Supported by Russell Hill Rogers Fund for the Arts.

I guess before you die, you started.

Everything started kind of passes through.

The through is like from that moment I started thinking, wow, well, certain people are ideas of what I would paint and how important that was.

What I wanted to say.

It's almost like what a revolution of change the world.

What this man would accomplish is mind blowing.

The passion, the drive, the force.

Born into poverty in Mexico, one of 12 children, Jesse Trevino, grew up on San Antonio's poor West Side, but he was a kind of child prodigy in art winning contest after contest, then a scholarship to a prestigious New York art school.

Exactly where I wanted to be with all these artists from all over the world.

It was great.

And that's when I got drafted and I ended up in Vietnam.

I got blown up with a booby trap and that shot at the leg at the same time.

And I didn't think I was ever going to make it.

He would lose his right hand, his drawing and painting hand.

The worst thing that happened, I mean, it was like I could never, ever do what I wanted to do.

You know, that I've always wanted to do in my life.

But while at his very lowest nearly two years in the hospital, even contemplating suicide, he realized I wasn't just going to stop thinking about art.

I couldn't.

I had to find a way.

So he was not going to let anything deny him his dream.

He was going to be an artist and he was going to be one of the best artists.

So he struggled to teach himself to paint with his left hand.

And within a decade, he became a groundbreaking artist.

He would have works in the Smithsonian selling paintings for tens of thousands of dollars.

I want you all to enjoy my paintings and and enjoy that, too.

Still, he dreamed bigger, so he created massive tile murals, now iconic San Antonio landmarks.

One of them nine stories tall, all while enduring a lifetime of constant pain, countless surgeries, long undiagnosed PTSD, and many personal challenges.

He had a volatile personality at some time.

This was difficult, but the war changed the way he would get angry and frustrated with his painting, with his friends, with the people that he loved the most.

But he always had this love for everybody.

He loved his family and he loved San Antonio.

We know his true beauty of life, which is what he showed it in the arts and his courage and his absolute determination and drive.

Now, after Jesse passed away at the age of 76, there's renewed interest in his work.

But Jesse admitted he wouldn't have become the artist he was without all those obstacles he had to overcome to understand his legacy.

We look at Jesse Trevino, the artist, and the man.

I'm Randy Pima.

I knew Jesse Trevino for 40 years and working in TV news.

I shot any number of stories on him and some of his projects, including his biggest this nine story Tile mosaic called The Spirit of Healing.

And then when Jesse was feeling better than he had in years and I retired from the nightly news, but we'd get together and sometimes I'd put a microphone and a camera or two in front of him, had both of them at the same time.

So this is Jesse Trevino's story in his own words from those interviews and some others, and in the words of some of the people who knew him best in the different chapters, the many different twists and turns in his long and remarkable life.

This is the block on which Jesse lived.

And I lived two blocks down the street.

But this was our sort of bicycle raceway right in here.

Former San Antonio Mayor Henry Cisneros grew up literally just down the street from Jesse Trevino.

Their father died at a relatively young age.

So the mother raised all of the kids and she raised them as really good people and good students.

And she was a Rock of Gibraltar.

So that picture in the backyard, the clothes drying in the sun is kind of a tribute to her as the anchor of the family no matter what.

And Jesse's mother had to get tough with him early when he was already drawing on the walls here.

It was just before then when Jesse was four that the big Trevino family moved from Monterrey, Mexico, to San Antonio and wound up on Monterey Street here.

Jesus Campos Trevino went by the nickname Chewie at home and became Jesse at school.

The name he used the rest of his life and in their two bedroom house, Jesse and the other eight boys usually slept in a screened in porch.

We were poor, but we didn't know we were poor because, I mean, we had everything.

We had all the love.

And we're happy.

And so all the kids from the neighborhood, all of the kids, including Jesse's, down Jesse's block, came in here and we had games that were just, I could tell you, every square footage of the space.

We had some fairy kingdoms.

I mean, it was pretty wild place, constant baseball, football, kickball.

There was a stretch of like four blocks of people who were always hanging out.

The whole street was kids.

Henry Cisneros, younger brother Jorge.

Now runs the community arts group Urban 15.

He remembers Jesse clearly as impressive, even as a quiet young boy.

He was quiet, but you knew that when you were in his presence, you could get him, you you to do anything.

Like mom with the big ideas, the one with the, you know, the lofty way of persuasion, the emotional, passionate person as a kid.

As a kid.

But I remember Jesse always focusing on anything art.

I mean, even from a little boy used to sing, picking up pencils and then doing little sketches.

And we would walk down.

When we started Crockett Elementary School.

But Jesse would stop over and get printers.

Who was Ruben McGill's, Henry Cisneros uncle?

They would come over to get paper.

And Jesse always said, if it hadn't been for your Uncle Ruben, I would not have would not have had paper to draw when he was in grade school.

And grade school is when Jesse had one defining moment as a kid.

The biggest imprinted in my mind was, was the Whitney Museum.

