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Emotional 'Surrender'

Tucson artist is guided by divine inspiration

Veronica Escudero draws on tension between dualities to express her art and her self.

The Mexican American artist splits the year between two homes, one in Pennsylvania and one in Surprise. She divides her work into two categories, sacred art and fine art.

Her mostly mixed-media paintings and pieces are influenced by Mexican and American indigenous traditions.

She grew up Catholic in Tucson, but is now a born-again Christian.

Her most recent show, "Escudero Surrenders," ran at the Kerr Cultural Center in Scottsdale in January. She's also exhibited Jadite Galleries in New York, and locally at Shemer Art Center and the West Valley Art Museum.

In the past she has painted permanent and portable murals. Kitty Gato, was commissioned in 1997 and decorates the Arizona Humane Society's animal shelter. Another adorns the Sunnyslope PAL Center.

Escudero says she feels that her work is divinely inspired by God. She refers to it as contemporary sacred art because she says the Holy Spirit utilizes her creativity and talent to paint sacred, whimsical or political art.

"I don't plan anything out," she says of her inspiration. "I'm just the paintbrush."

In the diptych The Virtuous Woman, she depicts a Madonna with a saying from the Bible's Book of Psalms painted along the edges.

Escudero was born in Tucson. When she graduated from high school, her family moved to Mexico City. She studied for a year at the San Carlos Art Institute, whose most famous students included muralists David Alfaro Siqueiros and Diego Rivera.

She later moved to Chicago and lived there for almost two years. She returned to Mexico City, where she met her husband, Jose Velazquez, a truck driver. In 1977, she moved to Phoenix, studied art at Arizona State and graduated in 1984 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts.

While in Mexico, Escudero traveled throughout the country, lived with indigenous families, and visited archaeological sites. These visits have resulted in the artist working Mayan and Aztec motifs and figures into her pieces.

For example, Return to Aztlán shows an Aztec against a colorful landscape.

"I missed Arizona when I moved to Boston and wanted to come back here," she says. The mixed media composition instills that emotional longing of a lost homeland.

Much of Escudero's work has high emotional impact. She is in love with rich, lush colors. Reds and purples are her favorites. One critic describes Escudero as an artist who takes a "single emotion, reduces it to its purest state and imbues it with an aura of mysticism."

"My main purpose is to get a reaction, for them to feel something, an emotional thing," she says. "I don't want them to just pass by it. I want them to go up to it and become part of it."

Escudero makes no claim to be Chicano or to paint Chicano themes, even though her painting Ode to Ida was presented in the historiography of contemporary art, Chicano art Triumph of our Communities: Four Decades of Mexican American Art, by Gary Keller and Amy Phillips of the ASU Hispanic Research Center.

"I stuck out like a sore thumb," she protests.

One of the Kerr show pieces, the mixed media Gag Order, was both whimsical and political. Escudero says the work is a protest against the "jibberish and rhetoric" of Bush's re-election, she says. A man's head has an animal across his mouth while other fanciful animals walk through a lushly colored jungle.

"There comes a time when you get tired of the politics and have to be quiet and go into a more spiritual, peaceful place," she says.