alex ramirez

Ask the Ramirez boys (Tino, 11; Alex, 10, and Tomas, 6) what comes to mind when they think of the State Fair of Texas, and the consensus is “Big Tex.”

But this year, when Alex, a fourth-grader at St. Patrick’s Catholic School, entered his impressive drawing of an eagle in the fair’s junior art contest, they imagine what it might be like to see his artwork on display at such a big event.

“I would be really proud,” Alex says. “It would be kind of strange to have everybody looking at his art,” his older brother, Tino, chimes in, “but really great, too.”

Alex is obsessed with eyes these days, his family says. He will sit at the dining table and draw eyes and more eyes until you walk in and dozens of pairs of eyes are staring up at you, they say. Sometimes Alex declines to play because he’s drawing, his brothers say, shaking their heads.

This still might be better than his “origami phase,” mom Kelly

Ramirez says. At that time, the family was drowning in tiny pieces of paper.

The artistic genes come from dad Tino Sr., whose pastel watercolor paintings are displayed throughout the Ramirezes’ Moss Haven-area home. The eyes, which Alex learned to draw from a YouTube video, are the centerpiece of his eagle sketch.

“The eagle has interesting eyes, so that’s why I wanted to draw an eagle,” he says.

An art teacher at the Ridgewood Belcher recreation center recommended the State Fair contest to the family. Though they visit the State Fair yearly, Kelly Ramirez says she wasn’t aware of the “contest subculture” until she visited the Creative Arts Building to drop off Alex’s drawing, she says.

“It is just row after row of tables — beading, ceramics, needlepoint, paintings and a test kitchen for the cooking contests in the middle of it all.”