Artist Noelle Garcia likes to work from old family photos, including those taken during visits to see her father in prison. He inspired her to become an artist with the drawings he’d send from behind bars.
Tuesday, Nov. 10, 2009 | 2 a.m.
Hero of a Different Kind
UNLV graduate student Noelle Garcia lost her estranged father to cancer when she was 13. Her memories of him fading, she paints him how she remembers him -- out of focus. Her art is created mostly from old family photos. The people she paints have no faces or are missing facial features, representing a lack of identity.
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Name: Noelle Garcia, visual artist
Age: 24
Education: Bachelor’s degree in fine art, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Day job: Works for the Las Vegas Arts Commission
Her art: In her studio Garcia has a handful of decaying photos, Polaroids taken in the prison yard for $1 when she was a child and would go to visit her father. A new series of works, titled “Prison Visits,” was created from these images on small canvases to help capture the intimacy of the photographs. Colorful and rich, the works were made with fabric paint. Without the title, the paintings would seem to be of a happy family at an outing on a sunny day. Garcia herself seems easygoing and matter-of-fact.
Identity: Her art is created mostly from old family photos. The people she paints have no faces or are missing facial features, representing a lack of identity. Her father, who she says was an alcoholic, spent most of his time in prison and died when she was 13. She knows no relatives on her mother’s side and does not know her father’s other children. She creates coloring books and painterly works from photographs. Her illustrative work is featured in a story about family life with an alcoholic father in the new book “Drunk: A Comic About Bar Stories.”
Starting out: Her father would send her drawings from prison. As a child, she wanted to draw like him. Her first sketches were of “Little Mermaid” characters. Much of her work deals with her relationship with her late father: “He wasn’t a very good man,” she says. “He was a different man when he was drunk. But I really idealize him because he’s my father.”
The coloring books: Garcia started making coloring books of her family when pregnant with her son, Sebastian, who is now 2, as a way to share family history that is tenuous and marred with drug abuse and alcoholism.
One book tells the story of her father based on things she was told. A phrase on every page accompanies a line drawing: “Walt was truely (sic) a legend. He rode wild broncos. Walt was a family man, even from prison. He loved babies. Some say he killed a man with his bare hands. Walt was a great man.” One of the books is on display in an exhibit at the Clark County Government Center Rotunda.
Getting to Las Vegas: Born and raised in Reno, Garcia grew up in the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony, but was a member of the Klamath Tribes in Oregon on her father’s side. Garcia moved to Las Vegas, as a child, with her mother. She attended Las Vegas Academy, where she studied art.
After college she and her husband, Shane Waters, whom she’s known since fifth grade, moved to York, Pa., but returned to Las Vegas to be near family. She is in the first semester of a Master of Fine Arts program at UNLV.
Cultural heritage: Garcia is working on a coat inspired by American Indian Grass Dancers, who wear costumes adorned with dangling tobacco-can lids shaped into cones so they make a jingling noise. Seeing the lids as indicative of the tobacco problem among American Indians, she decided to use beer bottle caps to represent her father’s alcoholism. She is also working on a Native American coloring book and trying to help coordinate a local exhibit of American Indian contemporary art.
Favorite artists: Edgar Heap of Birds, Alex Katz, Joyce Scott, Elizabeth Peyton
Arts in Las Vegas: “I love how new it is. I do like that it’s a small crowd right now. We’re really close to L.A. I wish people wouldn’t give up so fast.”
Other interests: When not making art, working and being a mom, she goes to the Strip with her husband. “We’re obsessed with the Bellagio and its gardens. We also go to the Springs Preserve a lot.”
Sticking around? “For a little while. I don’t want to stray too far from the West Coast.”
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