I don't know how he found out about this art contest for kids here at the Whitney Museum, but he did this famous picture, two little doves at a little small auditorium.

My mother would I don't know how many brothers and sisters a bunch of us went over there and lived.

Little Jesse went up on the stage because they announced him as the winner.

And he, you know, was all excited calling my name.

And, you know, I'm so nervous.

His eyes lit up and we were all clapping for him.

A lot of attention.

I come from a world of of no attention here so that I've history.

That recognition made me feel great.

And then they gave him a check for $40.

They said, Man, I love you.

They pay you for doing this.

Right there.

There is this huge.

This is what I want to do.

I want to be a professional artists like that.

But I knew I wanted to be a reserve, to have my work, you know, collected by humans and that I was going to take a lifetime of of of art education and learning about art.

From that moment there, I went with a passion and purpose.

By the time he was at Fox Tech High School, much of his life revolved around art and more content.

One of the best teachers in my high school teacher, Catherine.

Also, she started at Parsons School of Design and she was a great art teacher.

She knew how to do everything, should all have different techniques, and she would look for all of the competitions and contests all over the country.

I went to scholarships through contests.

I would send money through contests.

I remember Jesse because Jesse was in the commercial of art and I was into art.

I was I was a pretty good artist, you know?

But nothing compared to Jesse in the lobby of the school.

They would have just this artwork all on one side, and they will have mine and other members of the art club on the other side.

And you could tell the difference, you know what I mean?

You look at Jesse.

Yeah, I knew this man was going to do something great.

And that was exactly Jesse's plan.

Just a few months after Fox Tech, he was in Manhattan.

He'd won a scholarship to the famous Art Students League of New York, and he loved it.

One of his instructors, William F Draper, was one of the top portrait artists in the country.

Jesse loved the school and the city.

I'd walk around Manhattan, normal galleries and places to look at the pastry shops, the street Avenue, Times Square.

Then he got a job making extra money, sketching tourists.

I could speak for like 200 bucks and then I went back there and 200 bucks.

And a lot of what.

With that, I thought, Wow, this is really enjoying it here, living there in Greenwich Village, go to school.

Then that's where I got my draft notice.

Because he was born in Mexico.

He could have avoided military service if he wanted, but he chose instead to join the army.

It wound up in Vietnam because I come from a family that everyone before me within the service, the Army, the Navy Marine.

But it said I didn't realize what kind of danger I was going to get into.

You know, in Vietnam, he used his rare free time to sketch and paint.

Less than three months after he got there, he was working on this image of a Vietnamese woman and her child.

His canvas was the paper that his mom had used to wrap a package, she said.

It was the last artwork he ever did with his right hand still unfinished when out in the Mekong Delta.

He tripped the wire on a booby trap.

Like.

Like a catapult.

Sort of like a trophy from here.

Like 50, 50 feet.

There's like.

Like a spring loaded boom.

When I.

When I fell on the wood and water faced down mud, but my right leg from right here was shattered there, holding my arm and there were some nerves that were severed.

And I felt like it felt like I was on fire.

All I could do was to take what I had is the head I do everything with.

Right.

And that's when his thoughts drifted to art and his family in San Antonio.

All the kind of things that I did, you know, from from the Whitney Museum to.

Well, I was thinking about paintings I never done and is rare that give or take in about place, because, of course, I want to die or not or whatever.

But I think it'd be great if I could paint, painting my mother, my friends, and how important that was.

You know, what I wanted to say?

And it just seems like we were in that picture of museums and we were part of a mainstream America.

It's almost like what a revelation of what a great idea changed the world.

But soon those visions began to fade as he was sent back to San Antonio and Brooke Army Medical Center.

And he realized just how tough it would be to even survive.

And that's where I met Jesse during that period.

Armando Oberon lost both legs in Vietnam.

Also from San Antonio's west Side.

He tried to make friends with Jesse.

He was in a dark period of his life.

He was very depressed, didn't want to talk to anybody, but he didn't run me away.

I kept persisting.

When Jesse was able to walk some, Armando asked Jesse to push him over to rehab.

I told one of the therapists there, Do me a favor.

I got this friend of mine that come here.

He sits over there.

He was an artist.

Can you order an easel?

Occupational therapy today.

He got a little canvas and got paid.

I would tell him every day.

Jesse, look, there's a easel, some canvas paint.

You can.

You can.

You can paint again.

And he says, No, no, I can't paint.

I lost my painting arm.

I said, Jesse, you lost an arm, but you have another one and you can paint.

You don't lose that talent.

The talent within you can shrivel over dry for about a month, incursion and incursion.

And one day when I was doing my my therapy there in recreation therapy, I saw him get up on the chair, went to the easel, the canvas and got some brushes and and just started painting, just coloring the canvas a little bit.

And then that could do anything.

And then after that, every day, I kept telling him, Come on, you can paint.

And he kept doing the same thing, just trying to see what kind of colors he could make from the canvas.

And I said, Look, Jesse, let's do this.

You can paint me.

I said, We'll do a portrait of me.

So we did it.

