Transcript (Unedited)
Tom Heath
Well, welcome back to another installment of Meet the Artist, the production of the Tucson Gallery, located here in downtown Tucson inside of the proper shops at 300 East Congress, right across from Hotel Congress. Every week I have an opportunity to highlight one of our fabulous Tucson artists. Many of them have work inside of our gallery. Others have work on our website, the Tucsongallery.com. And you can also head over there for other Meet the Artist podcast. You can get up to date information and sign up for our newsletter to find out about our live events and come in. If we have artists doing any painting, wine tasting, agave tasting, all that stuff, check it out. The Tucsongallery.com. And before each of our Meet the Artists segment, before we invite the public in, we have this wonderful podcast. And today we are joined by the one, the only, the fabulous and you must be exhausted, Jessica Gonzales. Hi. So, yes, for the exhaustion. Yes, absolutely. Every time we try to schedule, she’s like, Absolutely. Oh, wait, no. I’ve got 74 things that we can push it. Push it back. You are crazy busy right now. Have you been crazy busy for a while?
Jessica Gonzales
Yeah, I have. It kind of feels like I’m waiting for some break in it, and it’s like I have to plan a vacation for that to happen because it keeps going.
Tom Heath
I think your last vacation was you got married or something. Yeah, honeymoon. I’ll get married so I can just want to get a break from the business. Yeah, right. So what are you up to lately?
Jessica Gonzales
Right now I’m working on a collaboration with Rock Martinez and we’re painting along the Rito River along mural there. Okay, where about? It’s at the end of country club where the Tucson Racket Club is. Oh, nice. Okay. And it’s just right across the bridge and along the retaining walls there.
Tom Heath
A heavily traveled area, so it’ll be well seen, I’m sure. Yeah. And are you mostly into murals at this point? I know you’ve done some origins, which we’ll talk about, but is mostly your life consumed with these huge projects?
Jessica Gonzales
Yes, it is. And I hope to kind of balance that out in the future and do more stuff in my studio. But right now, murals keep me busy around the clock. Painting, has that always been your medium or do you do anything else, like sculpture? I played around with it in college. I enjoy it. But, yeah, painting is definitely my favorite.
Tom Heath
So let’s kind of go back to the beginning then. When did you get started in art? When did you know this was like, a passion for you?
Jessica Gonzales
I’ve been lucky enough to always know it’s something I loved as a kid, and a lot of kids do. But I think my parents, especially my mom, who’s also an artist, she saw a little bit of extra. She saw something special in what I was doing. So she always supported me continuing to do art. So it’s like I always knew I was going to do art. I didn’t know in what capacity, but there was never a question about what direction my life was going to take. So I’ve always felt really fortunate for that reason.
Tom Heath
When you went to school then, was that a focus? Like, when you went to college, was that something you were intent about doing?
Jessica Gonzales
Yeah, definitely.
Tom Heath
Okay, and then how did you get into the mural side of things?
Jessica Gonzales
I was always kind of interested in them. I mean, I’ve watched people creating murals around town and was curious about them, but I kind of was just thrown into it because I applied for the City of Tucson Mural Arts program in 2016, and I didn’t think I’d get it at all. I had no experience painting murals, but I had experience painting large canvases. That’s the closest thing to a mural, and I was just really fortunate enough to be selected, and I just was thrown into it.
Tom Heath
So 2016, like, seven years ago, is about when you started doing murals. And then I’m seeing all of these murals. That is a lot of work in seven years.
Jessica Gonzales
Yeah. And I didn’t start doing it full time until 2019. Oh, my goodness. You really don’t have any time. Yeah. You’re not just blowing me off. You’re actually busy. Yeah, it keeps me very busy, and it’s kind of a trendy thing right now. So being a mural artist, it’s a good time to be doing it. There’s a lot of people that have been doing it forever, but right now, it’s kind of a sweet spot.
Tom Heath
Well, and you’re doing something right, I think. Was it 2022? You were named the Outdoor Artist of the Year? What was the award you won?
Jessica Gonzales
The best visual artist. Best visual artist. Yeah. Okay. Actually and it’s been a couple of years, not to brag. I’m just saying
Tom Heath
21 and 22 to get that type of award with the type of competition that we have in Tucson, that’s phenomenal. And I don’t know if people fully understand some of the work they see. They might not even know when they go by the realtor theater and they see the Marquee. You do a lot of those, right?
