Artist Jacinto Guevara Returns to Echo Park

Echo Park is home to many visual artists–it draws them, from other places, and sometimes it shapes them right here.

The painter and musician Jacinto Guevara was raised in Echo Park. He moved to EP in 1964, attended Elysian Heights Elementary, Thomas Starr King, Belmont High School, and CSUN.

A resident since 1992 of San Antonio, Guevara recently returned to Echo Park to do some commissioned scenes of the neighborhood.

You can see several of those in the accompanying gallery.

Guevara took the time to answer a few brief questions by email.

Echolocation: How old were you when you moved to Echo Park?

Jacinto Guevara: Eight. Summer of '64. I lived on Echo Park Avenue and, later, Champlain Terrace from 1964 to 1978.

I had come from the flat area of East Los Angeles, known as the Rock Maravilla and was amazed and dazzled by the hills, nooks and crannies of EP and Elysian Park. … In the 1960s as a child I walked in and out of the crash pads and parties without anyone caring or throwing me out.

Echolocation: Can you describe the commissions you did recently, especially location?

JC: Via social media I have come in contact with...the kids I had not seen since the early 1970s. They have seen my artwork and I requested that they commission me to paint their childhood homes. They live in Washington State, North Central California, New Mexico, and Japan.

Echolocation: I understand you are mainly self-taught as an artist. Did you ever take art classes at Barnsdall Art Park or in Echo Park?

JC: Nigerian folk costume one summer at Barnsdall, circa 1968.

Echolocation: What are some of your artistic influences?

JC: The book illustrations of Leo Politi influenced me as a child.

Echolocation: How did you end up moving to San Antonio?

JC: As a performing musician [conjunto and banjo] and working painter, I couldn’t afford to live in L.A. anymore, so I moved from my tiny “studio apartment” at the American Hotel above Al’s Bar and got to San Antonio in the June of 1992.

Echolocation: When you said you wrote four or five of Room 8's fan letters, do you mean you answered mail to fans or that you letters to the cat? 

[Ed.: Room 8 was the pet and mascot of Elysian Heights elementary in the 1950s and 1960s. Room 8 became a media celebrity and was  photographed for LOOK magazine.]

JC: Fan mail. I didn’t write very many because I refused to write in the ridiculous first-person as they kept demanding. Kids at schools around the country would write to Room 8 and ask crap like ‘do “you” like cat nip and chase mice?’ I‘d write back, “No, I don’t like cat nip and chasing mice, but I’m sure Room 8 likes cat nip, but he couldn’t chase a mouse if his depended on it because he’s so old and his stomach touches the ground when he walks.”