Southwest Art Magazine Louis Escobedo
As a boy growing up in Sweetwater, Texas, Louis Escobedo wasn’t thinking about making a career of art. He was thinking about surviving and about getting out of the town that wasn’t taking him anywhere. At 15 he had already worked several years in the cotton fields starting his days at 3:00 AM and working from the moment the sun cracked the horizon until late in the afternoon. It was time to make a change. That year he saved some money – enough to support himself for a while and to buy a one-way bus ticket out of town.
There are things in Louis Escobedo’s life that he says he just can’t explain. He says it’s a small voice, his intuition, that guides him along the right path. Leaving his mother, father, brothers and sisters at such a young age was one of those decisions. But having the tenacity to follow through is the ingredient that has propelled him into the life of a respected fine artist and teacher.
At the end of his bus ride, 15 year old Escobedo found himself in another small town but this time in east Texas. He said he picked Corsicana because it had trees; he thought it was pretty. He found a job washing dishes about the same time his parents decided to go find him. He hadn’t planned on continuing his education but when his family moved to him, he was able to finish high school. Though he was never encouraged to paint or draw, fellow students frequently called on his talent and one in particular planted the seed of an idea that he could actually make a living as an artist – something he had never considered before.
His intuition hasn’t always coaxed him to move on, however. One evening while still in high school it whispered in his ear as a young woman walked through the door at a dance. He leaned over and told a friend standing next to him, “Oh man, I think I’m going to marry her.” His friend was shocked that Escobedo could say such a thing about someone he’d never met, but sure enough he did marry that girl – Yolanda Martinez – when he was 18. Together they embarked on his pursuit of art, a pursuit that has taken him from a small town in east Texas to Sam Houston University in Huntsville, where he earned a BFA in advertising design, then into aerodynamics, illustration and on to a career as a fine artist. Since then he’s traveled around the United Sates, through Latin America and to Europe in search of subjects for his painting.
But even with an inner voice prompting him, Escobedo has never been one to make rash decisions. Instead he has carefully planned his course to determine the best route to the place he wants to be. Even out of college, when he found a job as a technical illustrator for a helicopter and aircraft manufacturer, it was a good paying job but not what he really wanted to do. He was painting with an airbrush but was drawn to illustrations in oils. Knowing he wanted something more, after work in the evening he sought out other contemporary illustrators and he studied the works of N.C. Wyeth and Dean Cornwall. He said, “That’s when I started to understand the illustrators. I started to pick apart oil paintings and from there I evolved. As I would learn one artist’s work another name would pop up, then another and another.”
Soon Escobedo was supplementing his day job with freelance illustration work, enough so that he eventually quit the aircraft company and went out on his own. Yet still he wanted to further his knowledge and grow in his craft. He began to take workshops from the fine artists he respected – many of whom lived in Colorado. He said, “Some of the greatest artists were here at one time, in one area and they inspired me. Mark Daily, Bill Sharer, Zhang Wen Xin, Michael Lynch, and Richard Schmid. That’s why I came here. I felt like I jumped ten times forward when I got here just being around those artists. It was the osmosis thing.”
That was almost 20 years ago. In that time, Escobedo’s work has grown to where he says now he is having fun with it, he doesn’t have to struggle like he used to. “I’ve always felt I was a little behind. I’ve had to work hard to catch-up,” he said. “I didn’t start painting in oil until I was 32 years old. I took oil painting in college but the instructor didn’t teach the basics. I didn’t even go to a museum until I was out of college. I’ve had a lot to learn.” And though on his own he’s had to search out his mentors through books and workshops, Escobedo would never say he was self-taught. “I learn from everyone around me. Just being in a place I learn something then I go home and paint,” he said. “Some artists are born to be taught; at 15 they start studying under somebody. I wish I could have done that but I didn’t have anybody. I was just trying to survive.”
Aside from having more fun painting, Escobedo says he’s also stopped searching out artists like he used to. He believes that this is his time to learn from himself, from working tirelessly, painting and seeing, and even throwing a lot of things away. “I want to get away from everything and see nothing. I just want to paint,” he said. “I don’t want to know anything. In books, I found a lot of inspiration -- I love books, that’s how I learned. But anymore I want to get away from things. All artists want to get away. It’s a good thing. It makes them evolve. It makes them stronger and allows something else to come. That’s when creativity really jumps to its max.”
After all this time, he says he doesn’t have a set way of starting or completing a painting. He says prefers trying different approaches as a way to keep surprising himself. Part of that surprise comes through the colors he chooses. He says that what makes his work completely unique to him or to any artist, for that matter, is color. “I could get somebody else beside me painting the same thing and their colors would be completely different. I’ve told students that I don’t know if I could teach them color because color is almost like a person’s own signature. I can tell you how to mix paint to get a color but I can’t teach you how to paint it.” And, he said, “I’ve never seen anybody with my colors. I’ve seen people who are colorful but in a different way.”
What Escobedo says he’s found in this phase of his career is that the basics like good design, form and value are all there but now he’s able to give his viewers a taste of what it was like to be in the room where he worked, to feel what the day was like. He is able to express something bigger in his work. Part of that is the subject matter he is drawn to, or rather, ‘the things that find him’. He said, “It’s funny, sometimes I just walk by something and -- boom -- there’s a picture. I don’t pick it – it doesn’t work like that. It grabs me.”
Of course, putting yourself in places where interesting subjects can find you is important, too. Escobedo travels a good part of the year around the U.S. and to places like San Miguel, Mexico, Northern Italy and Latin America. He’s even wandered into some pretty dangerous situations while on his quest. One particular trip to Ecuador was quite nerve wracking. In a town where he stayed the night waiting to catch a train, he recalled, “They were having political rallies and upheaval. People were drinking and there were gun shots all night long. I thought, Oh, no, how did I get myself into this? I couldn’t make a run for it with 80 pounds of art supplies in my backpack. Then about 5:00 in the morning I heard this POW! and then I heard this guy go UGH! When daylight broke I had to get out of that town.” He rode a train – literally on top of the train -- that took him through the jungles past banana trees and steep cliffs that just fell away from the rails to a safer part of the country.
Perhaps his story is not so different from other success stories: small town boy makes good. But like each person’s finger print is uniquely their own, Louis Escobedo’s journey from Sweetwater to Denver, past riots and jungles to sleepy Italian villages and all the other places in between, have brought him to this space where he is truly content and truly happy to be making his way as an artist.