The Art and Life of Ivan Garcia

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THE ART AND LIFE OF IVAN GARCIA: The Man Who Followed His Bliss essay by Will Cloughley M.F.A. April 2016 After a lifetime of studying the world’s religions and mythologies, the great scholar and teacher, Joseph Campbell, became famous for this pithy adjuration: “Follow your bliss.”

This might seem to be the perfect slogan for a call to the life of the artist, even though when we examine the biographies of numerous famous artists, it would appear that their lives were anything but a continual state of bliss, and more like a continual dipolar oscillation between manic activity and depressed alienation, between isolated successes and extreme poverty. But what Campbell was talking about was the life of the Hero, the challenge to follow a deep call wherever it might lead and through whatever difficulties, a life of finding meaning through creativity so that at the end one would not feel that he had put his ladder up against the wrong wall.

Ivan Garcia’s portrait of his parents with himself as an infant embedded in a painting of children’s toys.

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Ivan Garcia was born in Chile in 1927 to a family of European descent. Ivan was very unlike his father, a powerful and successful politician, who came to regard his son with concern and disdain, referring to him as a "clown." The epithet stuck with him. Ivan was a dreamy child on his way to becoming a dreamy adult. But he was dreamy in the way of the artist and he would become a self-taught, skilled, meticulous realist painter who in a number of paintings would embrace the image of the clown not only as an expression of his playful, childlike nature, but as a way of dealing with the distress he kept hidden in his soul.

There are two versions of the story of how Ivan left his native Chile to come to the United States. One version says that after a prolonged and unrequited love affair, Ivan Garcia fled to the United States around 1952 and eventually encapsulated the pain of this love affair in a painting of the sad clown plucking petals from a flower in the game of "she loves me, she loves me not..." In the painting, the clown figure has plucked all the petals except the last one, and his expression tells us that the alternation has led him to the conclusion that she, the framed female picture on the desk,

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shown also in clown garb, loves him not. But the painting as a whole expresses not only sadness, but through the device of the clown laughs at the foolishness of an infatuation of the sort which we have all experienced at some time in our lives: unrealistic projections driven by yearning.

But the other version of the story of Ivan’s Chilean love says that Ivan was having an affair with his father’s maid who was pressuring him to marry her. Ivan’s father had definitely discouraged Ivan’s predilection for art, and so marrying and settling in Chile would have undoubtedly meant submitting to his father’s career plan for him and ignoring the call to a life in the arts as a writer and painter. In any case, Ivan made the daring decision to move to the United States and he first landed in New York as a dishwasher. But shortly he headed for the other coast, as he explained with his characteristic light-heartedness, to become a Beatnik in San Francisco.

Photo of Ivan Garcia.

In the US, Ivan could try to build a new identity, a new selfimage, even at some point adopting the pen name Ivan

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Garrick because he thought an Anglo Saxon name sounded more appropriately upper class for a fine art painter and an author. But like a clown, he had no taste for aristocratic dress and grooming, preferring to go about in baggy work clothes.

In contacts with friends and relatives back in Chile, however, he always cheerfully represented himself as a great success, which meant that a number of them in desperate circumstances tried to hit him up for money. He began to essentially hock some of his paintings to a sympathetic art dealer with the promise to buy them back at twice what he was paid for them in order to be able to help out relatives.

Even though he had earned a PhD in science, he clung to his passion for writing and painting. To earn a living he became an art restorer and framer, working in San Francisco until he was forced out by high rent increases. He moved to Daly City and continued his trade out of a small, cluttered apartment while continuing a slow output of his own paintings, even managing over the years to write several science fiction novels.

He lived austerely, did not smoke or drink, and people who knew him say they never heard him speak disparagingly of others or, as he aged, complain about his health problems.

He has been characterized as childlike, always giggling or laughing and in his remarks lacking in adult duplicity. He always had time for the friends that he made in his professional contacts as a framer and restorer, and also people he met at the flea markets which he haunted incessantly, buying old pictures for their frame value, and also selling frames.

Yet his father's dire predictions that he was a loser who would become homeless remained buried in him like a latent infection. He was always afraid of becoming homeless, and being a natural athlete, he struggled with his fear of old age by daily routines of jogging, jumping rope, and doing pushups.

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He also dealt with his fear of old age in the symbolic painting, above, of a female figure, half young woman, and half old crone, sitting in front of an hourglass that rests on a surface that is reflective like a mirror or the plane of a still pond that seems to hold the mystery of Time in its depths.

This is what the artist can bring to the representation of the universal fears of humanity as he deals with it in himself.

