By Alexa Gromko
“I’m doing now what I wanted to do originally,” says Colorado muralist Emanuel Martinez as he applies fresh paint to his 37-year-old mural, Arte Mestiza, which spans the concrete wall of the parking lot of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College. “I am representing the artists whose work I am painting with more color, greater detail, and better accuracy.”
Thanks to a fifty-thousand dollar grant from the National Endowment for the Arts gifted to the Fine Arts Center for this restoration project in June, Martinez is breathing new life into Arte Mestiza with an explosion of color, lending a newfound vibrancy that makes every panel in the two-thousand square foot mural pop.
“Murals belong to everybody. They’re public property,” Martinez says. “They reflect the community and tell a story.” They are also part of his mission, the
Chicano/a/x Community Murals of Colorado Project, which is trying to save all of the murals that have been painted in the state since the late 1960s.
Students from the CC Art Studio Foundations Drawing course, taught by Senior Lecturer and Artist-in-Residence Jean Gumpper, spent a class listening to Martinez describe his technique, in which he uses a fishing rod tipped with a piece of charcoal to map out the boundaries so that the large mural is sketched to scale. He then paints it one square foot at a time, working in a grid pattern. The students had practiced the method in class and were amazed by his talent.
