Frederick Hammersley Fund, New Mexico PBS Great Southwestern Arts & Education Endowment Fund, and the Nellita E. Walker Fund for KNME-TV at the Albuquerque Community Foundation New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, and by the National Endowment for the Arts and Viewers Like You.

Santero Vince Campos reimagines saints as modern New Mexicans, and asks viewers to find the divine in the everyday.

Self-taught Ernest "Mooney" Warther transformed whittling into art, crafting intricate masterpieces.

Artist and gallery owner Gavin Jordan fuses screws and oil paint into 3D portraits, to create new ways to tie us all together.

It's all ahead on Colores!

Saints with Tattoos >>Faith: What drew you to creating Retablos?

>>Vince: Retablos were always kind of present in my life.

You see 'em in churches, you see 'em in restaurants, you see 'em in hotels, you see these holy images.

And often if you're not familiar with that saint or practiced faith, then you don't really know what they're about.

So, I took an interest in the stories of the Saints, and I wanted to tell the story in a different way.

>>Faith: Talking about the stories of your pieces, this piece is titled " San Lorenzo".

Can you tell me the story behind the imagery used in this one?

>>Vince: Sure.

San Lorenzo is a saint, and what I did was he was actually burned upon a grill for his faith.

So, what I did was I took traditional imagery and I kind of did a modern twist on it.

So, I like to think of saints as if they were here present today, they say the saints are all around us.

They're here today.

Would you recognize a saint?

Because they're not out there in their saint garb.

So, I thought, "Hey, San Lorenzo could be a hibachi chef."

So, what I did was I took, you know, the flames, as tattoos on his wrists and his martyr's palm, and kind of put it on the grill and the flame to represent his story.

And it's told that he said, "turn me over.

I'm not done yet", as he was being martyred.

>>Faith: That's why it says, “Turn me over grill?” >>Vince: Yeah, "Turn me over grill".

Yes!

[BOTH laughing] >>Faith: Are a lot of the pieces like based on real people that you meet in your life?

>>Vince: Yeah.

So, I like to think of it- I try to look out for- look out knowing the stories of the saints and I try to relate them to people that I see anywhere.

[Music] >>Faith: This one is titled San Francisco?

And it says Santa Fe on his hat, what's going on in this one?

>>Vince: So, this is San Francisco De Assisi, and he's a Saint Francis, a patron Saint of Santa Fe, and patron Saint of animals, people in poverty.

So, there's a story of him.

There was this wolf that was attacking the town of a small village next to where he was at.

And what he did was he let the people know, "Hey, I'm going to go talk to this vicious animal."

And he was able to reason with the animal through his relationship with the animals.

So, he came back to the village with the wolf by his side and, you know, the people really saw the miracles that he worked.

So, in this image, what I did was I took the traditional image of him with the wolf behind him, but I wanted to add some modernization to the saint.

So, how would you know this was St. Francis, right?

If you saw him in today's world?

So, what I did is I kind of made him like someone I know, like a buddy of mine with his tattoo sleeves, and if you look closely, you'll see that he has the Santa Fe Cathedral on his shoulder and the birds that he's often depicted with.

So, again, just telling the story in a different way.

I have a friend of mine, he just like, he's obsessed with his dog and it's like, I think it's like an Alaskan Husky or something like that.

So, I was like, "Oh dude!

You look just like this guy!"

[BOTH laugh] >>Faith: Oh, that's awesome!

I can understand being obsessed with your dog.

[BOTH laugh] >>Vince: This is San Raphael.

Yes!

[laughs] So, he's often depicted with his- holding his fish.

He's a patron saint of travelers.

So, again, a buddy of mine that loves fishing, that's what he does.

It's summer, winter, he's out there fishing.

So, I thought, how can I depict him in a modern world?

So, I kept to his same colors that you traditionally see, and on his tattoos you can see a Jesus fish.

You can see the mountains of New Mexico, and he's holding a Rainbow Trout from Northern New Mexico, often seen.

So, I found a connection to it.

>>Faith: Nice.

That personal connection.

[Music] So, retablos are really steeped in like, tradition and history.

How do you honor those traditions and the history, while also taking like a very personal and modern approach?

