Works in Progress

George Evans stands in back, watching a dozen young artists work in quiet concentration. They have embarked, he says, on an awakening, seamless and immeasurable, as they learn to see the world, paint it--and save themselves from it.

In an old Los Angeles firehouse, converted to a studio on Hobart near Adams Street, Evans and his assistant instructor, Edgar Arceneaux, share a belief that with enough work and enough paint, young artists can cover past mistakes and brush a new layer over life’s uneven shades.

Evans, senior graphic designer at Warner Bros., is program director of Art on Saturdays, an outgrowth of the ART (Art Resources for Teens) Team, which he co-founded in 1992. He grew up in Watts and remembers a similar program, Tutor Arts, which helped cultivate his own awakening.

The program helped him understand that it was OK to be himself, that there was a place in the world for those “with the gift,” and that such a gift was to be respected and nurtured.

Fire Station 18 began operation in 1906. It has survived because a group of artists, including Evans and Wendell Collins, the caretaker who lives upstairs, believes it has a place in sculpting the future of students who limn in the margins of their texts, turn in assignments with algebra on one side and Spider-Man on the other or spray paint walls and buses with cryptic messages.

These are signs that the students are searching, says Evans, because that is what you do when you are lost.

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Reyna Mendez and Horacio Serrano were two of the original ART Team members chosen to paint a mural for a South-Central branch of the Los Angeles Employment Development Department in 1993.

Before painting the wall, Evans, 48, took students on field trips, including one to the L.A. County Art Museum, a place they had never been. They discussed art and artists in planning the message they wanted to convey with the mural. What emerged were tulips and parrots, creamy clouds floating above a park, a girl in a swing.

“They wanted to see beauty.” Evans says. “They wanted to see tranquillity, and they wanted peace in their lives.”

Mendez and Serrano had attended Jordan High School together. Serrano had committed himself to the military upon graduation because he knew of nowhere else to go, and he knew he couldn’t stay.

“I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life,” he says, “but I knew what I didn’t want to do. I didn’t want to be in a gang, and I didn’t want to spend my life loading trucks or something like that.”

After working on the mural, Serrano realized he wanted to pursue art rather than the military. He and Mendez were given part-time jobs with EDD and both enrolled at Los Angeles Trade Technical College.

Last summer, Mendez, 20, died in a fire, unable to escape the blaze and bars on the windows of her home. Her dreams, which came to life in a firehouse, died in flames.

A week after Mendez’s death, Serrano was shot in the back two blocks from his home. Injuries forced him to quit school. He lost his job and had run-ins with the police. He was unable to attend Mendez’s funeral.

“He was spiraling downward,” Evans says. “I saw him slipping away, and I knew I had to keep pushing him and refusing to give up on him.”

Serrano, 21, eventually returned to the program and to Trade Tech. He has worked with artist Richard Wyatt on murals at Union Station Gateway Intermodel Transit Center, the Metro Rail Western-Wilshire station and the Alma Reaves Woods-Watts Branch Library. He hopes to become an illustrator or designer, have a family, a home in a safe neighborhood.

That is the direction he has found, and that is the awakening Evans quietly witnesses as he stands in back of the room. He now observes the students with a greater sense of urgency.

“Reyna’s death taught me how fine the line is,” Evans says. “Part of the thing of trying to give them a skill is to give them something that will hold them together, as well as give them direction in life and give them sanctuary, so at least they live another day.”

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Soon after Mendez’s death, as if by fate, a young man living just up the street from the fire station surfaced at the program. Although unrelated, his name, too, was Mendez, and his passion, too, was art. Rudy Mendez, 20, was a tagger.

“He had this look in his eyes that he could take on the world,” Evans recalls. “He had this energy about him. I said, ‘Here’s the charcoal and here’s the paper. We’re here every Saturday, so prove yourself. If you want to do something with your life, if you want to change your life around, show up every Saturday and I can work with you.’ And he did.”

After joining the program, Mendez earned a scholarship for a night class at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.

“This program got me away from bad company, which I used to have,” he says. “Gangs. It got me away from gangs. When I first started the program, I’d come tired because I just got home a couple hours before. I would be out drinking and everything. I just did it because my friends were doing it. When I was around them, in my mind, I thought, ‘Man, I don’t belong here,’ but I didn’t have nothing else to do. Now I see that I don’t have too much time to waste.”