So before we conclude that Ivan Garcia's tale is that of a sad clown, we should stop to do a little soul searching and deeper consideration. We will realize that Ivan Garcia's fears were versions of the same fears that haunt us all and secretly drive us: the fear of being unworthy of love and respect, and the fear of not only becoming homeless, but of living a life without meaning and losing one's soul. After all, the plain fact of our human condition, that in the end we will all grow old and die, could make us see everyone as a loser and life itself as a clown act full of pathos.

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But Ivan Garcia did manage to live a long life, finally passing away in 2016 at the age of 89. And if his career would not have been considered successful by his father, who wanted him to become a mainstream professional such as a chemical engineer, it was a life lived on his own terms, true to himself. Not only did his work as an art restorer and framer bring honest value into the world, but many of his original paintings are significant contributions to an ongoing and complex cultural manifestation of what in Jungian psychology would be called The Trickster, The Fool, the first stage of the "hero's journey," and in modern times The Clown. The Fool is the first card of the Tarot and Zero is his number. He is Joseph Campbell’s HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES and pops up as the Joker in the modern playing deck.

The word “fool” used in modern culture is almost always used with a pejorative connotation. But historically the fool has been associated with the wisdom of innocence, and the daring, to not only think outside the box, but to impishly reveal truths that no one else is willing to talk about.

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The Fool Card from the Tarot deck and Ivan Garcia clown painting.

In a way the Clown dares to be ridiculous as a strategy. He assumes (and protects himself with) a mask that exaggerates his features: the familiar big red nose, then carrying it into things like oversize shoes and garishly colored clothing. Of course, Ivan Garcia did not become an actual professional performing Clown. But we might think of the artist’s application of paint to the canvas as hauntingly analogous to the Clown painting his own face to greet the world in a special way. The painting becomes a stand-in—perhaps a mask—for the artist himself. So if we view Ivan Garcia as the sad Clown, I think we should also celebrate him as the wily trickster who found ways to live his life, keep his spirit alive, and deliver his message to us in a body of wonderful paintings.

In April of 2016, shortly after Ivan Garcia’s passing, a memorial was held at Montgomery Gallery in San Francisco’s North Beach. The group of close friends of the artist gathered there were happy to see his pictures hung among the old Dutch masters and paintings by Renoir, Albert Bierstadt, and Arthur Matthews. The Montgomery Gallery had been a client for Ivan’s professional services as a framer and restorer. They recalled that he picked up and delivered work in his dented red van, his work always immaculate and

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done for a fair price. Among the statements I heard were these: “He was always willing, always optimistic. He never stopped remembering and celebrating the joyful feelings of his childhood. He was a straightforward, innocent person. A gentle soul. …very cerebral, intelligent, could talk about anything…a role model for what a meaningful life is.”

Besides the Clown, Ivan Garcia was drawn to Santa Claus.

He did a number of paintings on the Santa theme and made some of them into seasonal cards, which were also on display in the gallery.

Santa images by Ivan Garcia

One friend recalls having said to Ivan, “You remind me of Don Quixote,” to which he replied, “That’s how I see myself.”

Christmas card based on Ivan Garcia’s painting CLOWNS IN HEAVEN

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One interesting story about Ivan Garcia was brought to mind by the Christmas card he did (above) based on his painting, “Clowns In Heaven.” When Ivan was very young he asked his beautiful aunt about heaven— which he had heard about— and said he wanted to go to heaven. She told him he would have to die first.

This was disconcerting and unwelcome news, but he said to his aunt, “Well, can take my dog with me?”

“No,” his aunt told him, “you can’t take your dog with you.”

Ivan thought for a moment and then said, “If I have to die and I can’t take my dog with me, then I don’t want to go to heaven.”

Everyone remembered Ivan Garcia as a very giving person, always thinking of others, even when he was in hospice with a fatal cancer he expressed his concern about others to friends who came to visit him. “The main thing Ivan taught us is how to be giving,” said Naim Farhat.

And even in hospice he was able to do a final painting and New Years Greeting card to send out. (below)

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Heaven occurs again as a theme, but a friend at the memorial recalls asking Ivan if he expected to continue in an afterlife, and he replied, “No, I’m a ball of energy and when it’s over, it’s over.” So there appears an element of gentle stoicism in Ivan Garcia, a willingness to face life as it is. It is indeed refreshing to encounter a story like that of Ivan Garcia in a field so often dominated by giant, competitive egos jockeying for position. He was a man who followed his bliss, and the people who benefited from his friendship are grateful that he did.