>>Vince: So, what I like to do is, of course I do a lot of research on the saints.

And I take those images and I find how they told the story to that particular piece.

And I try to retell it in a modern world.

So, I look out for things that I relate to.

So, Northern New Mexico, what does your average Northern New Mexico person look like?

He looks like you and I, he looks like, you know, your friends.

So, I take those images and find things that relate to them, and I retell the story to provoke the person viewing the retablo to ask themselves, "Hey, you know, who is this guy?

Why does he have tattoos like that?

You know?

I'm like, "oh, well let me tell you the story."

And now they've learned.

Often enough it catches a new kind of viewer.

It's a younger person that may not have known who these people were or have seen the images but didn't know what they meant.

So, now they do, they have an idea of the story and they have an appreciation of the saint and appreciation of the art form because, you know, this is a-- this art form is indigenous to New Mexico.

So, it's a way of keeping it alive and moving the art form forward as opposed to just the same traditional image that you don't question and you don't understand.

This type of take on traditional retablos is not to take away anything from traditional images that live on in New Mexico.

I think there will always be a place for traditional imagery, traditional retablos.

This is just simply helping the art form evolve.

And I hope that, you know, people are a lot more open to it as these retablos keep progressing.

[Music] Carving a Legend [Film projector whirring] He knew no strangers, and he had a big booming voice.

He talked to anybody about anything and you could hear him a mile away.

[ERNEST speaking loudly] He was kind of a showman.

We're a small town.

He kind of had to advocate for his own art.

And so I think that personality helped sell his art to others and kind of get that popularity.

His hair was bigger than the rest of him.

He was only about five foot eight, and he was rather small, a lot of hair.

He always said you could tell what direction the wind was blowing based on which way his hair was going that day.

So, his story really begins in 1885, when he was born here in Dover, to parents who just came from Switzerland in 1883.

Now, unfortunately, when he was just three years old, his father passed away in an accident.

And that leaves his mom with five kids.

And so as soon as he could started working, and that was at age five, as a cow herder.

So, he was born originally as Ernest Warther, no middle name, but that cow herding job earned him the nickname “Mooney” because in Swiss, Mooney means bull of the herd.

And as he collected the cows, everyone kind of joked because he was the little leader of all of these cows, taking them out to pasture each day, and that just ended up sticking with him for the rest of his life.

[Music] Taking the cows to pasture one day he finds a pocket knife in the dirt, picks it up, starts whittling to pass the time, watching those cows.

And he never stopped.

When you come into the lobby.

His workshop is attached to the lobby so you can see where he started with his carvings and where he accomplished all of it.

We have the big picture windows you can see out to the gardens, and where the button house is.

In the first room that you come into is the early years, when they were when they got married and was raising the family and his work in the steel mill for the first 24 years, and some of his original tools that he used in carving.

Replicas of the steel mill that he worked in here in Dover was the American Sheet and Tinplate.

He worked there for 24 years, and then after the mill was torn down and moved out of Dover, then he carved it about 15 years later.

And it's a scale replica and all the little parts move and operate.

So, you can see how the men work the steel He grew up along the railroad tracks, so it was a good place for him to hang out.

And the hobos would come into town.

And that's where he met the first hobo with the pliers.

So, the story of the pliers really begins when Mooney is about ten years old, and he meets a stranger who cuts him a pair of these pliers out of a single block of wood.

Hands them over, but doesn't tell him how he did it.

And of course, Mooney was enamored with whittling at this time.

And so, while he took those cows to pasture, he figured it out.

And he found out that if he makes ten cuts in a single block of wood, he could make a working pair of pliers as well.

From there he masters it.

He'll go on to carve about three quarter of a million of those in his lifetime.

He would hand those out to school children, anybody he would meet.

A lot of people would challenge him and say, you know, I don't believe that you can do it that fast because he could guarantee you a set in 20 seconds or less.

And then in 1965, he was on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and he clocked his fastest record at 9.4 seconds for a single pair.

So less than a second per cut.

And of course, the single pair wasn't enough for him.

He began experimenting with multiples.

The theater contains the plier tree, and that was his first big item that he carved.

In 1913, coming home from the mill.

