Jose Ramirez, painter, teacher, and gardener
How art helps elementary school students, the beautiful ways his art explores Los Angeles history, when his painting made a television appearance, and so much more
Flying into Los Angeles at night has always amazed me. I get excited by the lights, the sensible grid, the traffic snaking around canyons and through valleys. Some see it all as urban sprawl, but from the sky—and more specifically my airplane seat in coach—it’s beautiful. Painter Jose Ramirez seems to see things the same way.
Throughout his painting career, Jose has captured the landscape and culture of Los Angeles in beautiful ways. He’s painted neighborhoods where he lives and works as an elementary school teacher, celebrated the natural history of the downtown Los Angeles hardscape, documented protests and teacher’s strikes, and beautifully illustrated a set of children’s books that continues to expand.
His artistic talent was first nurtured at a boarding school program in Arizona, and then he went on to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees in fine art at University of California, Berkeley. When he returned to Los Angeles, he earned his teaching credential and became an elementary school teacher. For much of his 30-year professional life, Jose has worked as a third-grade teacher and painter, and often blends the two in meaningful ways by connecting his students with the lives of artists and encouraging them to make their own art. Jose has illustrated nine children’s books. He’s also tending a sizable garden of fruit trees, vegetables, and flowers on a terrace beside his house in Boyle Heights, a part of Los Angeles.
You are an artist and an elementary school teacher. How does art play a role in your teaching?
I’m an intervention specialist, which means I teach English language development to new learners in elementary school. I make learning about artists, including reading their biographies, part of this. Today, working with third-grade students, we learned about Basquiat's work and read a children’s book about him.
We had structured conversations to encourage the students to talk about what they noticed about his work, what elements would inspire their work, and what they would do differently. We did it before they created their own artwork, and we will do it again afterward.
I do this type of education focused on many different artists and architects of color who I think students would appreciate and connect with. Focusing on artists is effective because I can bring in so many different concepts and ideas: history, the context of where the artist lived, and why they created art. Many artists have stories of something traumatic that happened to them that directed them toward art, and they were able to channel that energy into something beautiful.
These stories can help students understand that perhaps their trauma can also be overcome or partly dealt with by making art.
Your job has a significant impact on these childrens’ lives.
I work with fourth- and fifth-grade international students who are new to this country. Many of them arrived here recently from Honduras, Nicaragua, or Guatemala. My focus with them includes some basic English development, but also social and emotional development. I expose them to art, art activities such as making collages or masks, and building with LEGOs as a way to establish some community for them. I may not know exactly what they're going through, but I know that there must be some difficulty they had getting here or getting accustomed to being in this country.
I've been working in this district for almost 30 years as a schoolteacher. I'm almost at the point where I could retire and focus more on my art. But this work also feeds my art because it keeps me connected and grounded to this community. I feel like my presence is important in this neighborhood.
Let’s talk about your murals. I was thinking it would be great to do a Jose Ramírez mural tour of Los Angeles.
Well, to be honest, I don't consider myself much of a muralist. I’ve probably created fewer than 15 murals, which is a small amount compared to some of the Chicano muralists that I know.
I have done a few that I feel proud of. But I would say that my paintings, more so than the murals, depict places, organizations, or time periods that people identify with the best. Frequently nonprofit organizations will ask me if they can use an image of one of my paintings to promote an event or use on their website. That's another way that my work gets out there and becomes part of the fabric that we see in Los Angeles.
Is there one image that has been seen by the most people?
Funny you should ask because today I went to the California Community Foundation. They have a painting of mine called City of Angels, which I painted in 2011. At the time, I thought it was my most important painting. I still feel like it's important. It’s large and it shows LA and all the people who made it what it is, and it’s been seen by a lot of people. The paintings I made about the teachers’ strike got a lot of exposure too.
Tell me about the mural, A Short History of Los Angeles.
It’s from 2016. I wanted to put in as many different things about LA history as I could. At the time, I was reading books about early Los Angeles history.
One of them, LAttitudes: An Angeleno’s Atlas, is a collection of essays about different areas of Los Angeles. Another one is From Cows to Concrete, and it's a history of agriculture in LA. I also was looking at A State of Change: Forgotten Landscapes of California, which the principal at my school, who is a birder, shared. It had beautiful paintings of what the imagined California landscape was like around 200 or 300 years ago and further back, and the different animals that were here. To think there were bears and other animals you would never think of as being in Los Angeles—I’m bringing them into my paintings so that people can be mindful of that.
