The Hand of Fate

The one-armed muralist and painter hasn't merely given his art to the city--he's given his heart.

by Ken Rodriguez

Two exquisite and colorful museums sit on the edge of downtown San Antonio. One, the Museo Alameda, houses magnificent collections of Latino art. The second, an outdoor square of historic buildings, contains the murals of an artist with a prosthetic right arm, Jesse Trevino.

At this intersection of Hispanic culture and beauty, public art frames private art. From late October through February, the signature of one artist appeared on almost all of it―Trevino’s.

Inside the Museo Alameda, there was his riveting retrospective: Jesse Trevino: Mi Vida, a collection of photo-realist paintings that depict the people and landmarks on the city’s West Side.

That exhibit has closed but the other remains open, with locals and tourists passing through it every day―few realizing the story behind the corridor of art.

Trevino is a Vietnam veteran who lost his right painting arm to a war injury. Years after learning to paint with his left hand, he produced a nine-story, tiled mural that rises as the iconic face of Christus Santa Rosa Hospital.

Trevino used 70 colors and more than 150,000 hand-cut ceramic tiles to paint a guardian angel, a young boy and a dove bathed in light. Called the Spirit of Healing, the mural towers over Milam Park, one block north of the Museo Alameda.

To the south of the Alameda, a small mural of Latino vendors, musicians and dancers―titled La Feria―greets visitors outside the restaurant, La Margarita. To the east, a tiled mosaic of lions adorns the wall of a Goodwill center. More than a mile west, a three-dimensional, four-story tiled prayer candle, devoted to the Virgin Mary, graces the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center.

The one-armed muralist and painter hasn’t merely given his art to the city. He’s given his heart. The dedication occurred on a battlefield in Vietnam.

Running toward a helicopter, Trevino collapsed when a bullet shattered his femur. Then a blast of shrapnel from a booby trap destroyed muscle and bone in his right arm, the one he used to paint. As Trevino lay broken and bleeding in a rice paddy, he saw a vision of faces―family members and friends from the barrio back home.

"If I get out of here alive," he thought, "I’m going to paint them."

The recovery took years. The leg injury left him unable to walk for nearly 24 months. Doctors amputated his right arm. The physical and emotional pain cut deep. "It was a very difficult time," Trevino says.

Far from the battlefield, he now fought a war within, struggling to make sense of his injuries, raging against the government for sending him to Vietnam. More than anything, he wanted to paint the people of the barrio but didn’t know how.

While in recovery, a friend persuaded him to paint a portrait with his left hand. Then, at San Antonio College, art professor Mel Casas provided instruction. Trevino continued his development at Our Lady of the Lake University under Sisters Tharsilla Fuchs and Ethel Marie Corne.

"I had to regain my confidence," Trevino says. "And that’s where I gained the most."

For a class assignment, Trevino painted a 100-foot mural―La Historia Chicana―that now occupies a prominent place at OLLU’s Sueltenfuss Library. The stunning work depicts people and symbols flowing across centuries of Mexican American history. It is a masterpiece, the first grand work completed with his left hand.

His genius unleashed, Trevino resumed a career that had begun in grade school. At six, he won a Witte Museum art contest for a pencil drawing of two doves. In high school, he won a scholarship to the Art Students League in New York. Now wearing a prosthetic, he began painting the people and buildings of his neighborhood, fulfilling a promise made on a bloody battlefield.

Art critics lauded his work. From Texas Monthly: "Senora Dolores Trevino has to be one of the best paintings of an artist’s mother since Whistler’s."

The New York Times called him "a Texas-based artists who brings to his Hyperrealist style a sharp sense of situational and compositional irony…With Trevino, we are drawn into human situations, rather than being told about them."

Today, Trevino’s works hang in the Smithsonian. They also hang in homes and public places throughout San Antonio. Forty three years after losing his right painting arm, Trevino has transformed a slice of the city’s landscape with his signature art.