The Sunday Times ran a great story on 80-year-old Mexican-American painter Alfredo Santos, and the beginning of his career as an artist:

[He] was 24 when he arrived at San Quentin in 1951 in the back of an ambulance. “I had a bum leg from an infection,” Mr. Santos, 80, said by telephone from San Diego, where he now lives on Social Security. “They put me in the convalescent wing, and the prison doc told me, ‘Keep quiet, kid, and I’ll let you stay here.’”

Mr. Santos, who had taken high school art classes until he was expelled from 10th grade for striking a teacher, remained in convalescent cells his entire prison stay. At first he read books voraciously, he said, and drew portraits of other inmates and, from photographs, their families. “I got paid a lot of cigarettes,” he recalled, referring to the standard currency behind bars. “But I also got to really focus on art. San Quentin is where I became an artist.”

In 1953, two years after he was locked up, Mr. Santos submitted the winning sketch in a competition among the inmates to paint a mural on one side of a dining hall partition. After inexplicably being denied the use of other colors, he began to apply thinned, raw sienna oil paint directly to plaster. Before long the warden ordered Mr. Santos to paint all three double-sided walls in the dining area.

You can see a multimedia feature on the mural. The article goes on about Santos’ life after San Quentin.

After his parole in 1955, Mr. Santos worked at Disneyland as a caricaturist and then opened a studio and gallery in San Diego, his hometown. But after pleading guilty to possession of marijuana, he fled to Mexico, where he owned a succession of galleries in Guadalajara, Mexico City and Acapulco. Returning to the United States in 1967, he painted, made sculptures of carved wood and found objects and ran a popular gallery and bohemian gathering spot in the Catskills village of Fleischmanns, N.Y. (An exhibition of his work is on display there through Aug. 31 at the Art et cetera gallery.) More than 20 years ago, after a divorce and a heart attack, he moved back to San Diego.

Though his San Quentin murals are among the most significant works of Mr. Santos’s career, for years even close friends knew nothing of them. “I never bragged about the murals because I was too embarrassed to tell people I’d been to prison as a young man,” he said.

For me, going to prison is high up on the list of the worst things that could possibly happen to you — but for an artist going to prison, you can’t get much luckier than this. As William Gibson says in another section this week, “Loss is not without its curious advantages for the artist. Major traumatic breaks are pretty common in the biographies of artists I respect. Not that I’d wish that on anyone.”

I’m suddenly reminded of my depression over the fact that we missed the Steinberg mural that’s part of the in-progress Cincinnati show.

I want to study more about the history of murals and mural-painting: anybody got any recommendations? (Especially stuff to see in Austin?)

The Enquirer has a long article about the restoration of Saul Steinberg’s 75-foot-long “Mural of Cincinnati” owned by the Cincinnati Art Museum. The piece was commissioned in 1948 for a restaurant at the top of a downtown hotel. When the hotel sold in 1965, it was donated to the museum, but it hasn’t been seen since 1982. The mural will be displayed as part of the fabulous Illuminations exhibit that’s coming on July 21st.

I’d love to go see it, but I don’t know when we’ll get down to Cincinnati before the big Austin move. Here’s a decent (at least it’s large) black and white detail:

If you live anywhere near Cincinnati, I really urge you to see this show.