Jessica Gonzales
Not the Marquee, but the show murals. Yeah, I do I do them every month in 191 Tool. Yeah, I repainted the Marquee for 191 recently. And then we do change out the shows too. That’s just words, though.
Tom Heath
That’s just words. I just think it’s interesting because, you know, you have these big projects, and then if you want to get a glimpse of a Jessica Gonzales, that’s really temporary. You got to go to the realtor Theater, take a picture of that wall, because in a month or so, it’s going to change.
Jessica Gonzales
Yeah. It’s a really different way to approach mural painting. I have to design it, keeping in mind that it’s going to be changing really soon and it has to be painted really fast, but it has to pop and it has to bring people in. So it’s a little bit more of a graphic art, kind of commercial art, sort of.
Tom Heath
I’m trying to figure out at some point that building just has to grow because there’s got to be so much paint on that wall.
Jessica Gonzales
I’ve actually cut a slice from it and so Joe Pagac started that. Right. And then Danny Martin did it for a while and now I’m doing it and you can literally see the layers of the different eras of muralists working there. It’s pretty cool.
Tom Heath
That’s fantastic. Yeah, it’s really cool. Yeah. That wall is going to be worth something one day if they ever decide to shave off all of that and see if they can salvage it in some way.
Jessica Gonzales
Right. I think that somebody should make something out of it. I don’t know what. Sculpture, jewelry, something.
Tom Heath
And you’re not originally from Tucson. You moved here about what time?
Jessica Gonzales
When I was 12 so 1990. Never mind, never mind.
Tom Heath
Where did you come from?
Jessica Gonzales
I was born in Oklahoma. Oklahoma City. Lived there till I was six, and then my family and I moved to Germany and lived there till I was twelve and then came here. So Air Force,
Tom Heath
when the most recent visual artist award was announced, I remember seeing on Facebook, and if you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine, but you were very open and candid about how art helped you through some troubling times as a youngster. Do you mind kind of talking
Jessica Gonzales
about that? Yeah, sure. I was just really introverted and had a hard time kind of in the social aspect of being in school. So I did a lot of art and that started a lot of conversations with my peers. And so I was able to connect with people in some way or at least start dialogues with other students. And that kind of really helped make up for the fact that I couldn’t talk because I was painfully shy. You talk for your images and your art. Yeah, exactly.
Tom Heath
Anyone that sees your work, it’s a distinctive style. It’s very vibrant. It just pops. Everything is just like this explosion of colors. Has it always been that way? Or did you have like a dark period where it’s just black and white?
Jessica Gonzales
Well, I did a lot of drawing when I was younger, so just gray. But I’ve always loved color. I’ve always been really drawn to color and lots of it. And I’ve definitely experimented with other stuff and I actually really enjoy a limited palette and I’m leaning more towards that now in life and a little bit more toned down. But yeah, color is like my best friend Diana.
Tom Heath
And then your murals also have a sense of history and culture. They all seem to weave that in somehow. Obviously it’s intentional, but does that come from someplace special.
Jessica Gonzales
Yeah, I think it has a lot to do with well, first of all, public art. That it feels like it belongs in the space that it’s in and that it enhances the space and also features the elements, the people in the culture surrounding it. But I’m on this long live or lifelong I’m on this lifelong journey to discover my own identity culturally and just as a person, as an artist. So I’m always kind of thinking about those things and exploring those ideas and a lot of it ends up in my art.
Tom Heath
Okay. Well, it’s amazing to me the amount of symbolism and ideas that can come across in an image and I think you capture really well. And I’m not alone. You have a lot of fans here in Tucson. A lot of fans. Thanks. People come in and they love your stickers. And people from out of town, they’ll grab, like, a bunch of your stickers of your rearls and they’re like, oh, do you know Jessica Gonzales? Like, no. They just love that. And they don’t even realize necessarily that they’re all from the same artist. So you have something that really captures people’s attentions and imaginations.
Jessica Gonzales
Awesome.
Tom Heath
Whether they know it’s you or not. Yeah. Or whether they know it’s a two year running visual artist award or not. Yeah. Tell me about this Tucson together mural. It’s right across the street from the gallery. This came at a very troubling time in Tucson. Tell us about that. Yeah.
