An elevated freeway cuts through the middle of a vivid downtown scene, a Los Angeles of a dozen skyscrapers and old buildings throwing bright red shadows across canary yellow city blocks. There are the old and the new, the present and the past all jumbled together, in Frank Romero's fanciful signature style.
It's not exactly accurate, but it's all recognizable and it's the story of Romero's--and L.A.'s--life. In the upper left of his painting "Downtown," there are Dodger Stadium and City Hall, and in the upper right, the three spiraling cones of Watts Towers.
"I single-handedly saved the towers in '59," Romero smilingly boasts, half-serious, half-exaggerating, as he stands in the creative sprawl of his 5,000-square-foot studio just north of downtown. He likes to tell stories.
"I was the teenage kid hired to collect money from people coming by," he begins, "because they were trying to tear them down--and I helped collect the money to run the tests." The tests determined that the towers were structurally sound.
These days Romero commutes from his home in Westwood, through downtown, to reach his studio off the 5 Freeway, so the painting is a kind of narrative of his commute. He points to the cartoonish pickup truck barreling down a remarkably empty freeway. "This is my off-white Chevy truck."
Then there are the less-familiar places. "I grew up in Boyle Heights," Romero says of an area in the painting's background. "This is the Breed Street Shul. It's just a little teeny building in the back. It wouldn't mean anything to anyone but me."
Then he jumps back 50 years, pointing to a trolley about to run beneath that jam-less freeway. "That's the P car going down 1st Street," he says. "I took the P car to go to the movies, and the R car down Whittier Boulevard to go to the Otis Art Institute when I was 16."
Romero's "Downtown," plus a few dozen other recent works, is on view in a rare solo gallery show for Romero, at the DoubleVision Gallery--rare because Romero has avoided commercial galleries, or perhaps they have avoided him.
However, his works have recently been seen in group museum shows. He received a 2002 City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellowship ($10,000 to create new work), and his large-scale diptych "Fullerton" was in the C.O.L.A. show that just closed at the Japanese American National Museum. One of his best-known paintings, "The Death of Ruben Salazar" (1986), depicting the journalist's accidental death when a tear-gas canister hit him in a 1970 incident, is in the Smithsonian American Art Museum's touring "Arte Latino" exhibition.