Tell me about Time Traveling in Los Angeles.
It's part of a series where the cityscape is always in the background of my everyday life. I teach at Esperanza Elementary School and we have a great view of downtown LA with its monumental landscape of buildings.
Most people don’t think of LA as having much of a history, but it does. Lately I've been thinking about how to bring in LA history into my classroom and for us in general to be reminded of where we come from and what was here before us. The original title of that painting was Mammoths and Tigers in LA.
How is your work evolving and changing?
I want to continue to develop that idea of time travel with a new approach to painting where I’m using washes and overlays and perspective in a way that’s more organic and less constricted and tight.
I’m playing with and learning how I can create depth and show the infinity and the microscopic and macroscopic. I had been doing something similar in the past with little shapes and now I want to see how I can do it with dots and washes so that the shapes recede.
I use more little lines so I’m relying less on the dark lines that surround a color and the sharp outline I would make with a marker. I still love that look with the marker and I will continue to use it, but now I’m working on how I can create something that's both colorful and has a lot of contrast and perspective.
I also want to continue to refine what I was doing with the markers and the bright colors and the dark lines around shapes because that's my signature style that I worked on for a long time to develop.
That style came from when I was in school three decades ago. I was doing a lot of work in layers: I’d start with the painting, then add charcoal drawing, then add graffiti or spray paint, and then go back with painting and then [add outlines with] markers. I would try to create all this depth on the canvas. Then I kept removing different things because I didn't have to rely on them and I ended up working with just acrylic paint and markers.
These newer perspective paintings of LA with stars and the streets are something that people are gravitating toward as well. I’m working on one right now [motions behind him to large canvas] showing the roots of LA and what’s underneath the soil and how small everything is.
How do you start a painting?
I start with a sketch that I outline in purple. Then I cover everything in a blue then red underpainting. Using different colors underneath creates a sense of vibration. I start with dark and go to light.
Describe your color palette.
It’s very primary. I do mix colors, but not as much as other painters. I want to work with vibrant colors and build up layers of red underpainting and the blue underneath the red so there's not a lot of white in the background.
If I am going to add outlines, I do that at the very end. The outlines are actually purple, not black. Black outlines would stand on the surface whereas purple looks like black but it kind of fades into the canvas just like the other colors, while creating even more contrast between the colors. Then I will use enamel markers along the outlines to tighten everything up and present it as a finished product with my stamp on it.
Tell me about your show at the downtown Los Angeles Public Library, the Central Library.
That was an awesome experience! It was the first time I had a curated show. The curator came to my studio and looked at my work online [he has the most organized and thorough online archive I’ve ever seen. More about that later.] The show was hung professionally [he usually hangs his own artwork by necessity, so he welcomed the luxury] and it was up for a few months.
It was a really large space, so the show included many of my really big paintings, which are mural-sized canvases that are not stretched; they hung them without stretcher bars. There were also smaller paintings exhibited according to theme. One part featured strike paintings, and another featured tree paintings.
How did your paintings end up in the tv show The Good Wife?
The producers of The Good Wife, Michelle and Robert King, have been big supporters of my work since they met me about 25 years ago. At the time, a little coffee shop in Santa Monica was showing my work and Robert started buying paintings. He said he wanted to include one of my paintings in an office scene of the show.
[It turned out to be much more than just a painting in the background.] One of the main characters had my painting hanging in their office, and at the beginning of the episode said, “This is a Jose Ramírez painting. He's from Los Angeles.” They showed the painting really big. And they kept showing it over the course of three or four episodes. People got to know about my work through that show.
You've made many paintings and murals, illustrated children's books, and had your images included in a Quetzal video, Justice Never Dies. What do you still want to do?
I'm open to many different possibilities. As long as you are doing good work and putting out things that are from your heart, things will come to you. I want to be open to any of those possibilities.
At a younger age, I had a romantic vision of what an artist does. They had to become a professor at a university and get their work shown at a gallery, and then their work went to a museum. But that's not the only route, fortunately.
As I was becoming an artist, I realized that I wasn't going to show my artwork at the westside galleries because I didn’t have connections. I looked at the models of the African-American artists that were coming out of the Black Panther movement or artists that were coming out of the revolution in Mexico and their art wasn't made for galleries. It was made for the community or to document something or be used in some other way. Realizing that helped me see more possibilities for my artwork. I realized that I didn't have to wait for a gallery to show my work. Now, I am shown in galleries sometimes, and that’s great, but it’s not my end all.
