commissioned by the Town of Taos to paint the Taos Timeline Murals on a wall adjacent to the Town Hall complex.

George painting the Taos Timeline murals (Photo and copyright by Jeff Caven)

Along with his mural art, George does oils, acrylics, etchings, drawings, monotypes, mixed media, pastels, and woodcarvings; and as a fine woodworker, also builds custom furniture. He even plays congas, bongos and timbales, having studied Afro-Cuban music for over 30 years.

George playing with Los Lobos, 2002 (Photo courtesy of Taos Solar Music Festival)

For just as long, George’s art has been enjoyed by studio/home visitors and private collectors, and has received several awards. His website shows portraits and nudes, landscapes and architecture, and Hispanic and native scenes.

Nude Study, ink and brush (Photo and copyright by George Chacón)

"Marisol of Equador" pastel on paper, 18.5x26.5 (Photo and copyright by George Chacón)

"Valley Near Tequila, Jalisco, Mexico" oil, 16x20 (Photo and copyright by George Chacón)

"La Casa de Mi Vecinos" pastel on sanded paper (Photo and copyright by George Chacón)

"Mayan Woman with Calla Lillies" monotype and acrylics (Photo and copyright by George Chacón)

"Canoe Races, Nooksack Tribe, 1980" acrylics (Photo and copyright by George Chacón)

"Summit of Mt. Elbert" acrylics (Photo and copyright by George Chacóon)

Shortly after George left Bellingham for Colorado, he met his wife Beverly; and their three daughters now are about as old as we were then.

The Chacón family (Photo and copyright by George Chacón)

Since 1983 he’s lived in Taos, where he talked with me by phone last summer, after all this time. We’d finish the 30-year catch-up later, but right now it was about his art.

Claire Sykes: You live in such a beautiful place, and many of your murals offer up these sweeping vistas of Taos. What’s your favorite view?

George Chacón: The one right out my front window every morning. When we built this house 24 years ago, we placed the large living room window to look out at the Taos Mountains, located on the Taos Pueblo Reservation. The mountains completely dominate in Taos. And at sunset, shadows cast against them and it breaks the mountain in a prism of shades of light and dark. It’s pretty amazing.

I’ve painted that view on canvas many times over different seasons, and it’s changed over the years—different skies and light. The Taos light is why painters come here. We’re witness to it every day, all year round. And at sunset, it moves from tangerine to orange to crimson. The air seems to fill with this iridescence.

CS: Light is an object itself in your work, isn’t it?

GC: I’m glad you see that. Culturally, my mestizo heritage, both Spanish and native, dwells in the mysteries of light and dark. And we have a strong mestizo element here in Taos with the essence of the land, and light as a dominating factor. Through the ages, various human conditions have brought humankind to be observant of the light within us, all seated in a dark universe. Out of darkness comes light. The famous Spanish poet, [Federico Garcia] Lorca wrote about this. He also often wrote of the duende, the wellspring of the creative spirit that an artist seeks.

As painters, one of our challenges is to capture light. I’ve been chasing it all my life. I like to go out and paint plein aire. That’s when I do smaller paintings. They help by serving as studies of landscape and light when I’m working on murals or creating out of my head. You have only an hour and a half to capture the light, because it shifts. The challenge is to try to paint it in that time, but it often takes longer, so you rely on memory if you’re finishing in the studio.

CS: How else do you keep your paintbrush nimble?

GC: I do figure studies and portraits, weekly. I attend two groups of artists that pitch in for models, and this allows us to afford them, and be disciplined. The portraits are three-hour studies, and the figures here are 20-minute studies.

"Dine Woman" oils (Photo and copyright by George Chacón)

"Model with Duster and Hat" oils (Photo and copyright by George Chacón)

Figure study, conte pencil (Photo and copyright by George Chacón)

Figure study, conte pencil (Photo and copyright by George Chacón)

CS: You work from studies, and I know you map out your murals. Have you created any on the spot?

GC: The owner of a house here in Taos Ski Valley gave me carte blanche to paint whatever murals I wanted inside all three levels of this family home. It’s rare for an artist, especially a muralist, to get a commission from a patron saying just do what you want. It’s the best commission an artist could ask for.

Instead of having to give sketches and stick to a plan, the chains were released and I was free. I didn’t have any idea of what I was going to paint until I started painting. I prefer not to have any plan and just start painting with no preconceptions, letting it evolve and that way grow on its own, out of my own jurisdiction, and let the creative juices come out. When the creative spirit comes through, that’s when duende appears, hopefully. I’m the vehicle for it. And that’s really important for me.