He painted with his other hands, kind of distorted because it looked like it was done by a ten year old.

But it was the first painting that Jesse did with his left hand.

From there, he just, I guess, got the spirit back.

I mean, he had it all the time.

It just wasn't there.

Or you could see the difference.

It didn't seem very much depressed anymore because he was busy trying to continue doing this painting.

And then after that we got discharged from the hospital and we became friends, real good friends on the day some of his brothers finally drove him home after he'd been in the hospital more than a year and a half.

There was a little celebration at the house on Monterey, but it was hardly a happily ever after moment.

Jesse was on pain pills and on crutches and often depressed.

For now, he still had his right hand, but it was getting to be worse than useless, only getting in his way and causing him pain.

His right leg that had been shattered was still in a cast.

Doctors tried, but could not repair the nerve damage in his hand, and as the muscles continued to atrophy, the pain would only get worse.

Within two years, he decided to have his right arm amputated just below the elbow.

And while his first attempts at painting with his left hand did encourage him, he knew his still limited control over it wasn't nearly good enough for him to be a real artist.

In fact, it was still years after he painted Armando's portrait and got out of the hospital before he would dare to think he could be an artist for years.

So Jesse was still figuring out what he might do, what he might be able to do.

Created an artist.

Forget about it.

Never going to be able to do that.

I thought maybe I could be a teacher.

He started by enrolling at San Antonio College, and that's where well-known Chicano artist Mel Casas became a very influential teacher and mentor for Jesse.

It's almost like learning to read from from right to left and from left to right.

It was quite an accomplishment.

Courses also brought him into a Chicano arts group here called Concern for Chicano Artists, a period where they don't want identities put on them anymore.

Gabriel Velasquez was one of Jesse's best friends.

He runs the other Neither Guadalupe Association that helps develop the West Side community.

I was taught that to be Chicano is to to take up the cause of the dispossessed.

And it could be anybody.

Does it have to be brown people?

We had a lot of ideological arguments.

San Antonio artist Cesar Martinez is was a member of Gonzales.

Some members were not interested in politics, other members were.

But I think that the biggest unifying factor there was culture.

The proliferation of Chicano art as activism and activism and culture are things Velasquez says that Jesse showed in his own way.

What is activism?

It isn't all throw your fists in the air and go fight the system.

And if there's nothing to tear down, well, let's tear something down.

Now, that's not that's not true.

The movement is also a values that Chicano art movement gave him a platform to celebrate his Uncle Cultura.

That's a concern for peace there.

That laughing about the farmworker people that that have forgotten.

Jesse's first massive mural was on a black background in what he'd later call his dark period.

He worked on it for months while getting his bachelor's degree in art at Our Lady of the Lake University.

Didn't really feel that good about myself.

So why was I going to paint something that was positive?

It's called La Historia Chicana.

He painted it in the old student Union building, but since then it's been moved to the university library.

And that massive canvas also reveals some of his early influences and just how he worked.

Almost always in acrylics.

Combination of brush and airbrush.

Sort of a depiction of the Mexican-American past up to the present.

Male counselors like to do big works.

I think Jesse might have been influenced by that, but Jesse also was interested in what the Mexicans did and in our conversations, he knew all the great Mexican artists and you could see some of the work there.

The Aztecs in it.

And this is who these guys painted.

We're proud of our indigenous versions of where we draw the aspects.

A much more personal painting Jesse worked on in the seventies.

Also on a black background would eventually become one of his most iconic works, though he painted it directly on a wall in a bedroom of his house.

I started thinking about why my of course, the head was the main deal holding a Purple Heart, and and that was the only image that I had that went on there first.

He called it me either my life, and it evolved as he added different elements.

My first real car and I had a girlfriend, one well, girlfriend.

Sweet bird with a cup of coffee.

Of no pain pills to provide myself with.

I favored Budweiser, but I was thinking, Man, I should have painted it right on the wall.

It's got to stay here.

And that's that.

But it turns out it did not have to stay on the wall in that house.

More than 30 years after he painted it.

When he sold the house, the new owner knew of Jesse's reputation as an artist and that she needed to save that painting.

So she hired construction workers to carefully remove the entire wall from the house.

Eventually, movie, though, would be shown in exhibits by the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

More recently, it came back to San Antonio for the grand reopening of the main library.

But as he worked on movie the all that was still decades in the future.

He graduated from Our Lady of the Lake and his mood and his canvases gradually brightened.

He thought about getting his master's degree at Stanford University, where a brother lived.

Instead, he chose to stay in San Antonio and get his masters as part of UTSA, his growing art program.

San Antonio is a city that's very dear to me, although sometimes I I'm very frustrated with San Antonio because.

Because I think the lack of awareness of art and not a very art conscious city, although sometimes it appears to me that I feel like, well, we still have a long way to go.

He said that in 1981, frustrated by the years that he and other Kansas FO artists had spent just trying to have their works be seen back then, belonging to that group maybe was the pressure of what we're presenting or whatever.

We couldn't have exhibitions in and a museum or a gallery or even the library which the they're open to exhibits and stuff like that.

