Lake County artist remembers farmworker movement, mural painting in San Francisco

All that artist Catalina Gonzalez requires for inspiration is a step out the door of her Spring Valley home.

Being so close to Lake County's gently sloping hillsides, now blanketed with wildflowers, that are set in a backdrop of the larger mountains and craggy valleys adjacent to the Berryessa Snow Mountain's National Monument near the North Fork of Cache Creek, truly shows how inspiration is always abundant.

The natural beauty here invites her to experience elk bugling in the fall while providing her with her with a ruggedly natural place to explore the personal and shared narratives of her culture on her colorful, spirited canvases.

“Landscape painting takes courage, like mural painting in a way, since finding your way with nature or, with an audience when you need to interact with the public,” she said.

Gonzalez, 60, loves the prolific bird-watching opportunities in the area, as well as the particular slant of light that streams into her studio during the right time of day.

"Nature is my love and teacher, and nature is my studio," she said.

The artist works indoors or paints plein-air. Gonzalez has also worked in ceramics, drawing and crochet.

Her oil-on-canvas work is on display at the Middletown Art Center's Raíces Hermosas exhibit. The art show has attracted 2,400 visitors, including nearly 1,800 Lake County students.

"Every student deserves an equitable education. According to 2022-2023 data, Lake County has 9,901 students — 4,228 of them identify as Hispanic or Latino,“ said Lake County Superintendent of Schools Brock Falkenberg. ”By implementing inclusive practices, we can create learning environments where every student feels valued, respected and empowered to reach their full potential in school.”

For this exhibit, the California Natural Resources Agency gave the Middletown Art Center $188,744 to put toward a yearlong program that will connect the Latinx community through art, events and education.

"Catalina's large painting ‘Chalk Mountain in Spring Valley’ attracts many students through the animals both hidden and forward in her composition,“ said artist and Middletown Art Center Director Lisa Kaplan. ”The landscape grounds us in place, and expresses aspects of her mixed Mexican and Native American identity through the rhythms of forested mountains trees and the flicker bird wings that are central to the composition."

Raíces Hermosas’ Latinx exhibiting artists are from Lake County, Sacramento, the Bay Area, Miami and Chicago. Of those 19 exhibiting, six were born in Latin America, four are in the LGBTQ+ community.

Family roots, farmworker rights

Gonzalez’s mother, Leonor, was born in Mission, Texas; and her father, Teofilio, was born in Vera Cruz, Mexico. The two met as teenagers in the grape fields of the Central Valley, then they had three kids.

Born in 1963, she is the middle child. During this time, the Bracero program, an arrangement between the United States and Mexican governments where Mexican workers would come to the states to tend to farmland, was nearing its end in 1964.

Cesar Chavez, one of the most predominant leaders in the farmworker movement, has been a key figure when it comes to Latino empowerment and pride.

“I remember it was a tough dirty job and we worked from sun up to sun down in the valley heat. Our pride was coming from being Mexican,” she said of working in the fields as a youngster. “Today I recognize the value of all I had learned working in the tomato fields, pickling cherries, strawberries and plums it taught me a great work ethic, taught me determination and the spiritual strength to live my truth which is to express myself as an artist.”

Her mother later met her stepfather, Frank Carolla, a teamster who was a friend of Jimmy Hoffa. The family left the Central Valley and moved to the Bay Area when Gonzalez was eight years old.

She said doodling in her middle school classes helped her get through the boredom she said she experienced. Then, she gravitated toward learning about lives and works of artists on her own like Vincent Van Gogh, Rembrandt, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Rubins and that of Georgia O' Keeffe.

A few years later, Gonzalez would be back in Modesto living with her grandmother from ages 13 to 17. She said her grandmother's love of cooking and gardening may have fostered her current love of nature.

“My mother’s mom, Audrey, came from Texas. She made great salsa and had an enormous avocado tree in her backyard that she grew from a seed,” she said. “My dad’s mom Vicenta, we called her Abulita, made fresh flour tortillas every week we would eat them with butter hot off the griddle. Ceviche was a special dish of hers as well as chicken mole and enchiladas.”

Finding her artistic medium

In her early 20s, Gonzalez worked as an airbrush artist painting commercial concert backdrops and billboards for Tower Records in San Francisco.

The job taught her how to paint in the style of photorealism, which is a genre of art that encompasses painting, drawing and other graphic media. In this style, the artist studies a photograph and then tries to reproduce the image as realistically.

Then, Gonzalez received a scholarship and enrolled into San Francisco State University's multimedia studies program from 1997-98. She later attended San Francisco Art Institute's painting program in 2002-03.

“One thing I learned from working in the fields was that I did not ever want to do that work again so to be a painter and artist was a labor of love,” she said. “I spent most of my 20s and 30s with many different, very talented mentors each and every one of them taught me.”

In 2005, you could find her with her painter's palette, painting murals around the Bay Area. She was also selling paintings and worked on commissions. One of her projects was a series of nude paintings for an Oakland strip club.

She also began working with incarcerated youth at Alameda County Juvenile Justice Center in San Leandro where she conducted painting workshops.

“I worked with a group of young Latinas, outspoken young ladies in the old dilapidated jail,” she said. “Another group of youth I worked with was mixed boys and girls. A couple of kids reached out to me and told me their almost unbelievable stories.”

Inspiring young artists

She really enjoyed working with youths, young artists and being a mentor.

"I started mentoring students when I was in my early 30s working at Precita Eyes Muralists in San Francisco with Susan Cervantes the founder. She was my mentor,“ Gonzalez said.

She taught workshops and led mural projects through Precita Eyes Muralists, which is an inner-city, community-based and mural arts organization located in San Francisco’s Mission district.

“I led several mural projects guiding them through the design and painting process, even having one of our murals printed in the New York Times 'Fashion of the Times,'" she said.

Before Gonzalez moved to Lake County from Oakland, in 2010, she conducted an eight-week mural workshop at the Claire Lilienthal Alternative High School in San Francisco’s Marina District.

She also competed with other artists to have a chance to create a work of art for Society for Advancement of Chicano and Native Americans in Science. She won and in honor of their 2011 national conference, she designed a piece of art and it was published on the cover of the conference brochure.

Gonzalez said her process when working on commissions or creating art for other people starts out the same.

"Creating for others, I first will sit with the theme, listen to clients, taking notes and sketching out ideas. Since painting is technical it involves planning, while knowing when to walk away during my process,“ she said. ”At times, I involve another artist's opinion, since it's good to get lost a little in a back and forth idea session.“

In 2010, Gonzalez wanted to move somewhere quiet in nature to raise her daughter and paint landscapes. While living in Spring Valley, she learned to navigate the challenging balancing act between her country lifestyle and working to survival.

She’ll occasionally commute to San Francisco for commissioned work. In 2020, she was part of a team that painted two murals of Cesar Chavez celebrating the contribution of the Latino workers for the San Francisco Human Services Agency.

Through her classes and her various projects, Gonzalez has met artists from various backgrounds using various mediums. These days, one of her main goals is to meet more artists, become a part of plein-air painting groups and to seek out more art showings.

She considers herself a lifelong learner, challenging herself to take creative steps to continue learning the process of painting.

"Art is a lifestyle that gives my life meaning,“ she said. ”It is talking stories with images where no words or explanations are needed."