Some artists know, mysteriously, what they must do with their lives when they're still children.
    To me, this has always seemed a bewildering process, how a four-year-old would know first how to copy comics with crayons, then realize that he wants to read every book on art in the public library, which he achieves by the seventh grade.
    Such was the experience of painter Edward Gonzales, known to Hispanic folks in New Mexico and around the country for his realistic depiction of Hispanic life.
  "None of my family were interested in art. They were all poor and working-class people. “
    When he went to school in the seventh grade, he already knew about the Rococo and Classical periods of art, along with the early Renaissance as opposed to the late Renaissance, and of course, the importance of Caravaggio.
    How does a boy walking around the playground with Caravaggio in his head get along with his peers?
    "It was a rough neighborhood," he responds, but the key to his survival was his ability to switch out of his artist mode and play baseball and fit in. It's a matter of keeping the practical world close at hand, or as others have described it, "a balance between the left brain and the right brain."
    "I was the only kid in my neighborhood to go to college at the time," says Gonzales.
    But college was not something for which he was prepared. His drive to find his own way as an artist was confused and complicated by the kaleidoscope of new ideas prevalent in that era.
    He realized how isolated he had been from the rest of the world, living in what was then a kind of neighborhood as a village.
    "The families were very close. Kids (within the neighborhood) were marrying each other. There was a comadre-compadre system, where people had five or six kids, and so everybody christened everybody's kids. So there were godfathers and godmothers. It was kind of a community policing system because no one could get away with anything."
    This culture of traditional rural Hispanic values would eventually become a major focus of his paintings, but first he had to work his way through obstacles that life threw in his path.
    The first was conceptual art.
    "UNM was a real trip in the '60s. They had a lot of well-known, avant-garde artists who came through there as teachers,” Gonzales told me. "Conceptual art was the thing. Painting was dead. And I just wanted to draw and paint." He got his degree, therefore, in sculpture.
    Out of nowhere came the draft, yanking him out of college. "I just had to serve time in Vietnam. It was like a sentence.” All he thought about was returning to continue his art.
    Sometime during this time of upheaval, at the height of the Chicano movement, war and abstracted art, Gonzales says, "a light went on." His way, he discovered, would be a search for identity, not just for himself, but also for Chicanos in New Mexico.
    "I could have painted 'screaming mestizos,' " he says, using a term he mentions frequently, meaning art that grew out of the anger of the Chicano movement. Instead, his instinct led him to paint "a sense of place." His paintings, oil and acrylic, became more figurative, especially after his 1978 work "Los Paisanos Del Norte" (The Countrymen of the North). Here, he looked closely at the objects of identity. The picture shows turn-of-the-century folks--the clothes they wore, the wash tub and washboard they used. The details of rural Hispanic life.
    "We are real people with more to our culture than church architecture and food," he says.
    As he found the human elements of Hispanic life missing in the artwork of others, he set out to explore these "missing images." And real people, real images led him to realism.

from 'Missing images' drive Edward Gonzales. Bernalillo painter explains how he found his New Mexico style
by Brian King ABQ Arts Magazine   April 2000