But then there’s the challenge of this blank wall. I knew I wanted the murals in this home to be pleasant for those who live there, but still exciting for me to paint. I thought of landscape and wildlife from all over, and breaking these walls open because it’s very claustrophobic in these canyons of Taos Ski Valley. The house is right up against those trees and mountains, and I wanted to give people in the home visual relief. That was the challenge. So I started with the architecture. I wanted to open it up, and at the same time give credence to the natural, physical place.

The mural in the stairwell is high and narrow. I painted it in earth tones, with a rainbow near the top to brighten up a dark spot. It’s all out of my head, without the help of studies.

"Stairway to Heaven" (Photo and copyright by George Chacón)

The murals in the dining and living rooms, in the middle level of the home, are also created from my own inventiveness. Here, I wanted to capture the alpenglow. Up high in the living room side, I have two eagles in a free fall, with talons interlocked preparing for a last-minute mating ritual before releasing. At the front door, a cougar greets guests who may be arriving for dinner. The house is built on an extremely sloping hillside. I wanted to give the viewer the sensation that if you stepped through the wall, you’d tumble down into the valley below and into the soft snow.

(Photo and copyright by George Chacón)

On the lowest level, I painted the desert, as it is the coldest part of the home and I wanted the terrain to warm it up, visually. Here, I portrayed a wolf and her pup, an owl in a saguaro cactus, and eagles and canyons. On the third level, in the master bedroom, I painted the Serendipity Range near Banff, Canada. The fiords of the South Island of New Zealand and its glorious range with birds of many different feathers, and waterfalls from New Zealand’s Alps seen in The Lord of the Rings are in one of the children’s rooms. In this same room, in a quiet ladder area to access a loft, I have a mermaid and a flying swan in the fiords of Scandinavia.

CS: So much of your art celebrates the natural world, but also you’ve done murals that are very Hispanic. How does your art speak of your ethnic heritage?

GC: One thing I purposefully do is not duplicate what many Chicano or Mexican artists have done. They’ll try to put a thousand pages of history on the wall, and it’s been done over and over and over. But I don’t like being pigeon-holed. I’m a contemporary Chicano who paints, an artist who happens to be Chicano and who paints. I’m not caught up in trying to paint my people, but I do.

"Mexican Folkloric Dancers" detail (Photo and copyright by George Chacón)

“El Santero,” done in 1989, reflects my historical culture, and is dedicated to the santeros of the past and present. It’s also dedicated to the craft of iconic art here in New Mexico for centuries, done for churches by the Hispanic craftsmen here. The artisans of the past did mostly religious artwork because the churches needed the iconography in the moradas, the little chapels where people worshiped. The artwork there is called bultos, which are sculptures of the saints; or paintings on flat pieces of wood, called retablos. These were done entirely of raw materials made by the craftsmen of the past, as there was no access to materials from Europe or Mexico in Northern New Mexico or Southern Colorado, which is the range that makes up my cultural heritage here.

George and Beverly with "El Santero" (Photo and copyright by Larry Chávez)

In this mural I didn’t include any religious imagery relating to traditional Catholicism, so as not to offend non-Catholics. But there’s symbolism—of family, a single parent (with the architecture leaning on her) and a positive individual who doesn’t have a family. I’m assigning sainthood to these people in our contemporary society, but in nontraditional forms and shapes symbolically representing an age-old tradition.

CS: What else do you consider when creating your murals?

GC: The materials. I’ve studied a lot about mural-making and materials used. Primers for early murals, done with oils, were made with gypsum and painted al seco (on dry plaster); frescoes are painted on wet plaster. They had to be done inside under protection from the elements or they would become damaged.

Doing interior and external murals, different concerns come into play. Now we know much more about walls and what materials are most compatible for murals. Today’s acid rains are destroying many ancient and not-so-ancient murals, and this is one reason acrylics were invented, to find a modern solution for modern times in regards to exterior art. Time will tell whether it is successful or not. But also, the salt from the ocean will affect the plaster, so you need a different primer up in the Pacific Northwest than down here in the Southwest, where walls are sandblasted by the wind or face the harsh, cold environment of the mountains.

CS: What about other muralists, or artists, in general? Who has especially influenced you?

GC: One of my favorite painters was José María Velasco, a professor at the Academy of San Carlos, in Valencia, Mexico. One of his students was Diego Rivera, whose landscapes were influenced by Velasco. Many of Velasco’s landscape paintings are very large, and when you stand before them, you enter into the realm of his vision. In Mexico, you’ll see all these beautiful murals with his influence.

CS: History figures strongly in your work, whether it’s your own culture’s or someone else’s. I’m thinking of your murals at Taos Ski Valley. Tell me about them.