I appreciate the fact that, after 30 years of doing this, I never know what's going to happen with my artwork. Sometimes I’m just producing it here, and other times, many people contact me and ask for different things. And when it rains it pours. I've been very blessed in that way.
When you were first starting out, it was pre-Internet. How did you get your art out into the world?
It was difficult. Instead of having a business card, I made a magnet with my contact information on the back. I sold the magnets at local cultural centers that have little stores in them, such as Self-Help Graphics and Plaza de la Raza and bookstores.
I don't make the magnets anymore because they were labor-intensive. Now I make cards and prints and offer them on the website.
What’s the best advice that you received about being an artist?
My ceramics professor Richard Shaw said to document all your work. He taught me how to take pictures of my work. I had my 35 millimeter camera, lights and a polarizing filter, and my tungsten film light. I learned to never let my paintings leave the studio until I had a good picture. [Jose’s website has an extensive archive.]
Who are the creative people that you admire?
My students. The kindergarteners have taught me a lot. They're creative people who come up with cool ideas and are always trying to have fun. Last year, I had the same group of students every Friday and we would do art day and spend the day focused on one artist.
Some of the artists we learned about included Carmen Lomas Garza, and Zaha Hadid the Iraqi architect. Also Yayoi Kusama, Jacob Lawrence, and William H. Johnson. We did a lesson on my professor Richard Shaw. I showed them pictures of me with my teacher, and it was cool for my students to know that I too had a teacher. They wrote my professor notes and they drew pictures of us. I sent him the notes and drawings and he said it made his year.
Let’s talk about your garden…
It's been an enriching experience. It's a blessing that I can walk into the garden and escape the city and be around all these beautiful trees. I'm still learning how to be a better gardener, but I'm also learning how to kind of let go a little bit more and let the plants do what they want to do.
His garden has more than 250 fruit trees planted close together: varieties of pluots, apricots, nectarines, apples, Meyer lemons, mandarins, mangoes, limes, cherimoyas, guavas. He’s done experiments growing coffee beans, dragon fruit, cinnamon, and other plants, plus he grows other crops.
Lightning round questions
Do you like to cook?
Yes! I do the cooking. I learned to cook Mexican food from my mom. We eat mostly vegan in my house, so I’m making vegan dishes. I cook with mushrooms as a meat substitute, and I love to make salsa with fruit from the garden.
What's the craziest fruit you're growing in your garden right now?
Ice cream beans, which are called paterna. You open up the pod and it's full of seeds, but there's this cotton candy type of sweetness in the middle around the seeds.
We're also harvesting Surinam cherries, which are this tropical cherry that melts in your mouth.
What's your favorite piece of art that you own?
I got to trade one of my paintings for five Siqueiros prints. Siqueiros is a Mexican muralist who is one of the big three Mexican muralists along with Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco. He did these five silk screen prints in collaboration with Pablo Neruda.
I also have a couple of pieces by printmaker Jose Guadalupe Posada, who created a lot of the skeleton pieces from the revolutionary period.
We also have a big collection of prints from Self Help Graphics. They've been producing prints since the 70s here in East LA. I used to print art there and I knew the printmaker, and when they would print editions, they would keep five prints and I would get one of those, so I have a large collection, which I’m proud to have.
Do you have a painting that you made that you don't want to sell?
It’s a self-portrait called Hip Hop Dad, and I'm holding one of my kids.
What’s your most captivating museum visit or art viewing experience?
We recently saw the King Pleasure Basquiat exhibit of the family collection. Also, visiting the museums in Mexico City was amazing. The first time I went to New York and went to MoMA and saw van Gogh and Frida Kahlo paintings, and seeing the van Goghs at the Metropolitan were also memorable.
You are hosting dinner for six people living or dead. Who is coming and what are you serving them?
I would want to be with all of my grandparents and great grandparents because I don't really know them. I was born here, and a lot of my family was in Mexico, so I didn't get to spend much time with them or meet all of them. I think they would like spicy food, so I would introduce them to Thai food.
Palate & Palette menu for Jose
Here’s what I would serve if Jose and his family came to dinner, which they are invited to do:
Spicy Watermelon Salad
Peanut Lime Tempeh “Wingz”
Roasted Rainbow Carrots with Garlic Scape Pesto
Tahini Chocolate Chip Skillet Cookie
I'm crazy about his palette! It is so consistently splendid! Thanks for the introduction to Mr. Ramirez's work--it will stay with me!
Thank you Amy (and Jose)! Just wanted to let you know that I'm out here reading. This is beautiful and inspirational stuff.