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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
So now De La Vega will face the court with the possibility of up to a year of jail time. It will also put him at a much higher risk of a tougher sentence if he continues making street art when he is released. And it's a particularly dangerous moment for an artist who has seemed to be close to the brink of widespread success, a Basquiat to be, but who has yet to commercially break out of the East Harlem community he stays loyal to.
Not that his art is contained there. On any given morning, De La Vega will go out early and choose a location and an aphorism that suits his mood, selecting from 150 or so he has stored in his head. Some of them are quotations; others are stirred by his reading. When I first met him, he was reading the poems of Pablo Neruda. A well-worn Bible is frequently at his side; Ecclesiastes is a particular inspiration.
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De La Vega had a new chalking in his head on that first warm spring day I visited his studio. He felt trapped inside, unable to open the floor-to-ceiling glass windows, and there was no air conditioning, so we spilled out onto the street, a fruit stall on one corner, a communal garden in the middle of the block, and as people passed, they greeted James and he greeted them. Many know him as a prominent man in the community, someone with gravitas, despite his youth.We crossed the street in search of a smoother sidewalk and then, without saying another word, he bent down and began his drawing. It was abstract, a series of geometrical and morphed forms one on top of the other, like a series of acrobats climbing on each other's shoulders at the circus. I stood at a distance and watched the drawing take shape, moving with James upward and away from Third to Lexington Avenue, and then he suddenly stopped and signed "De La Vega" at the bottom. The drawing was playful, and also mysterious. I asked a passerby what he thought it meant and he said, as though it were the most obvious lesson in the world: "Life must be in balance." The communication between the artist and his neighbors seemed as kinetic as the drawings.
De La Vega painted his first wall portrait in 1993 after a teenage drug dealer he knew was killed. "Sam's family asked me to paint a memorial for him on a public wall on 102nd Street," he explains. "It was my gift to the neighborhood, to the parents. People stopped by to watch me paint and I realized, this is where I belong, out on the street making art." Tragedy has touched his life, as it has touched a lot of the young men raised in El Barrio. De La Vega's father died of AIDS in 1989. And although his younger brother is doing well now, he once belonged to a gang. Men and boys he knew and loved have fallen dead, but he has resurrected them through his portraits, painted boldly on the bricks of the neighborhood, giving the walls new life. "The walls breathe again," he has said.
Unlike the chalkings or wall paintings, which feel easier to render and loosen him, the portraits and paintings he makes in the studio are a discipline. They are mostly self-portraits or portraits of his mother, Elsie Matos -- she is ubiquitous in his work -- or his daughter, or other family members, or political leaders. Some of the paintings are lightly stenciled, playful and light; others are volcanic and dense. He only uses acrylic, which he applies with thick brushes and a palette knife. These dense paintings are often disturbing, particularly the self-portraits. And this is puzzling; De La Vega has beautiful, near-perfect teeth, and his smile is broad and engaging. He is soft-spoken and thoughtful, with the manners of a gentleman.
"It's the animal in me," De La Vega explains. "The animal in all of us that I paint."