He visualizes the block of wood that he needs to shape out and the tree that he'll ultimately create.

And then he places in that block over a 64-day period, 31,000 cuts, and that unveiled a tree of 511 pair of pliers.

Then he started with trains.

There was a rail line that passed his home, and he was able to go down and look at the engines and started memorizing them.

And then he'd read in the encyclopedias about different things that happened in the stages of History of Steam.

So, he'd carve something, and then he'd read about another one and how the steam developed over the years.

1913 is when he began the evolution of the steam engine completely his idea.

And it started with 250 BC, and it goes around the room up to 1942.

So, he wanted to make sure that when he carved the evolution of the steam engine, that he was capturing them in their full essence and that was also included, mechanizing them into and so they all run off of an electric motor with a leather sewing machine belt.

That's how we continue to run them today.

They're all pressed fit together.

They're not glued.

So, they all have a tight fit and they're solid.

The evolution itself is carved across 40 years.

You can think of it as is probably about 35 pieces in there for the most part.

So, none of the works in the museum took him longer to do than a year, and he knew that he could carve about a thousand pieces a month.

I would say his average is about six months time of actual carving time.

Most of them are right around that 6000-piece mark.

The smaller engines obviously are fewer pieces, but then you get something like the Erie Triplex and that's over 9000.

He was considered an artistic genius as well as a mechanical genius to be able to operate them like that.

[Music] Frieda was very fun loving and very artistic.

Frieda Warther originally born Frieda Richard, she was one of 13 children.

She was born in Switzerland, immigrated here with her parents when she was just a young girl.

It was a European and particularly Swiss tradition that the oldest daughter would receive her mother's button box, so she got the idea that she could make jewelry out of buttons.

And so, as she was wearing these, everybody was like, "oh, she likes buttons."

then she just started acquiring buttons from everyone.

Lots of buttons.

She had boxes of them everywhere.

Even under the steps she had boxes and up in the attic, and she had strings of them hanging in the dining room.

Frieda and Mooney, married in 1910, built the family home.

And all this while, she's just collecting buttons.

Just word got out.

Small community.

And eventually, after the kids were a little older, she had some free time finally.

She was like, "I'm going to go through all these buttons."

And then that really sparked the idea for putting them into patterns.

So, the button house, she put her all of her buttons in there.

Grandma had started the gardens when the kids were little for vegetables.

Then she canned a lot of that and stored it.

Eventually it turned into flowers.

[Music] At the age of 68.

He retired because he'd finished the evolution of the steam engine.

So, for four years he didn't carve.

But he was restless.

So, my dad and him sat down and they discussed, and they came up with the idea of carving the great American events in steam history.

So that was things like the Lincoln funeral train, the driving of the Golden Spike.

The John Bull was the first passenger train in the US.

Then we have a new display that we opened last September, and it shows the evolution of the knife making because he started making the knives for carving and then it developed into kitchen knives during World War II.

The commando knives he made.

He would contribute 1100 commando knives for World War II, and so he was nicknamed the smallest defense plant in the United States.

Most years we average about 70 countries throughout the world.

We keep a registry that people can sign in.

There's kind of like, I guess, groupies.

There's people who really get- really get into Mooney and the history and everything that he created.

Our biggest method of advertisement is word of mouth, people telling other people about it.

He had opportunities.

He had offers for quite large sums of money at that point in time, but he turned them all down.

And that's why, thankfully, I have a job and we're all still here and all the carvings are still here.

But he thought it was very important to have everyone come to the city of Dover to see his carvings, and that's why we have such a great relationship with the city.

People are just fascinated and amazed that someone can actually do this from scratch.

And with only a second grade education, it's not like he was mimicking someone else who had done it already.

He had all this idea in his own mind.

That's truly amazing.

A New Dimension It's funny, because halfway through most of these paintings I'm like, "Gavin what are you doing?

Why don't you just paint normally, right?

Why are you going through this?"

But, you know, when the painting is complete, and I step back and I'm like, “wow, I did that.” You know?

So it's a difficult technique to do.

What keeps me doing it and keeps me going is actually the reaction from viewers, right?

Because, you know, there's 2D, but 3D adds a different dimension to the experience of seeing the piece.