But then they turned us away.

So we resorted to whatever first exhibits went to Edgewood High School Trinity, and then we went to Ann Arbor, Michigan, and some of these places where there were open to having go to our shows and stuff like that.

But here in San Antonio, nobody wanted.

You could call this one of his protest works subtle, but powerful.

His 1976 portrait of an office worker at Kelley Air Force Base titled No Textbooks.

Kelley Field don't close.

Kelley Field, but learned from within that paper.

I could take a guy that works at Kelley Field, make him proud.

The first big breakthrough for Chicano artists as a group and for Jesse individually was in 1977 at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston in a show called The L.A. Guys, meaning give it the gas and let's get on with it.

The first Chicano martial ever in the country at a major museum.

That's where I sold the painting to the mayor of Houston.

Like Mora, it's a car, says on Wall Street.

As for where his ideas were coming from, he was exploring, taking photos of whatever caught his eye.

These are just a few of them.

There are documentary paintings of San Antonio.

I felt that they would make a very good painting, but a very important part of the Mexican-American, the environment and the significance of the place, perhaps in the future that that place would not exist.

We talked about the whole New York School of Photorealism, and in those early cultural images, they were not people, they were buildings.

But at some point you started building in his family and those early pictures of the backyard.

That's the exact backyard that we all remembered.

And we would talk about that transition from photo realism to actually moving into a cultural statement.

Just what is important.

It's nice to converse with Art Park sort of speaks to you what it was.

It tells you it's not just their houses, but it's power.

Motivate people by different ways, which is good to get the conversation going.

It's about something a prelude of the is just a period of a building.

The people that worked in there, the whole story about San Antonio, the capture.

Well, so much.

They say so much.

The guy says, Hey, there's people everywhere.

But you study the whole situation, not just that his own life.

He does that every day and depends that for his family.

So it's a lot of bore and I think a lot of people can relate to that.

That's kind of jobs sort of lifts them up.

It just kind of makes you feel good to see themselves in an image as important as a canvas.

You want somebody to feel something as well, But ultimately, if it doesn't do that, then I feel like I'm missing an opportunity.

And by 1981, Jesse was getting more opportunities to have his artwork seen by more people than ever before.

It's really important for me.

He was commissioned to create fiestas.

First official poster.

It's quite a challenge for me.

I never like to think of my paintings so much as decorative, but they should be decorative because you hang up on a wall and you want to be able to look at them.

Really enjoy looking at them.

Also, in 1981, he was featured in the grand opening of the San Antonio Museum of Art, as well as an exhibit in New York at the Museo del Barrio.

And by now, any thoughts he had of teaching were long in the past.

I was having too much fun doing my own work.

And it was, you know, commissions.

And I saw a lot of teachers that didn't seem very happy.

He also spent more than a year on scaffolding above the tellers at what's now a Wells Fargo Bank office on Old Highway 90.

The owner at the time commissioned Jessie to paint a mural of something he didn't know what he wanted to do.

And it just struck him.

It has to be San Antonio.

It has to be where I live.

Anthony Head wrote the one and only book about Jessie called Spirit The Life and Art of Jessie Trevino.

It wasn't just a static portrait of it.

If there is anything like movement and painting, you see a cinematic wonder.

You can't take it all in in one viewing.

And it just looks as though it has movement to it.

How do you work?

How do you visualize?

Do you see something in your mind before you knew it?

Exactly.

That's what it's exactly that way.

You know, the images that I think about.

And then I bring them together.

He and his mind knew what that was going to look like.

Gallery owner Lisa Ortiz worked with Jesse for years when he was painting it.

It was not consistent.

He would pay a building here.

He would build people here.

He will bring the sky here.

And then all of a sudden it just came together.

But he was all over the place.

By the early eighties, he was selling some canvases for more than $10,000 a piece.

And a film crew came to town at the Ritz Cleaners.

Then at the other end of this wreckage, changes in his work, working with a dog and Bella Gallery, Anheuser-Busch sponsored the only documentary on Jesse produced during his lifetime.

My paintings are about my culture, the Mexican American culture called Spirit Against All Odds.

It was narrated by actor Martin Sheen.

His innermost choice was clear force feed, a reluctant hand, the sweet diet of artistic knowledge, or live an empty and listless life without palette, brush or paints.

One of the young up and coming artists in the United States, not only as a Hispanic painter, but as a realist contemporary painter.

The film was less than 20 minutes long and came out fairly early in Jesse's career before his big landmark Tile Mosaics, though it did include a brief mention of his first hand-painted tile work at Market Square.

I had to exhibit in some of the most prestigious museums.

The main goal that I have when I do that, and perhaps I'll be successful, perhaps I'll be successful.

Jesse What was a painting that you were doing there in the film?

That's a commission.

A friend of mine, east of the Continent as a child, and now he's 30.

What?

You see the painting here of the piece?

Galleries.

That's Jesse's vision.

Juan Vasquez is the friend who commissioned that painting.

It's now one of Jesse's best known works.