Jessica Gonzales
So I was approached about the concept. So it was early 2020 and when everything was crazy and the idea behind it was to for every letter of the word together is pulled from a sign of an iconic kind of Tucson business. And the idea was to just kind of unify Tucson, bring something, a message of hope and togetherness. And I painted it in April 2020 with a mask on barricades so nobody would get close to me. And it was really quiet downtown. It’s quite an experience. It was kind of strange, but yeah, that’s how that came to be. It was just kind of like to sort of uplift people.
Tom Heath
It was anonymous for a brief period. Like, your name wasn’t on that mural of people. Like, who did that? It must have been because you weren’t quite done. Wasn’t quite done. It looked on to the rest of us. I remember seeing the post on Facebook like, who did this? I know, because I saw her painting it from over 6ft away. Yeah. The g is from hotel Congress. And I’m embarrassed to say that I got all of them. And I’m like, where’s that g from? I couldn’t figure out the G. I was looking at the G and someone, like, points at the hotel congress sign, like, right there.
Jessica Gonzales
Right there. Well, that’s what’s so fun about that one too, is it’s interactive in that way
Tom Heath
and your stuff is popping up everywhere. I’m not sure if people are fully aware that you have a comedian on Netflix that you would design a stage for.
Jessica Gonzales
Yeah, that was an amazing project. The comedian is Cristela Alonzo. She played at the Realtor Theater. She had a show in 2019 when I was painting show murals, and I did one for her. And she liked the mural that I did and kind of followed me. And we sort of talked a little bit about doing something together in the future, but there was no clear direction for what that was going to be. And then she decided to film her Netflix, her second Netflix stand up special.
Jessica Gonzales
And she was apparently talking with her producer about how to make that the stage and the background interesting. And she thought of me and having me come in and paint a mural. So she reached out. It was like surreal and super fun.
Tom Heath
And there might be just too much Jessica Gonzales news, but I completely missed that. My business partners, the ones that helped open the Tucson Gallery, they were watching just Tony Ray Baker and Darren Jones. They were watching Netflix and they got irate because this comedian was using your art. Someone is just copying her style, and they were just so upset. And then they see the credits at their own, like, oh, it is Jessica.
Jessica Gonzales
Oh, good. We don’t have to raise a ruckus.
Tom Heath
No ruckus raising here. It’s just another one of those examples where you don’t always expect to see it’s just nice to see Tucson being represented and respected in the way that it is. Yeah. Are you doing Euros in other cities or is Tucson really all you can do at the moment?
Jessica Gonzales
I have done a few in Albuquerque because my dad owns a vacation rental and I paint them for him at his rental, which is fun. I have done some just outside of Tucson in Saudi’s, and then I have done one in Bisby, but that is it right now. However, my husband and I are planning a road trip this summer, and we’re hoping to paint some murals along the way.
Tom Heath
Breaking news here, folks. You’re hearing it first on Meet the Artist podcast runs by the Tucson Gallery.
Jessica Gonzales
So if you’re in Little Rock or Memphis well,
Tom Heath
listen up little Rock in Memphis You got something special coming your way. When Jessica Gonzales rolls in, you want to hang out and watch her paint. And when you’re in your studio, are you by yourself or do you have people around you? Do you have noise? Do you have quiet? What’s your environment like?
Jessica Gonzales
Nobody around me for sure if I can avoid it. Music, usually, or podcasts. That’s what I like to get in the zone, have some little bit of lavender oil going and just peace and quiet for the most part, which is the opposite of painting publicly.
Tom Heath
I was going to say that I can see why you want to get back in the studio a little bit more. It’s therapy. It keeps me grounded. Well, the excitement people have when they come in, it’s one of the reasons we open the Tucson Gallery, having a place where Jessica Gonzales can display her artwork and get merchandise and other things with those murals on it. The public loves it, and it’s heartwarming to see that kind of gratification. But it was also heartwarming when you created a couple of pieces for the gallery and you posted on Instagram when you showed pictures of them and you said, this is you kind of getting back to your roots. And you were excited by that. And again, talking to Tony, Ray and Darren, we all sort of like, this is why we do it. It’s so nice to have that. So we appreciate that you were open about that and shared that.
Jessica Gonzales
Yeah, I was really excited for the opportunity to have a reason to get back in the studio. That, to me, was one of the most valuable things of being part of this. My friends outside, anyway. Yeah, it just gave me a reason to kind of reconnect with myself as an artist on a more personal level. And so that’s really, really important to me, and I’m really glad to have the chance to tap into that.