My name is Gavin Jordan.

I am the gallery owner of 24 Marie Fine Art Gallery.

I'm also an artist.

And you know, some of my work is here at the gallery as well.

And you know, Gavin is also an executive, right?

A business executive, a CPA.

So Gavin is many things.

So, in 2016, I was doing an assignment in New Jersey, right, for a Jamaican-owned business.

And I was the CFO for that business.

It was a stressful experience.

And I remember I was driving by a Michael's art store one Saturday afternoon, and you know, I said to my wife, Tamika, "You know what?

I want to stop at Michael's, and I need to get some pencils, because I want to start sketching again."

When I think about it, I can't really tell you why it happened the way it happened.

You know, I often tell people it's like, you know, when Spider-Man just got bit by that radioactive bug, and then, you know, suddenly he has superpowers.

It kind of felt like that, right?

I was posting my sketches on Facebook and Instagram for a while, and the response was, you know, that was overwhelming, in terms of the reaction to pieces.

That passion that was reignited in 2016, you know, caused me to go through a process of significant exploration, right?

So, I started with sketching with pencils, then charcoal, you know, a painting with acrylics, inks, oil paints.

And I eventually started working with mixed media.

I was doing a lot of research.

This is my mechanical brain now.

As soon as I started painting, I wanted to have a style.

I was like, boy, you know, I need my style to, I need something to show that this is me.

It's very humbling, right?

It teaches you about patience, right?

You have to be, you know, vulnerable, and then you have to figure out how you get your authentic voice to come out in your paintings.

So, it took me a while to figure that out.

So, I started exploring with mixed media, and after that process, I decided to merge that three-dimensional element with traditional painting, know, styles, right?

You know, so more impressionist.

Then you have the mixed media coming in.

So, I decided to go the route of screws, you know.

So, during my exploration with nails, you know, after, you know, the disaster of hitting my fingers a few times, I said to myself, you know, what is easier to use than actual nails?

This is the tool of the trade.

So, I have my drill, so I paint with a drill at my feet, and I also paint with brushes here, you know, with my oil paints as well.

So, given this particular piece that I'm working on, so I will, after going through the process of doing the sketch, and I've worked out how I want this piece to look on screws, then I will look at the sketch and with intuition determine the depth of each screw, the positioning of each screw and so on.

So, I will go through this until I'm satisfied, and then what I will typically do, is rub my hand over the screws to just ensure that what I'm feeling is the indentation of the face, right?

And these are the cheekbones here, the nose is also here.

There's an indentation here, and so on.

So, I will go through that process until I get the perfect, you know, sculpted image on screws.

If I'm not connected to a painting emotionally.

It's hard for me to complete a painting, right?

So, I can't just paint random objects without any sort of emotional value to it, right?

And what I've found, creating pieces that have that kind of emotional value mixed with the three dimension, you know, unlocks a different experience for my viewers, right?

So, I want people to experience what I call the other side of the story, and not focus on the single story.

When I came up with this idea for opening a space, right, one of the issues I had in my creative journey was finding spaces that were open to showing my work.

So, when I opened this space, I decided that, you know what, I need to figure out how I also help those other artists to get exposure.

So, we decided to set up this space in, the Flagler Village.

You know, there's a lot of history, as it relates to African-Americans on Sistrunk.

I mean, it was one of the largest settlements for African- Americans in Fort Lauderdale.

We decided that, you know what, this upcoming area would be a great area to have a gallery that's dedicated to the African experience, right?

You know, because our culture is, there's a thread that ties us all together, but our experiences are just so different.

So, this guy's walking, having done a day's work, I mean, does he feel fulfilled?

Has he lived a life that he's comfortable with?

And you know, I decided to name this one "Old Life".

So, it was kind of me asking myself that question as well.

You know, have I done what I wanted to do?

So, one of the responses to that question was actually for me to pursue my creative journey.

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Funding for COLORES was provided in part by: Frederick Hammersley Fund, New Mexico PBS Great Southwestern Arts & Education Endowment Fund, and the Nellita E. Walker Fund for KNME-TV at the Albuquerque Community Foundation New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, and by the National Endowment for the Arts and Viewers Like You.