I gave him a photo of my grandfather not in that pose.

And I described to him how my grandfather or that red bandana.

This is not a photograph.

He actually created this picture, but by the interviews of one.

Jesse was very lucky because he was able to believe in both the commercial world and pursue his fine art world.

He agreed to sell it to me for 9000, but he would take payment.

It was his concession.

VASQUEZ And advertising executive Lionel Sosa were just two of Jesse's fans who bought some of his paintings on installments.

Jesse was one hell of a salesman.

I mean, he every painting that he painted, he did his best to sell it to you says, give me $1,000 a month.

And every 18 months you can own a new one.

But he wouldn't just put the one that I had committed to buy.

He would come in and put another one on the wall.

This will be your next one.

And then he would put another one on the wall.

And before you knew it, you had to have them.

There's no way you could live without them.

Jesse had this instinct about what he wanted for his work.

Elaine, dig.

It also worked with Jesse for years at Big and Bella Gallery in Market Square.

He demanded maybe much higher prices then at that time in the seventies or early eighties could not totally be justified by the market overall.

Now, looking back, Jesse was so correct in what he was doing.

He knew where his talent was going and it was taking him to the White House more than once with Elaine Diggins help and her background working in Washington, DC.

Jesse was honored with one of the first Hispanic Heritage Awards and more.

We had the pleasure of presenting a painting to the vice President, George Bush at the time, and Jesse did a special painting of the Alamo for Ronald Reagan.

And then eventually, a couple of years later, ended up with him getting a painting at an exhibit in Washington at the Smithsonian.

And he was being featured in everything from Ripley's Believe It or Not, though they misspelled Jesse to Slick magazine ads for Wrangler Jeans.

I was proud of it when I saw it, see them like that, that he was chosen to do that.

But I love that.

Thank you very much.

And Jesse was excited that he was commissioned to paint a mural at the new San Antonio Library.

It's a beautiful library.

And remember, that old library was where his cousin Sappho Group wasn't even allowed to exhibit years before.

What a great honor for me and to be that really nice to do that always reminded me what to be proud of, who we are, to be proud of our community.

Lawyer Frank Guerrero JR has a number of Jesse's works, including the site of his first law offices in the old Texas theater building.

Kind of a brief life in a dignified, I guess, to some extent, the Latino community.

It paints us, as is San Antonio, as this.

It's Hispanics, but it's us means everybody because we have so much diversity in our country.

He wanted to help veterans in every way he could.

Advertising executive Ernest Bromley worked with Jesse on a project helping veterans.

So another cause always close to Jesse's heart.

Bromley also wound up with a painting of the Alameda Theater, which Jesse suggested he sell to a museum.

As Jesse was always thinking about his legacy and being in those museums he dreamed of as a boy.

He wants people to see his work and value his work.

And it's great work.

People call him, you know, Mexican-American artist, comic con artist, Latino artist, Hispanic artist, American artist.

That's true.

But more importantly, I want to be recognized for being an artist.

And Jesse wasn't thinking about labels when his biggest and best known work was unveiled in a rainstorm in 1997.

But before that curtain could drop, it took literally decades for his vague idea of putting something on this big blank wall to become a reality.

I've wanted to do that for over 20 years, but I didn't really know what I was going to do.

Called The Spirit of Healing on the side of what's now Christy's Children's Hospital.

It took a few coincidences that some called Divine Intervention to bring it to life.

I'm talking about God writing the the plot to this whole story because there is no way that any of us could have orchestrated this.

And the award winning former journalist Patty Elizondo interviewed Jesse in 1981 for her first ever on camera TV segment.

The last question she asked me, after all the questions that she asked me about my work.

She asked me what future projects are in store.

Jesse Well, so I said, Well, there's a wall at the children's hospital at Santa Rosa.

And he started talking about this mural.

We need to have art in the west part of downtown to bring in more people.

And it has to be, I think, significant art.

I think when people take me even more serious, this will happen.

And Jesse later brought up the idea to city council members.

The Plaza would be the setting for this marvelous mural mosaic.

Mosaic.

I would hope that someday we can do that.

But nothing came of all of that talk until Patty Elizondo started consulting for the hospital in the mid-nineties.

And she happened to mention that interview to an administrator stopped in its tracks.

He said.

What do they come to you or how do you feel they came to be?

Yes, exactly.

You know, they saw them they saw the actual videotape of this program.

The fact that the Santa Rosa Hospital was considering leaving downtown for them, I think it was a big step.

Heaven sent because it cemented the decision to stay downtown.

I guess at times you work really hard saying that it'll pay off.

But Jesse still didn't have an idea yet for what image he wanted to put on the wall.

What?

I found out that they were really interested in and this mural I was working on, on a couple of other projects.

One of them, I was going to the San Fernando Cemetery and I was taking pictures of some of the tombstones there, and there were some beautiful angels.

And I guess I was interested in the forms and I thought maybe one day I'll do a painting of those tombstones.

And the San Fernando Cemetery is like some of my other paintings.

And this particular angel is an actual sculpture in the cemetery.