GC: Ernie Blake, the founder of Taos Ski Valley, was German-Swiss. Before he passed away [in 2008], he wanted images on a new day-skiers facility, similar to the ones on the old facility. Ernie owned a book of 11th-century poetry, with imagery from the 13th century. On the tower and around the exterior of the new facility I painted Minnesingers, German poet-musicians of the 12th and 13th centuries. These small images were from the Byzantine Era of religious art, when Christianity was spreading to the north in Europe. They were in the collective memories of pre-Renaissance art there, and were similar throughout Europe. Then they were brought by the Spanish when they came here to the Southwest, in the 1400-1500s. I took elements of these line images from his little book and rearranged, reproduced and enlarged them to mural scale.

On another tower of Taos Ski Valley, located on the children’s daycare facility, I painted Ernie Blake’s family from his childhood in Switzerland as a ski jumper, with his grandmother on the Swiss Alps. The front wall on a 40-foot tower has a 20-plus-foot painting of his children and wife, during their founding years in the 1950s Taos Ski Valley, welcoming children to their ski school and daycare.

At the Hotel St. Bernard, for Jean Mayer, the founder and owner, whose passion is the mountains and skiing, I painted a pictorial history of skiing in 30 different murals. A few were painted panels attached to wood-plank walls often done above snow lines. I went back to early Scandinavian cave art that showed skiing as transportation for warriors and hunters all the way up to skiing today as a sport.

(Photo and copyright by George Chacón)

Detail (Photo and copyright by George Chacón)

CS: I can see how meaning and memory are preserved and conveyed in your murals, which serve as tributes to a person, place or time. How else do your murals contribute to the community?

GC: There are the ones I did on the interior walls at the Taos Youth and Family Center’s swimming pool. On one, I painted tiger sharks, a dedication to the Taos High School swimming team’s mascot. Another portrays Williams Lake, up in the high range near Taos at the base of Wheeler Peak, the highest peak in New Mexico. This mural is 50 feet wide by ten feet high, and portrays all the different wildlife you might see on any given day up there—eagles, bears, elk. And a third mural has divers at the cliffs of Acapulco against an orange sunset. When people are doing laps or especially when the therapeutic swimmers are in the water, they have a diversion, a calming visual to enjoy, and they get to see all these things they otherwise might never see.

CS: Like the underwater ocean scene on the exterior of the building. There’s a picture of someone helping you paint that. What’s the story there?

"Wonders of Water" (Photo and copyright by George Chacón)

GC: I wanted the youth of Taos to have an appreciation of our fragile oceans. So with the town’s approval and a local bank sponsor, in the summer of 2008, I had kids drop in after their swimming sessions to help me do this mural. Working with only two to three kids at a time, I gave them individual lessons on how to paint fish, outlining some for the younger kids. The older ones could see how they were participating in a community event, contributing to their community in a civil way. This mural was a sort of repeat; in 1994 I did another with kids in the original pool that was abandoned for the current, newer facility. Some of those kids are now the parents of these other kids, almost a generation later.

"Wonders of Water" (Photo and copyright by George Chacón)

"Wonders of Water" detail (Photo and copyright by George Chacón)

I’ve worked with two generations of students in Taos doing many murals with them. It gives kids an outlet for their creativity and a sense of civic pride. The parents get something out of it, too, and so does the city. The rewards are prismatic.

CS: What do you enjoy most about painting murals?

CG: I just love working on a large scale. I have always been inspired and awed by works of art larger than life, maybe because I grew up in a landscape so vast and endless that human efforts are minimized. Also, people have access to public murals, without stepping into a gallery. Murals reach a lot of people at one time. And that’s a good feeling, knowing that they go by my work every day, and I get a new audience with tourists when they come through. On a grand scale, artists are storytellers, visually sharing something that we’ve discovered, that excites us and that we want others to see. Artists are also risk-takers, and a muralist or public artist puts it all out there. In this sense, murals are almost invasive; whether you like it or not, they’re there, to be enjoyed or not.

CS: Maybe one day hundreds or thousands of years from now, someone will come upon your mural of the undersea creatures or the ancient skier, just like the people who discovered the prehistoric cave drawings or frescos of Pompeii. And they’ll wonder, Who was this George Chacón who painted these, and what other murals did he do that no longer exist?

GC: Already I’ve had several painted over or the buildings knocked down. But like my mother used to sing, “Que sera sera. Whatever will be with will be.” I don’t have any control over the life of my murals. I don’t know what kind of longevity my art will have. That’s the risk we muralists take.

George Chacón (Photo and copyright by Beverly Chacón)

Words © 2011 by Claire Sykes. All rights reserved.

Images © 2011 by George Chacón. All rights reserved.

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