With moody blues and vibrant reds, Alfredo Arreguín fused the tools of classic oil painting with Mexican folk traditions, compressing fine art and ancient craftsmanship into stretched canvases that were often taller than he was. . For those of us who knew him, the news of his death on April 24 came as a shock, like something that didn’t quite register, even though Arreguín was 88 and had cancer. A flame that we thought was indistinguishable had gone out.
For 60 years he painted with few breaks, channeling explosive energy into methodically composed canvases that sampled motifs from the jungles of his Mexican childhood and the lush landscapes of his adult life in the Pacific Northwest. Its glow-in-the-dark aesthetic is due to the accumulation of thousands of small brushstrokes in dazzling, intricate patterns.
As his health deteriorated, he suffered a fall that seemed to break his spirit. “All of a sudden I lost my inspiration to paint,” he wrote in a message to friends on Facebook. Three weeks later he was gone.
Arreguín was born in Michoacán, Mexico in 1935. He learned to paint as a child and moved to Mexico City as a teenager to attend the National Preparatory School, where Frida Kahlo had studied in the 1920s and Diego Rivera had taught. At age 24, Arreguín immigrated to Seattle.
After serving two years in the Korean War, he studied art at the University of Washington with classmates such as Chuck Close, Dale Chihuly and Roger Shimomura. One of his favorite teachers was Elmer Bischoffthe Bay Area figurative artist who, like Arreguín, mixed and buried his subjects in the soil of paint.
Bischoff, with painter Michael C. Spafford, encouraged Arreguín to explore the visual culture of his Mexican heritage, drawing inspiration as much from myth as from memory. He was inspired by the symbols, shapes and colors of masks, ceramics and tapestries.
In Seattle, he took daily walks to study the water, forests, and mountains of the Pacific Northwest, often bringing a camera to photograph plants and animals. Like so many painters, the camera was an important tool for him. When I photographed it for a magazine story in 2021, he showed great respect for the medium. He was eager to take direction and generous with his time, and he talked about the great photographers he knew, like Bob Adelman.
Arreguín and I bonded over having our work in the collection of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery (NPG). The NPG, one of his favorite museums, acquired his Portrait of Cesar Chavez in 2006, which is representative of his style – cool, dark colors nestle against rich reds, and words and symbols are stitched inside the design. A closer look at the grid of squares reveals tiny faces inspired by Mesoamerican masks, over 700 in total. It has an overarching quality that shares some relationship with abstraction – it came of age when the movement took over the American art scene – but the artist’s interpretation features prominent and proud figures within. geometric landscapes.
On the 2007 NPG show Portrait now: Framing memory, Arreguín showed footage alongside Brett Cook, Tina Mion, Kerry James Marshall and Faith Ringgold. He included a portrait of Frida Kahlo, an ancestor of Mexican art and his favorite muse whom he painted over a hundred times. “I use it as a symbol of beauty”, he said in 2009“like a spiritual element that I can disguise”.
Although his work defied labels and evaded formal schools, he was often referred to as a painter of models, magical realism and the founder of the Pattern and decoration movement. Last year, the Museum of Northwest Art held a sprawling exhibition, Arreguín: Painter of the New Worldhis fourth retrospective in recent years.
Whatever the subject, there is always mathematics or geometry behind the construction of the work – a kind of arithmetic order that allows its forms to rhyme and repeat. With the wisdom of old age, Arreguín claimed that he could establish these labyrinths quickly and move through them mainly by instinct.
For Latinx artists and art lovers, Arreguín was both a mentor and a bridge to “homecoming” culture, wherever that might be.
“As a young Latin American artist, arriving in Seattle in 1982, the first artist I looked up to was Alfredo Arreguín,” recalls Cuban-American visual artist Juan Alonso-Rodríguez. Deb Ramirez Rock remembers seeing Arreguín’s work for the first time: “I stood in front of it for many hours, lost in his paintings… I know now, it brought out the Mexican in me.
Arreguín participated in the historical pageant Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmationwho traveled to 10 cities between 1990 and 1993. In 1995, the Mexican government awarded him the Ohtli Prize, awarded to those who defend Mexican culture abroad.
Yet Arreguín also became a quintessentially American painter, earning intellectual praise and accepting popular commissions. He received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1980 and painted the official Washington State Centennial Poster in 1987.
In recent years, he has ventured into the genre of political portraiture, painting the official portraits of three Washington State Supreme Court Justices. With zigzag shapes, thick contour lines, and ancestor cameos, his work is a stark departure from the forensic portraits that hang nearby. “Mine won’t look like that,” Arreguín said as he accepted the commission. “These are like classical music, and mine is more like jazz.”
There was also a jazzy quality to the way Arreguín spoke. When I called poet Lawrence Matusda this week, he marveled at how his friend could tell stories, how he could court over dinner with the same enthusiasm and flourish with which he painted.
“When you heard him speak, it almost sounded like melodies,” said Matsuda, who often collaborates with painter Roger Shimomura. “It was like a song: you could feel the beats as he told you about his bad behavior, his good behavior, his redemption. In a room full of people, he was the star and he was the black hole. Everything is passed to Alfredo.
Arreguín told stories of himself as a rowdy young entertainer who drank, smoked, and had never met a stranger. As a student at his favorite bar, he jumped and swung from pendant lights and danced across tables. When the police arrested another man for being naked in the bar, Arreguín announced that he would join the naked man in jail. He got out and urinated on the police car, and together they went to jail.
Arreguín credited author Raymond Carver with helping him get his drinking under control. Carver’s wife, poet and prolific writer Tess Gallagher, also visited Arreguín’s studio, as did the elusive Haruki Murakami. Carver wrote a short story in 1987, “Menudo», which takes place at the Arreguín house. In the midst of a breakdown, the narrator looks up at the jungle animals on the wall, and a painter named Alfredo cooks a Mexican soup (menudo) on the stove. “He put his big painter’s hand on my shoulder,” the narrator says, capturing Arreguín’s warmth with his words.
Arreguín shared his basement studio with his wife, painter Susan R. Lytle, known for her close-ups of flowers. “From the moment we met in 1974, we were together,” Lytle told me in a phone call this week. “For one of our first dates, he invited me to come to his studio. I brought my canvas and my paint, and we listened to music and painted together. It was so good that we’ve done it for the rest of our lives. A towering pile of empty paint tubes, piled up for decades, divides their studio in two. Canvases of flowers line the walls on its side and Frida’s faces adorn hers. .
When I think back to my photo shoot with Arreguín, I feel the same warmth that so many people talk about. I feel its strength and friendliness, its bullish charm. I see his square jaw smiling and his blue eyes squinting.
My brother was filming with me. “I remember that day very well,” he sent me this week. It looks like I might come back to this kitchen if I closed my eyes and thought about it long enough. That was perhaps Arreguín’s greatest gift: he gave you more imagination. Lawrence Matsuda reinforced this idea when I spoke to him: “Recently I saw something that said, ‘We don’t remember days, we remember moments.’ But with Alfredo, you remember the day. All day.”
Arreguín pioneered a rigorous and meticulous process, but without an underlying equation. And yet, that afternoon, I wanted there to be one. I was struggling to improve my drawing and painting, so I asked the master for advice. Arreguín, then 86, smiled and shook his head. How many times must he have heard this question over the decades. I was just another student looking for a shortcut, a map to art treasures. Arreguin patted his chest with his large painter’s hand. “Your heart,” he said. “That’s what you paint with.”
