Walking in Beauty

By William Swislow

He started modeling with clay as a young boy, he says, then moved on to wood and eventually to his premier medium, stone. And as he figured out for himself how to turn his materials into objects of meaning and beauty, he also chose to teach himself all he could about art—and from the masters. When asked if anyone mentored him, his first answer is “Miró.”

This, of course, puts him outside the guideposts of art brut, along with other artists who ultimately engaged with the art world, like Mr. Imagination, Michel Nedjar and Lonnie Holley, among others. But for self-taught artists determined to connect with art beyond their own creations, descriptors needn’t be cages. In Villarreal’s case, as in others, it’s still an artist mostly figuring out for himself what those “mentors” and their styles mean and what he can learn from them.

“I would always look at books. Since I'm a self-taught artist, a lot of my education came through research on my own part,” he says. “I was always, always fascinated with the masters. You know, what they did, how they dealt with color, how they approached it, the different periods in art history… As an outside artist, you absorb this all by yourself… You never stop studying. You see something and you want to try it.”

And he tried many things.

“I experimented a lot in the early years, because I was trying to find myself and what direction I was going in…experimenting with all the media [and] the Cubist, the realist movement and the different styles. One year I would do a series of Cubist. The following year I would start doing this or that, but I was slowly, slowly, developing…all these things I would do on my own until I felt I got it.”

As with many self-taught artists in Chicago, the Art Institute of Chicago, both the museum and school, played a role in this process of figuring art out.

“The Art Institute was the world that I thought I belonged in. I could envision myself in the early years when I would go there, that one day I was going to be one of these artists."

Villarreal also spent time hanging around the School of the Art Institute. Some friends from the neighborhood, a working-class community on the city’s far South Side, were attending, he says, and he took advantage of that entree to learn technique and hear about what other artists were doing. He never enrolled and never got a degree, however.

“I wanted to be an artist, but I didn’t need the degree. I felt, if I’m an artist, what do I need this piece of paper to say I’m an artist. There's a difference, the degree and learning, and mine was not the degree, mine was learning. Little did I realize the importance of the degree, but at that time it wasn't important.”

The artists who inspired Villarreal weren’t only the kinds you find in museums like the Art Institute, however. “There was a book that was called Fantasy something, and that was a perfect example of artists like myself… This is the one that I look at and I think to myself, ‘Wow, I would love to do large-scale this and that.’”

When he pulled the book out, it was Fantasy Worlds by John Maizels and Deidi Von Schaewen, an exploration of art environments around the world. “The funny thing to me is that a lot of them are strange old guys. So, I must be one of these strange old guys. Because I love it.

“It's like the guys that worked in this Fantasy Worlds. I could imagine these men getting up at six o'clock in the morning, working, working, working, go drink a bottle of wine, go to sleep, get up the next day, ‘cause they love what they're doing. And the passion is there in this book.”

Villarreal considered following their example literally but hasn’t got there, yet. “One day, I got together with some friends, and we were going to board up the house with panels, and we were going to do a series of three-dimensional sculptures on the wall. But it kind of takes you away from insurance. They look at your house like, ‘what the hell did you do?’ So, I had to stay kind of traditional, and I went for siding. But I'm still considering doing my doors, and I'm going to decorate my backyard really elaborate.”

At 69 (when interviewed for this piece), Villarreal is acutely aware of both the pluses and minuses associated with being a self-taught artist.

“For art history, they're going to remember us, but it's not gonna be the same thing as academia… I had to accept the fact that no matter what happens in life, everybody who stepped into academia is going to be considered before I'm going to be considered. So my role as an outside artist is: don't worry about it. Just keep working, keep working your own.

“I learned to be proud of the fact that I'm an outside artist. At first a lot of us that were outsider artists, we were kind of bitter. But then we have to realize, that's not the way it works. We have to understand, hey, man, we're in this, we did this.”

Villarreal’s particular path of work was not conventional where he grew up, making him an outlier in his own community as well as the art world.

“I mean, this is an industrial working-class community. Could you imagine going to a bar and talk to somebody about Dada… They look like, ‘what are you, a nut?’ Nobody knew what the hell you were talking about. But this was what fascinated me.”

Although an artist from a young age, in 1967 he nonetheless followed his father, a Mexican immigrant, into work at the U.S. Steel plant on Chicago’s far South Side. He went into the army after that but then returned to a job at the mill.

“My plan was, I was going to retire from the mills and then still be an artist. That was the plan. But they closed them. One day we go to work, and it’s gone. The whole era of the mills was gone. That's when I made the decision that I was to be the master of my fate. I was no longer going to be dependent on paychecks and this and that. This was a gamble. It was during the ’80s when I quit working completely for the world, and I started just doing for myself.”

