Virgen De Guadalupe Paintings at San Fernando Cathedral 1989

So I did a little digging through my clutter and found the photos documenting the making of the five paintings Alex Rubio and I designed and painted of the Virgen de Guadalupe for the San Fernando Cathedral's celebration of the Virgen Morenita in 1989. We worked from mid November to till the wee hours of December 12th which was our deadline.

That's me in the photo above working on the face for the main painting. This was the same painting that was shown at the Museo Alameda in 2007 as part of the two person art exhibit by Alex and Vincent Valdez.

As I recall Alex was not comfortable painting faces and hands at the time so he asked that I handle all of the portrait work for all five paintings.


We had four weeks to paint the five paintings depicting the story of the Virgen de Guadalupe and Juan Diego. That pretty much required that Alex and I work six to seven days a week days and evenings to have the paintings ready for the celebration. Every so often though friends would pop in to lend a hand. Above is a very young Vincent Valdez putting in some time on the main piece. His parents were very supportive of Vincent's artistic inclinations and brought him to over to the cathedral now and then to participate. He must have been around nine or ten years old at the time.


Here's Vincent again doing some more detail work. Juan Hernandez, lead muralist of the Community Cultural Arts Program where Alex and I were also muralists, came around and helped quite a bit too.


That's the main piece without the decorative elements on the dress.


Myself and Alex on the scaffolds looking like we've been painting for a very long time. From what I can see the painting looks completed so we should have been smiling but we knew we had four more paintings to complete.


Here's a nice detail of the roses that flanked the image of the Virgen.



This a detail of the completed clothing and hands.



Alex adds some final touches to the dress.

I included this one because you can see that there is a second and off and unseen to the right a third painting in progress. That painting on the left was started and finished by me.