And along with that, I had shown some photographs.

I was working on a portrait of my son.

Then another of Jesse's longtime friends, Meteora owner George Cortez.

Notice those photos and something else.

You said Jesse, who's this little boy?

So I asked my son, What is he holding a hand to?

Dad took this photo of me holding a hedgehog.

Was a pet hedgehog I had not a hamster is a hedgehog.

Jesse's son, Jesse LaShawn Trevino, now a screenwriter and actor, was about eight years old when his dad painted this portrait of him and one of his two hedgehogs.

Sonic the Hedgehog was popular in the nineties.

That fills the gap of why they would even be a thing.

I had one named Claire.

Other one Sonic.

So think I was holding someone?

I got Sonic.

I said, You know what?

That's your painting.

But it's going to be dog owner, something that would represent the Santa Rosa.

Also, he was had a lot of history.

And the angel that started representing something that I wanted the mural to reflect.

We all need some, you know.

I had, you know, like my father died, my older sister and my mother.

And, you know, a bunch of people were were my angel in my life.

They made that difference with that angel, with the broken wing.

Angel's gone through a whole lot.

Yeah.

Physically, you know, it's like when we're seeing I have or missing.

I mean, there's something.

But yet those people have been that in your life.

Of course, the dove spirit could be life itself.

That his holding it was kind of it all came together in his spirit.

And that was called the spirit of healing.

This mural is about children and how important that child is going to be to our future as a city.

That's why the mural is about sometimes, I don't know, I like to call it a mural because, you know, we have murals that are painted, you know, like overnight on a wall and, you know, and and this isn't at all like that.

I just want to be like a monument.

But even with the image now decided, actually creating that massive monument took about three years and a lot of help to watch his creative process.

It was inspiring.

Michael Roman was on a small crew working on that huge tile project.

They spent more than a year in a warehouse helping Jesse and Jesse's longtime friends and assistants, brothers Alex and Jesse Villarreal.

And Ramon says Jesse inspired him to become an artist years later, painting his own murals like this one on the West Side.

But Jesse's tile creation process, well, that was something else.

There's thousands of tiles that were every tile is hand-cut.

I would say at least 90% of that mural was hand-cut by Jesse.

And he cut the tiles in a certain way to mimic the brushstrokes so that you get the feel of the of like if it was a painting.

And that was one thing about his prosthesis.

He never missed his right hand after he became proficient with his prosthesis because he wouldn't wear out the muscles in his hand, cutting that tile for all of his murals.

And sometimes you used his artificial hand as the hammer.

Wow.

When he'd be hammering something.

Jesse, that's not a hammer.

Yes, it is.

BOM Wow.

Wow.

But while he was working hard much of the time, sometimes he wasn't working at all.

There were times when he would procrastinate because there were other things that that he wanted to do.

The piece that was commissioned through a van, say, for Prince Charles.

When we took it to be framed two days before, there was still a little wet paint, but it was done and it was presented.

We shipped it to Buckingham Palace.

So it took a big push from a special friend.

Another angel in his life to get Jesse, to get that spirit of healing done.

I was the one that kept him on track.

Longtime caterer Rosemary Kowalski was a somewhat unlikely friend, especially given how they'd met a few years before.

You see them come to life in the actual buildings.

Jesse was designing a set at the Majestic Theater for an opera.

One day he picked up the star, Joel Gray, at a hotel at the same time that Rosemary was picking up a client.

But she didn't know who Jesse was.

And she asked her about his license plate because I had never seen like it.

And instead of telling me that name, he took a put out the window, the hook he had on his arm.

And I reckon that it was for the Purple Heart.

I was extremely embarrassed, so I just put the gas on the car and got out of the way.

But the next day she sought him out and apologized.

That started a friendship that I feel like older sister of his or someone that had been in his family.

I just know that the two of us loved each other and had a tremendous respect.

So when it looked like Jesse was not going to get Spirit of healing done on time, it turns out the only person he listened to was Rosemary Kowalski at hospital.

He called me to get him away from his fun life and get to work, and their friendship endured.

Later, she commissioned paintings from Jesse of her first business.

She also bought from him that last painting he did in Vietnam, but she still isn't sure why she was able to get to Jesse when others.

You know, with Jesse like it was, I guess if he said something to me tough, I probably answered it.

And by all accounts, because of Rosemary Kowalski, the spirit of healing was finished on schedule.

Lorraine hit hard downtown tonight, just minutes before they unveiled a huge new landmark.

This has to be the most exciting event for me as an artist.

Oh, I said I told you.

It's awesome.

Jesse, How did himself.

I wanted to cry when I first saw it.

It is beautiful beyond words.

It's going to be a landmark and Jesse was already working on something else that would become another landmark.

As I interviewed him just before, the Spirit of Healing was unveiled.

It was literally in the background.

This painting is a painting for myself.

I always have to find the time, no matter what I'm working on that I do the painting.

So my ideas that 3D painting of a vote of Candle of Dora would eventually become the model for his second biggest public art project on the wall of the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, a years later.