During the day, he drives a truck for his father, “but I have my [sketch] book with me all the time. I look at everything, the colors on the street, you know? People say it’s black or gray, but no, there are a lot of colors in everything.”

Mendez is a work in progress, sometimes walking on both sides of a fine line. To recognize the message within him, he says, is to recognize graffiti art as a legitimate medium of artistic self-expression.

“I think I’m never going to stop. I believe it isn’t wrong. I don’t think it should be considered a crime. We’re just putting our lives on the wall, sort of like what the Egyptians did with hieroglyphics. They recorded their lives and that’s what we’re doing. My dad says it’s vandalism. He says, ‘Get that spray paint out of my house,’ and I say, ‘Dad, I’m not hiding it from you. Do you know why? Because I don’t think that it’s wrong.’ ”

The program has expanded his interest beyond walls and sides of buses and trains. It has directed him to canvas and books and hope.

“Before I started this program, I had never painted with a brush. I had never read books on art. I would just draw my girlfriend and stuff like that. I started reading about the masters from Renaissance times, and I’m starting to feel that I’m an important person in this world because not everyone’s an artist, you know? I love to put down the paint and feel the way I move the paint around and study the colors.”

He and his family moved from the Adams district neighborhood to distance him from gang life. In many ways, he has tried to turn his life around, change the momentum that swept him away from the person he wants to be.

“I been the worse in my family. I know what’s good and what’s bad, but I disappointed my parents a lot of times. My mom says, ‘You’re still my son, I know you made some mistakes, but I know you’ll change.’ But if I disappoint my dad, he’s disappointed until I can prove different. That’s why I wanted to work for him. I wanted to show him I can change.”

In art, inseparable from his life, Mendez is painting over past mistakes, sensing that the canvas is a reflection of the artist. As he sits quietly in the studio, he works on a self-portrait.

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Giovanni Sheran uses a rag to wipe fresh black paint, slathered like margarine on a canvas, to form images of the items set before him: an alarm clock, a couple of bottles, gourds, a brown boot.

He rides his 10-speed bicycle to the class, wary of gang members intent on drawing him into their ranks. From the time he was little, Giovanni, 15, drew superheroes--Batman, Spider-Man--during class rather than listen to teachers. It was difficult to express himself through words or numbers.

“You know how people, when they count stuff, they draw little lines?” he says. “I used to make like happy faces or apples and different stuff.”

He loves speed, riding his bicycle until his chest heaves and his thighs burn. Sometimes he runs around his block, just for the feeling of movement. In art, he transports himself, exploring new surroundings where he can be at peace.

“It can take you places,” he says. “You know, say you’re just thinking of the beach and you can draw it, and think about that beach and imagine yourself there. It can just take you away from everything and put you in that position wherever you want to be. . . . Sometimes I’ll be like in a forest by myself walking through tall trees just to get away. I don’t like being around here too much. I live around this area. It’s a Blood neighborhood. Some of my homies they got put on gangs. Some of ‘em try to put me on. I don’t want to get put on.”

About a month ago, Evans took the students outside the firehouse to sketch. He emphasizes working from life, drawing buildings or trees, drunks or drug addicts, anything as long as it’s taken from real life. Across the street, a gang had tagged a wall, and the local Bloods were staking turf and contemplating riposte.

“George went out and started talking to them,” Giovanni says. “They came over and shook George’s hand. George said, ‘If you want to draw, just come on by, and I’ll show you some real drawin’.’ ”

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In his vision, Evans hears music and poetry flowing day and night from upstairs. He sees a full-time school for the arts where many new dreams are born--in a neighborhood where many old dreams wither.

Last year, Art on Saturdays was one of six programs chosen nationally to participate in a competition sponsored by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to develop a poster for food stamp offices.

Sherri Cassius, 17, who will enter Otis College of Art and Design this fall, won the competition with a poster designed around the words: “In a world of differences, we all have the same needs.”

A $15,000 grant from the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department has given the program a new lift, and Evans is searching for new students, those willing to seek the artist within.

In a building once filled with the clatter of hooves and bells as horses charged out the doors harnessed to wagons, a different kind of fire, equally deadly, is now being fought one stroke at a time.

The students sit quietly in the studio, awakening, battling flames.