- [Alessandra] This San Diego region is home to many artists who work in an assortment of media.

As a curator and educator, I want to know what inspires these creatives.

This is "Insights Into Art."

(soft laidback music) (tool scraping) Today I'm visiting with painter Perry Vasquez.

Perry is inspired by palm trees and their association with Southern California and their history.

- [Perry] Living in Southern California for most of my life, I'd kind of become... Palm trees had sort of become invisible to me because they were such, so completely saturated in the environment.

When I first saw an image of a burning palm tree, I was shocked, really, 'cause I thought it was such an iconic, classic image.

And so I thought that's a very strong reaction, and it deserves to be investigated.

Early on, I decided I was going to use these very narrow, vertical canvases because I didn't want to include anything else in the landscape.

I just wanted to focus on the palm tree itself as a way to isolate it and frame it and almost like you would pin a butterfly to the wall, kind of a specimen.

And so that's how I've been painting them ever since.

And that reframing of the subject matter, I think, has allowed me to focus on and talk more about the issues around the palm tree itself.

Whether it be fire ecology or the notion that most palm trees in Southern California are exotics and not native or that palm trees have become symbols of Southern California's paradise in the desert.

- [Alessandra] What have you learned about the history of how they came to California?

- [Perry] Junipero Serra brought the first exotic palm tree to Southern California.

It was a canary palm.

And the Spanish picked those up on the way over from Europe.

They stopped off in the Canary Islands and dug up some canary palms and brought them and planted them in front of the missions.

When I first read that, I thought it was very strange.

But then I... The more I thought about it, the more it made sense because they wanted to, within the landscape design of the missions, they wanted to evoke the Holy Land.

And during Easter, you need palm fronds.

So the palm tree is a very essential part of the Catholic faith as far as the iconography goes.

And so on reflecting, it makes sense that the Spaniards would bring them over from Europe.

- [Alessandra] So they're tied to the colonization of the place and then becomes, also, colonizing the landscape itself, too.

- Exactly, they're artifacts of Spanish colonialism.

I think you can safely say that.

- [Alessandra] Are there any native palm?

- [Perry] Right over my shoulder here in the background, you see, it's either... I'm gonna go out on a limb and say it's a Washingtonian palm.

But the two native species here are Washingtonian palms and Mexican fan palms.

The fronds look like the palm of your hand.

And the date palms, which are all exotics, who their fronds look like feathers.

- So by painting these, you've become kind of like an expert on the different types.

- I know a lot of facts about palm trees at this point, probably more than most people wanna know.

But it makes it more interesting to me as an artist, to be familiar with my subject matter.

- [Alessandra] To get in the right frame of mind before painting, Perry spends some time playing his guitar.

(string plucks) Perry under paints with burnt sienna, mixing his pigment with linseed oil and mineral spirits to create a more fluid and translucent medium.

- Underpainting is a monochromatic version of the image in which I solve all the problems of light and shadow and form.

And then when that's dry, then I go back in and I add the color on top of that.

- [Alessandra] And is this gonna be a triptych?

- [Perry] Yes, this is the third panel of this triptych.

(brush swishing) - [Alessandra] In an effort to capture the mood and tone of a burning palm tree, Perry brushes with long, loose strokes to convey the movement and energy of a chaotic moment in time.

- [Perry] What you're seeing now is a real spontaneous process.

I just want to capture the energy and the movement without being too fussy.

Ultimately, my paintings can become detail-oriented.

But I feel like if it has this foundation of spontaneous energy, it always comes out better in the end.

The photograph, it's not really a one-to-one model.

It's just a point of departure.

(cloth rasping) (brush swishing) - How long does it take you to do a painting?

- Anywhere from three to five days of one of these.

Depending on how much time I have to put into it.

But if I can paint for eight hours a day, that's a lot.

I may go into the studio and be in the studio for eight hours.

I may actually only be painting for six hours because I'm just doing other stuff.

- Because you're playing guitar and getting, setting the mood.

- Yeah, doing that, whatever else is distracting me.

But this would be, this is the underpainting.

I could go into more detail, but the photograph is very vague, so I'm just gonna leave it at that.

And then when it dries, I'll come in and I'll start adding in the over paint.

- And this one, because it's so transparent, it will dry fairly quickly?

- Yes.

- Okay.

- I could probably go back and start to work on it later today.

- And just add more.

Then you would start adding more color?

- Yeah, yeah.

Define the flames a little bit more because all of these trunks are kind of now burning.

So I would wanna come in and start to make that, create a little bit of value contrast.

(cloth rasping) There's no mistakes.

To quote Boss Ross, "There's happy accidents."

- Right.

- So when I take the cloth and I start to rub it around, I'm not being too fussy about it, but I'm just hoping that some of these gestures will feel right and will take.

And that'll be a happy accident.

- [Alessandra] As the layer of underpainting dries for this artwork, we step over to a completed painting to discuss more of Perry's process.

So each palm tree, it has almost like its own character.

- [Perry] Yes, yeah, they each have their own character.

This one's called "Late October."

- [Alessandra] Okay.

- And the reason it's called "Late October" is because that's the Santa Ana season.

- That's the fire season.

- Fire season.

- [Alessandra] Is there an irony in this in a way, or how do you see that?

- I think that the early paintings were a little more ironic because I was still investigating the subject matter and I was really conscious of the palm tree as a cultural icon, a symbol of Southern California, of this lifestyle.

And so there was an irony in that because you're taking an image which represents all this affluence and the promise of a capitalist society, which is the leisure time, no work, all leisure.

And so maybe the earlier paintings were addressing that more.

But as I got into them, that stopped becoming the motivation.

What became the motivation was the passion.

- [Alessandra] This has been very enlightening, and I appreciate Perry's openness to reveal so much of his insights and processes of creating these magnificent paintings.

Thank you, Perry.