Villarreal did not stray far from mill town, however. He lives less than a mile from the site of the old South Works, now a park whose entrance, not coincidentally, features a Villarreal statue in bronze commemorating the steelworkers and their families. Although Villarreal does not view himself as a political artist, there is something inherently political in his work and, in a sense, who he is.

“I am an urban artist. There's no two ways about it. I remember years ago I had a discussion with some Indiana artists, and they were landscape artists. What they were painting was barns and beautiful scenes... I was seeing gangbangers, prostitutes, urban this and this, so that's what I was portraying, because this is what I would see outside of my window.

“If I lived on a farm, of course, I’d be painting chickens and sunsets and stuff like that. But that's not what I see. I used to tell people that I was an urban anthropologist, because when they’re going to study what happens in life, they come to the artist to see what we were doing during that time. We weren't hiding nothing. I was showing the rawness. When the gang killings started in the ’90s, there were big shootings constantly and people were dying. I portrayed that in my paintings. You can't sell them, but that's what was happening.”

For Villarreal, art not only portrays the realities of his community it also represents the possibility of renewal. “Art is the new steel,” he likes to say. It can provide the fiber to pull the neighborhood together.

“[As] an urban artist, there's 20 issues that you get bombarded with… I'd rather just concentrate on one thing and one thing only: The development of arts and our communities. Then we'll worry about the other issues.

“When the mills closed, the problem with this community was everything went up—alcoholism, divorces, more criminal activity. And then the children of the men who came from the steel mills got involved in gangs. And then in the ’90s, we call it the bloody ’90s, because this neighborhood went nuts, nuts. They were killing each other left and right.

“But see, this was energy. If you could…channel that energy to something else… That's why places like SkyART [a local arts program] and the things that we have in our community here are so important. What they're doing is adding this extra element for that energy.”

Villarreal himself has taught and mentored many artists over the years and worked with a variety of art programs for young people. He continues to make art as well, of course, often with whatever materials are at hand. That includes bars of soap, which he has carved into lovely little portraits; hunks of foam, which he carves like wood; and old vinyl LPs, which he has melted and shaped into portraits and animal figures. He’s also tried his hand at spray paint.

“The young guys right now that are working with the spray can, they're amazing,” he says. “The spray can has developed to a whole new level—the can, the caps, the distance of the spray and all that. I've been messing with it a little bit, still not me yet. I am spraying a little bit, [but] it's expensive. Every time these kids go out and spray, they're investing a couple of hundred dollars’ worth of paint. And it's only going to be there for a day, two days. The city’s going to wash it off, or another crew’s gonna come and wipe it out. But they want the photographs, that's all they care about.”

Some of those young artists with their spray cans work side by side with Villarreal in Nine 3 Studio, an old service station in the shadow of the Chicago Skyway toll road that he has adapted for artist studios. Villarreal’s stone sculptures line one large room, along with some maquettes and his work in other media.

Villarreal also remains a prolific painter, lately using his fingers in place of a brush. “Being a sculptor, something clicked inside me that came like second nature, because you're manipulating things with your fingers. So, I was able to control the paint in a certain way.”

Reflecting his core identity as a stone carver, Villarreal has executed commissions around the city. He has limestone figures—all highly accomplished—in a number of city parks, as well as the steelworker statue.

Perhaps his best-known contribution to Chicago’s parks, a life-size mermaid, was a surreptitious creation by Villarreal and three friends over a couple of weeks in the summer of 1986. They carved the mermaid into one of the limestone blocks that once lined half of the city’s lakefront.

Some of the blocks remain in place, but the rocks where Villarreal and friends carved their figure were removed as part of a shoreline protection project. Someone in the Park District liked the sculpture, however, and it is now resettled near Oakwood Beach on the city’s South Side.

For years, though, the mermaid’s creators were unidentified. It was only in 2000, when the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper wrote about the “mystery mermaid,” that they stepped up and went public. You could say that the mermaid, like many of Villarreal’s stone carvings—like many great stone carvings generally—is most of all about presence. His carvings, be they animal, human or mythical, all have a quality of being intensely there. They are as emphatic and articulate as Villarreal himself. That’s a good thing, as he counts on the art to speak for him.

“Now I might never reap the full rewards of my work, but my descendants will, my kids will, my greatgrandchildren. They're going to know that Roman Villarreal was a life. Most of the people that I know here, they were all hard-working men. But once they die, they’re gone. The difference with me is, I left a legacy. Now, no matter what happens, I could be dead a hundred years, but Roman Villarreal is going to live through his art, which is kind of like being like immortal."

Ultimately, he loves the freedom of being an artist, the beauty he creates and the beauty he sees all around him. “What's interesting about being an artist, you can go to the ugliest places in the world and you're always going to see the beauty.

“We're very fortunate that we walk in beauty.”

Intuit will open an exhibition of Roman Villarreal's work in 2022.