Tom Heath
Well, last question here. As we wrap up, one of the things we wanted to do is also help artists in Tucson get moving if they’re struggling in any way. Is there advice out there for someone that’s getting into either public art or just really trying to find their voice or or maybe has the issue where they’re they’re not able to communicate as as well, verbally or socially and, you know, are there any things that you can pass along? That’s a lot of information. That’s a lot of stuff.
Jessica Gonzales
Well, I would say for anyone who’s trying to start getting into public art, something that I’ve learned along the way is that when you’re painting publicly and you’re painting for clients and things, it’s easy to kind of fall into this kind of groove that is painting, the kind of stuff that people that you think people want to see. And I just think it’s really important to always stick to whatever you’re passionate about, because that’s going to make everything you do really worthwhile in the end. So for me, it’s always coming up with something new, painting something new, some new technique, or like a different style, even just mixing it up all the time. That’s what keeps me engaged with it and keeps me connected to it from an artist’s perspective. So I think that is really important to hold on to. And what was the other question?
Tom Heath
Well, I was just wondering, art was very therapeutic and helpful for you and just kind of curious. Did it just come automatically or is there something you had to tap into? Is there some advice you could give someone that maybe has artistic talent, that’s feeling kind of that isolation that you were feeling, what were some of those steps to move forward?
Jessica Gonzales
Yeah, well, I mean, definitely showing your work. I know a lot of people create work and then are either nervous to show it or feel like that’s a big step. It is a big step, but it’s an important one because you’re never going to be able to really share your thoughts and your work with people and then have conversations that will keep you growing unless you put it out there. So that’s important. And there are all kinds of gallery spaces that offer different types of spaces for different kinds of art. So there’s something for everyone out there. It’s just a matter of being vulnerable enough to do that.
Tom Heath
Yeah, I would imagine that’s the fear. Right? We all don’t really want someone to say they don’t like something we did.
Jessica Gonzales
Yeah. And I think everybody has the choice to explain as much as they want to. Also, I mean, sometimes even just coming up with titles is difficult for me. But you can tell people as much as you want to about your art or it can be a mystery. They can come up with whatever thoughts they have about it, they can interpret it their own way. It’s totally up to the artist to divulge as much information as they want to. But you still want people to see it.
Tom Heath
Well, I don’t know. There’s a twelve year old in Tucson that came here, shy, introverted, started showing her art and now she is here at the Tucson Gallery about to meet a bunch of Rockets fans. You can hear them starting to gather in the background, waving to us through the windows. So hopefully you’re over the Shyness phase and you’re able to talk to some people tonight.
Jessica Gonzales
I mean, yeah, it’s better than it used to be. It’s still challenging, but you got to do it right.
Tom Heath
You got to do it well. Jessica, I really appreciate your time tonight and I’m looking forward to seeing some more of these original pieces come out of your studio.
Jessica Gonzales
Cool. Yeah. Thanks for having me.
Tom Heath
You have been listening to Meet the Artist production of the Tucson Gallery here inside of the proper shops in downtown Tucson. We’re at 300 East Congress cross from the historic and venerable Hotel Congress. Every Thursday we have a different artist come in for a session to record the podcast and then it’s a really casual meet and greet with their fans. You can grab a glass of wine, you can check out all the other retailers here inside of the proper shops. And the mission of Tucson Gallery is to really help the world understand how amazing our Tucson artists are and to give our Tucson artists a chance to better engage with their public. So tune in next Thursday for another installment of Meet the Artist. Or better yet, check out our website, the Tucsongallery.com and find one of these live events and come down yourself and meet your your favorite artist. Jessica, thanks again.
Tom Heath
Thank you for listening to Meet the Artist. This is a weekly production by the Tucson Gallery located inside of the proper shops at 300 East Conga Street in Tucson, Arizona. The mission of the Tucson Gallery is to support local artists by providing a space to show their art, a forum to engage with their audience, a virtual presence to connect with global patrons, an outlet to earn a fair price and an opportunity to hone their business skills. Head over to the Tucsongallery.com for more information about our live events. Listen to other Meet the Artist podcasts and check out the wide selection of art, gifts and other items created by Tucson’s modern, thought provoking and forward thinking artists.