The Joy of Sharing Art
Chicho Lorenzo is a local painter and muralist. He has murals all over Charlottesville: on empty walls next to roads, in schools, restaurants, and on fences. Lorenzo grew up in Madrid, Spain, but has been living in Charlottesville for more than 15 years. Lorenzo is a self-taught artist. His only advice on how to “learn” art is “to learn something, you have to know the skeleton.” For example, Lorenzo talked about struggling to paint a waterfall. But then he looked at some real waterfalls and realized that they are not just straight lines of water, but swirls and foam where the water hits the rocks beneath.
Lorenzo says he’s “not a big fan of preserving art.” He means murals specifically. Lorenzo says he doesn’t teach how to make art; he shares enthusiasm about it. When he talks at schools he tells the kids, “I hope one day, you paint over my murals.” Aside from art that goes in museums and such, Lorenzo says that “public art is meant to change, to stay alive.”
For example, on the mural on Barracks road, there is a little girl leading a horse, and in her other hand she is holding a baton. Lorenzo says that a couple months after he finished painting, someone made a white OM symbol coming out of her baton like it was a magic wand. He says, “ I like it… It made everything a collaboration, and that is the point with public art.”
How does a full-time artist get ideas on what to create? “Most of my paintings have a tribute to someone,” Lorenzo says.
On a fence on Avon Street, there is a mural Lorenzo made of a line of boats. For this mural, Lorenzo took inspiration from works by the Spanish painter Joaquín Sorolla, from the eighteenth century, which focus on light. Sorolla often painted people on the beach in sundresses and umbrellas, so Lorenzo made a woman in a white sundress holding an umbrella standing on one of the boats. Those boats were inspired by the fisherman boats of Balancia, which is where this painter was from.
In the former Venable school, Lorenzo made a mural paying homage to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, author and illustrator of The Little Prince, by making Saint-Exupéry’s iconic image of a snake eating an elephant into a hat. Lorenzo has a spontaneous painting style; he takes people walking down the street and incorporates their looks or their ideas into his art. For the mural on Mas Tapas, he talked to a man on the street who had always wanted a barn, so Lorenzo painted a little barn. He also takes inspiration from children’s books, such as Where the Wild Things Are and books by Dr. Seuss. Lorenzo makes ideas come to life, or as he puts it, “making real to the impossible.”