In the meantime, he was working on more paintings of San Antonio icons.

And in 1999, in a mural at the New Texas Diabetes Institute on the West Side, he memorialized another traditional place of healing in a painting titled Lakota in the area where the world changed my neighborhood.

And as he had done for decades, he was still speaking to kids very proud that he lived on the West Side.

They gave me a lot.

And in 20, with private funding and some help from the city, this time they unveiled his 40 foot hand-cut tile mosaic of the Villa Dora.

He knew that that would have such an effect on the community, it would give it a power.

I could have never imagined that it would be as large, as beautiful or emerge as one of those iconic San Antonio images.

His public art was very important to him.

He put an awful lot of effort into the public art, and it was all dedicated to the people of San Antonio, and he meant that sincerely.

It's his hometown.

It was his muse, his inspiration, and it was his canvas.

He used the very buildings of San Antonio to places art on the Goodwill building just across from Market Square in another tile mural unveiled in 2003.

Jesse highlighted some of the people who helped him about a decade later and a couple of blocks to the south.

They also helped him with his last big tile creation, remembering the little Laredo neighborhood.

But just a few months after that, Jesse was diagnosed with stage four throat cancer.

It was pretty brutal.

Something of life out of you.

Well, it wasn't just the cancer.

Jesse started with a lot of other medical issues, even before the cancer, as he had numerous different surgeries since his injuries in Vietnam.

His body had been slowly breaking down over the years.

And valiantly he fought and kept that as private as possible.

He had his struggles, and it did lead to depression.

With themes of healing and spirit and love flowing through decades of his work.

Many people didn't know that Jesse himself needed extra help and healing of all kinds throughout his life.

But as a person, he was.

It could be difficult to to to live and work with losing a hand.

And cancer was some of the physical challenges.

But most people didn't see his other side.

Sometimes he would get in very deep depression and anger unleashed anger that that that he had and that affected every aspect of his life, including his art.

He was married four times with a number of other serious and many not so serious relationships.

He had five children, and with all of them, most of his family and many of his friends.

There was often tension, fights, break ups, and only sometimes reconciliations.

The war changed him, you know.

He was still very compassionate and how much he could.

He would give you the shirt off his back.

But he had a very short fuze.

He had no patience.

And he would get angry and frustrated with his painting or with his friends.

And he had this love hate relationship with the people they love the most.

I think it was a very drastic change.

I think he was very happy.

He was he was experiencing pain for the rest of his life despite all these injuries that he had.

You know, he never really was a complainer.

I'm a nurse.

And in that time period, we did not recognize post-traumatic stress syndrome.

I believe that what it is, he himself had to work with it himself.

And that's difficult to do.

He had many, many moods since I didn't know what bipolar there was back then.

I don't even know if he knew.

I think I did a pretty good job of not taking it so personally.

I realized a long time ago this is who he is in spite of the depression that always came back and at times consumed him.

He was able to work through it on his own and get back to the place that he needed to be.

But, you know, I don't think there's any doubt that the Curtis family saved his life.

They loved him.

They loved the man, a brother, a person that understood me.

And I could understand him many, many days.

He didn't want to get up.

So George Curtis would have somebody pick him up every day at a certain time, bring him to meet the area where he had his own corner.

And it was Jesse's storytelling time.

So he would beg because he wanted me just reading.

He's right here.

You have a cup of coffee with him.

And he did that for many years.

Well, sometimes, you know, when he would go through those some of those valleys, you know, he would he needed people like, my dad and like Rosemarie Kowalski and Judge Vasquez and others to come in and lift him back up, He pushed away everything at some point.

But Gabriel says Jesse had a kind of awakening about exactly what happened in Vietnam and his PTSD and other problems since then.

The harder to show time when they went to a Smithsonian exhibit in Washington in 2019, this was the beginning.

He didn't understand the level of PTSD he had to later.

To me, the breakthrough was that he had come to the conclusion that he'd been dealing with PTSD his whole life has been here for some reason.

Right.

He was realizing some mistakes he made in life.

I'm not too sure, but I can see he's not done with me yet.

By early 2021, Jesse felt better than he had in at least a decade with the throat cancer apparently gone.

I'm in the mood for doing some saliva reading for the project here, and those projects started with him building a deck onto his house.

Amazingly, doing most all the work himself, he would do all the work himself, solve all that.

What you see here.

It didn't, though, other than putting the beams up all himself.

You can build anything out of anything.

He's always had that skill, and Jesse told me he had to finish the deck first.

Before that tile studio, he was also building behind his house.

Randy, that that is more important than this.

But this has to come before that because this.

This is where a lot of the of some of the metal the the create came in so I sit out here this is a space to be creative you need that well yeah and he was always thinking about creating more projects coming up with ideas every day.

Every day.

While working on portraits of his family, he was hoping to create a mural on the side of the old Munguia print shop where he got his paper as a kid.

I had my eye on that.

Really.

