Robert Vargas drew his first nude 29 years ago when he was three. As his mother dashed from the shower to her room, Vargas captured her in crayon. Then as now, the female form was an inspiration. With commanding technical skill, an intimacy with his media and an exuberant, expressive style, he is on top of his game.
At the lively Tuesday night figure drawing workshops at Jim Fittipaldi’s Bedlam Warehouse on E. 6th Street in the Arts District, he is an anomaly: amidst the easels, on all fours at the foot of the model stand, surrounded by a clutter of oil paint and charcoal and never distracted by onlookers. His finished product has a lyrical beauty that is at times grotesque and well informed (Francis Bacon and Ralph Steadman come inevitably to mind). Like those artists, he works fast —watching him, you get the sense that he would like to spout oil paint from his fingertips so the distance between his brain and his canvas would be shorter.
A graduate of Pratt in Brooklyn, he already has some impressive accomplishments: two murals at the Gene Autry Museum, a mask in the Southwest Museum, a mural at the Edmund P. Edelman Children’s Court. But one of the most surprising things about Vargas is his relationship with the octogenarian model, Miyoko.
Vargas affectionately calls her the High Priestess of Models. Living around the corner from Skid Row, Miyoko skirts about downtown in a mink coat, but she doesn’t have a telephone. Rail thin and with skin like rice-paper, she is always dressed in a corseted teddy and knee high leather boots. In the summertime, Miyoko races from her drawing sessions with Vargas to the lunchtime concerts at Pershing Square to dance. She still employs delicate gestures and moved with a grace that reflect her training in the tea ceremony and other traditional arts in pre-war Japan.
Vargas first drew Miyoko at LACHSA when he was 15. It was her hair that fascinated him first: a shock of black that seemed to leap from her head. The hidden strength in her gestures helped him develop the techniques he uses today—from his method of applying value to the form to the rotation and weight of his lines. “Miyoko makes me gasp when she poses. Whether you like her or not, you react to her,” he says. Like Vargas’s work, Miyoko’s form cannot be taken in one glance: simple, yet complex. But after LACHSA, he didn’t see her for a decade.
At 30, soon after he had given up a career as a talent buyer for the Conga Room (booking the likes of Celia Cruz and Tito Puente) to go back to “what I was put on earth to do,” he was ambling through the streets and passed a now-peppered coiffeur on Broadway. Elated, he stopped Miyoko in the street. The meeting felt like kismet. Since that day he draws her weekly—and uses Miyoko as the model for his Sunday art classes.
Since 2005, Vargas has been a part of downtown’s renaissance. From his third floor loft above Gallery Row, the streets he observed as a child visiting his mother at work at Bullocks’ Seventh and Broadway offices continue to inspire him. He has tender affection for the rough, almost uninhabitable downtown of the ‘80s, ‘90s, and its present “New York-style loft living” incarnation. “The textures of the city have found their way onto my canvases, in subject matter and an abstract, expressive style,” he says.
He is a flâneur—watching the slow renovation of theaters and office buildings as they begin to recall downtown’s glory days. Vargas visits the Biltmore Hotel to steal a glance of friezes of the Lakota Sioux above the doorways, reflecting on his Native and Mexican heritage, and take in the Art Deco and Beaux Art buildings on nearby streets. Born and raised in Boyle Heights, a mile from downtown, he remembers watching from his porch on City View Avenue the US Bank building going up and wanting to make his own mark among the towers.
Though he has received much attention for his work from the East to the West Coast, he beams brightest when he discusses his most recent commission: an indoor mural at the newly renovated Salesian High School in Boyle Heights, which he attended before transferring to LACHSA. The Salesian priests gave him free reign to design and paint the largest mural in the school. He is incorporating themes of Catholicism, school pride, and the heritage of his community. “It’s exciting to give back to my neighborhood. Downtown is my home, but this is where it started,” says Vargas
In a time when an artist’s ability to create themselves as a brand is often championed as their biggest achievement, Vargas is wary of conflating effective marketing with fine art. He could be called a Chicano or Southwest artist, but those labels grow stale. “Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueros, sure they are Mexican painters, but their work transcends nationality. They are part of the canon because of the strength of their work and what they had to say,” Vargas says. “I don’t want to become formulated or schematic. With each piece, I am trying to formally and conceptually advance my work.”
Though Vargas draws on the influence of John Singer Sargent, Velasquez and the Abstract Expressionists of the New York School, his work is not mimetic. As Ginna Christensen, who is featuring Vargas’ work at a Beverly Hills art show on May 3rd, observes, “It’s surprising watching him create. Each pose, each model evokes a different style.” In the “Battle for Heaven” series, Vargas departs from the Romanticism of early and recent works with illustrative vignettes that show transactions between prostitutes, drug dealers, and the homeless he has seen in downtown. His stylistic approach — expressive, deconstructed figures—allow the viewer to focus on the vicious circles of downtown’s destitute, not the aesthetics.
Every week, three to five students gather with Vargas and Miyoko in his loft. Before they start their class, they drink tea. Vargas treasures this simple ritual. “It feels like I’m completing a circle by using Miyoko,” he says. Vargas nurtures peers from Bedlam who have sought instruction. HE says, “part of being a working artist is contributing to the dialogue in the community. While teaching, I think about the figure differently, I think about my work, my influences, and feel rejuvenated in a path of constant discovery.
Robert Vargas’ work will be on exhibit at the Divani Showroom in Beverly Hills.