There’s something significant going on downtown, and it’s scale is quite impressive. I heard about it from a friend, and drove down to inspect what was going on. At a noisy place, where I-10 meets I-35, right behind the Christopher Columbus Italian-American Society, there’s a very unremarkable urban parking lot. In that lot three young men pour skin-colored paint into big, hand-pump paint cans. Then they begin spraying the paint onto the asphalt.
“My name is Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada.”
Rodriguez-Gerada is the world renowned artist behind this project.
“This is my third time in San Antonio. We’re here in this parking lot and we’re going to do a piece that’s about a 100 by 150 feet. It’s going to be a beautiful piece to look at. People can walk on it, take pictures on the eye, that kind of thing.”
He and assistants Jose Cosme, Chris Montoya and Nat Stone are painting a portrait that’s a hundred feet by a hundred and fifty feet large. One might wonder who in San Antonio deserves this kind of attention.
"A little girl who was chosen at random, at the school where I went to talk about my work, She just seemed so engaged.”
The little San Antonio girl who’s the subject of the massive portrait is Nyssa Gomez. Her mother Yesenia Ruiz says it all began when she got a call from the Vice Principal at Briscoe Elementary.
“Like any parent I was panicking—what did she do now?--but she’s a good kid, so I was confident everything would be okay.”
Rodriguez-Gerada had chosen Nyssa randomly for this portrait during a visit to Briscoe elementary and needed her mother’s permission. Why Nyssa? He focuses his art on people who aren’t famous.
"We’re used to movie stars and politicians selling us ideas and products. That’s who we see big. We don’t see ourself [sic] big. We’re sold the reality that who we are is the brands we wear or the cars we drive. And that’s not true. That’s just superficial stuff. Choosing people at random this way and making these portraits in historic scale talks about the importance of every life."
But that doesn’t mean that Nyssa is ordinary. He says her look is a smart and confident one.
"There was a lot of kids, but not all of them have that spark. I knew that looking at her that her parents also had that spark. Because that comes from the nurturing."
“She’s just always had that spark. She’s had it since she was a newborn.”
Rodriguez-Gerada does portraits like this all over the world.
“In Buenos Aires I chose a child who was in a special school for children who were in danger of becoming homeless. There’s no safety net on a national level for street kids. One night I was coming home from drinks with friends and it was like 3 in the morning and there was a 3 year-old kid juggling in the middle of the street at the red light. And I just…I was like ‘I’ve got to do a piece about this.’ And so I went to school and got permission from the parents and I just made that kid’s face 45 feet high on a wall in Buenos Aires. To then get attention to the school because it has no state funding, to get food for the kids. You can’t learn on an empty stomach.”
Back in San Antonio, he says the portrait he started on Thursday will be done on Saturday night.
"And everybody will be seeing it through imagery on the internet, and on the news. So things have changed as to how we see artwork now. The aerial photograph of this will be splashed across the planet when it goes into all the blogs."
The portrait will only last a matter of weeks. Part of the plan is to re-surface the lot afterwards. And that's another theme in his art. Nothing lasts forever.
We've more on Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada here.
We'll update this site with the finished portrait on Monday.
