Jesse Trevino, a prominent Mexican American artist who learned to paint with his left hand after his dominant right arm was rendered lifeless by an explosive booby trap he stepped on while fighting in the Vietnam War, died on Feb. 13 in San Antonio.
The specific cause was not known, said his biographer Anthony Head. Mr. Trevino had recently been ill with covid-19 and pneumonia.
the Express-News in 2017. “So his work is very, very introspective, but yet resonates with everybody’s spirit.”Mr. Trevino was taking art classes in New York, painting tourists and Greenwich Village characters, when he was drafted in the war in late-1966. A few months later, racing to board a helicopter amid sniper fire, an explosion launched him 50 feet into a rice paddy.
Mr. Trevino was sent to a military hospital at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. His painting hand was paralyzed by the blast, and the arm would eventually need to be amputated up to the elbow. He grew bitter and depressed., “would come and pray and try to say something, and I was like, ‘Please, just leave me alone. I never did anything wrong. I feel like I’m being punished. I thought God gave me all this ability to paint and all that. Now I can’t do anything.
“They had it on a little easel, and I remember going up to the podium and the people were clapping,” he. “I was nervous looking up, and I was taking in all the excitement of what was happening. What was happening is that I was getting compensated, recognized. It was such a great feeling that I said, ‘If I can do this for the rest of my life, this is what I want to do.’”
After his discharge from the Army in 1968, Mr. Trevino took art classes at San Antonio College, continuing to perfect his strokes with his left hand. He also returned to using his walls as a canvas.On his bedroom wall, he painted an 8-by-14-foot mural titled “Mi Vida.” Vestiges of his life float over a self-portrait: a Purple Heart hanging off a prosthetic hand, a painkiller pill, a Ford Mustang.
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