(Above: One panel from a mural artist Alejandro Sarmiento is painting on a fence along Franklin Boulevard in east Eugene; photos by Paul Carter)
By Randi Bjornstad
On the way out Franklin Boulevard at Eugene’s east end, traveling toward Glenwood or I-5 South, there’s a long stretch of wooden fence on the right-hand-side that has a mural-in-progress on it.
It’s the work of 35-year-old artist Alejandro Sarmiento, and he’s been commissioned to create it by the owner of the property. The mural is in its second iteration — it started out two years ago with a series of more or less stand-alone panels, but as taggers began decorating it liberally with their own signature symbols, he began to rethink the project.
Now it’s taking the form of what Sarmiento calls it a “creation mural,” beginning at the right end with a classical hero figure blasting energy into the cosmos and working its way around to show a continuing array of life forms that exist on this planet. In that sense, the whole mural seems more like an “evolution mural,” a description Sarmiento almost prefers.
Part of that “evolution” involves continually working around the uninvited participation of the taggers, he admits.
“It kept happening so many times that I started to look for ways to incorporate the tags in my own paintings,” Sarmiento says. And if the graffiti keeps on happening, he jokes, “It could be a pretty long evolution. Sometimes it seems almost like a competition.”
His own artistic development in itself has been a process of evolution. Sarmiento was born in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico, right across the border from Nogales, Arizona, where his family eventually moved. His mother enjoyed painting, and his brother also was artistic. But Alejandro didn’t have much opportunity in school to take art classes, “because I was in ESL (English as a Second Language) classes,” he says. “That meant concentrating on all the basics and learning English, and that didn’t leave much chance to take art classes.”
Art always was in the back of his mind, though, and after he moved to Oregon — “I wanted to get out of Nogales, and a friend showed me a picture of Oregon, and it was so green, it looked like a postcard,” Sarmiento says — he began to get more serious.
He signed up for graphic design classes at Lane Community College, “and then I also started taking watercolor, drawing, and other painting classes,” he says. “I started doing art all the time. All my storage is full of paintings.”
Like many artists, Sarmiento’s living is a collage of jobs. He gives private art lessons, tutors college students in art or Spanish. He’s done “mobile events” such as teaching art classes in bars, and he’s even painted food trucks.
“My first food truck, the owner asked me, ‘Do you know how?’ and I said ‘Sure,’ ” he recalls. “I had to figure out every step of how to do it, so it took me longer than it would have otherwise, but I charged by the job, so it worked out fine.”
During the past several years, he has painted murals in Eugene, Springfield, and Junction City. He also worked for six years at Vino and Vango in downtown Springfield, where the venue hosts party groups, teaching them how to create their own art pieces by recreating works by some of the world’s most famous artists as they nosh on refreshments that they bring in with them.
Sarmiento has created a website, studio33.org, where he shows and offers his work for sale. He also has a presence on Facebook titled Art by Alejandro, at https://www.facebook.com/artbyalejandrosarmiento/ which contains notices of his classes and mobile events and where he offers 10-minutes-or-less, on-demand mini-classes on how to draw various objects, such as eyes.
He knows friends “who are really, really good artists, but who would rather starve than sell their work,” but that’s not Sarmiento’s approach. He’d like to start participating in gallery shows, and his focus is to keep his artistry growing.
“My ultimate goal is “to get better, better, better, and to find a way for my art to be my lifestyle — but not as a starving artist,” he says.