Now the offices of Henry Cisneros, Jesse wanted to highlight Henry in that mural, talking about painting the wall is good, but Henry was encouraging another project Jesse had on his list a mural at Sacred Heart Church, an explosion of color of color.

Plus, he had plans for a massive steel memorial to veterans at Elmendorf Lake by Our Lady of the Lake University.

Beautifully lit battle structure.

And for years, one of Jesse's biggest dreams was to create a tile mosaic on the side of the Alameda Theater facing San Pedro Creek.

He's higher in spirits again because he can do things like when you start pulling in that deck and feeling really good about it.

And then I believe it was August 20, 21, That's when they told me I have cancer and it's it's bad fast.

This time, doctors at the VA detected a cancerous tumor the size of a racquetball behind his jaw.

They told him the only possible way to treat it was a risky surgery peel off out of his face and get all the way back in there and get the cancer out.

And perhaps I might not even come out of that surgery.

He was taking a big risk, but he was willing to take it.

Shortly before that surgery at the VA hospital in Houston, he admitted he was scared, terrified of the second battle with cancer treatment.

I also asked him what he wanted people back in San Antonio to know and how they could help.

They've been praying for me.

Oh, that's why I'm still here.

So I would be there for that, I think would be the biggest donation for me would be their prayers.

He came through that 15 hour surgery, but a COVID lockdown and then pneumonia kept him isolated at the hospital in Houston.

But in a few months he was back in San Antonio at a long term care facility right outside the gates of Fort Sam Houston, where he recovered after Vietnam nearly 50 years earlier.

I get well yeah, that I can't do that.

In the last year of his life, Jesse was still convinced he would get to go home and work, but his health declined.

His spirit brightened when he was able to see some of his paintings on display at Progresso Hall, right across from his velvet aura.

Beautiful.

And in late 2022, Wells Fargo held a reception for him right under his big San Antonio mural, and he'd been making amends.

He wanted to make things right with everybody.

He, you know, apologized for all the hard times he put me through and stuff.

That was really nice.

It was almost like, you want me to forgive.

And I told him I forgave you so many years ago, especially in the last few years.

He was it wasn't very often, but he would become he was more comfortable talking about his faults, more comfortable apologizing and regret some of the things that are done just before his birthday on Christmas Eve.

Jesse got pneumonia again and then in the hospital contracted COVID.

After he was released, he grew even weaker.

Longtime friend Jorge Cortez saw him the night before Jesse died in February of 2023.

When he opened his eyes, he looked at us.

Where's my barbacoa?

Very traditional.

But I loved the word when he said Jesse is a light.

It gave me healing that he was going to be okay to the next Islamic world.

He's with us in spirit.

But up there.

I won't be surprised if he's painting, if my painting angels or whatever he might be.

Or maybe.

God, you never know.

Oh, my God.

What's important right now is that many of us who loved Jesse cared for Jesse used him as a not as a role model, but as a person to be admired because he survived.

And he came through things that I don't know where he got it.

We have to be very careful.

You don't make a caricature.

But Jesse was driven.

He there was something going on there, and we just better figure it out and deal with it.

He not help but pour his soul into his work.

Part of that anger and part of making sure that his work was documenting his people and I don't know if he would have been as good if he had not had that anger in him yesterday when they were speaking about the PTSD.

It kind of made sense to me.

You know, I'm a lot older now, so as a kid, it didn't like I couldn't connect to that.

And it took me to grow up to realize that that was just him.

That was just him.

Jesse really was passionate about his art, but I believe he had to have that passion to achieve the greatness that he achieved.

And that was out in the rice paddies in the Mekong Delta.

It was a horrible experience.

The worst thing that could have happened to me.

It changed my life.

It's almost like, you know, all the paintings, all the all the paintings that I did before, technically, they were real good and people liked them.

And but they didn't say as much as as the paintings of the Rastaman or the Progresso Drugstore or the Kelly Field Worker.

More personal paintings.

And yet because of that horrible experience, it just changed me in the way that I would see.

And he would choose to capture seemingly insignificant but sacred moments that bind us together.

So I'm glad that that that that change happened to me where I got hurt.

But that's the one I always that, you know, otherwise I'd be set in New York and, you know, who knows what I would be painting, but I certainly would be painting the paintings that I have.

You wonder what your life would be like, where you would be, what you would be doing, what you would be.

Yeah, well, you know, I want to think that if I came down to it, I was going to paint the things that I want, wanted to do.

When I was in New York, I was still a student, still learning a lot.

But when it comes down to the real work, what you're going to do, you want to give it everything that you can in that painting, that you create a life of its own strong.

And the message that when I'm gone and, you know, an artist does a painting, they're gone.

That painting is as just as fresh and it's just as powerful.

And what it says, you know, 100 years from now, colors and brightness.

And the story behind the painter is definitely something to understand.

Reading and knowing so many people in the city know his art and aren't quite sure of his name.

Jesse wanted to be San Antonio's artist more than anything.

I think is now time for the city to take up the baton and start claiming Jesse as San Antonio's greatest artist.

Supported by Russell Hill Rogers Fund for the Arts.