Making Art Work

Editor's note: There has been ongoing conversation in Northeast Ohio about artist support in recent years, but little examination of how artists support themselves on a day-to-day basis. Through this series, ideastream highlights a sampling of area artists and the various ways they make their finances work.

John Rivera-Resto is a Clevelander with roots in Puerto Rico, and he lives an artist’s life he never intended.

He’s a painter, writer, designer, actor and director, and he never knows where his next buck is coming from. But, life has taught him that the phone will soon ring with a new job.

One Fall morning, John Rivera-Resto gazed at his huge mural at the corner of West 25^th and Clark Avenue with a mixture of pride and sadness. Two stories high and over 100 feet long, the painting depicts the local community as it has changed over the years. It was an immediate hit when it was unveiled in 2014.

“I knew I was going to get a reaction, but I didn’t know it was going to be embraced to this level,” he said. 

The community loved this representation of their lives, and people were outraged when someone defaced it, two years ago.

The 60-year-old artist has done numerous life-sized, photo-realistic paintings, in many spots around town. But this was one of his favorites, because of the uplifting social commentary.

“Everybody got it,” said Rivera-Resto. “They said, ‘Yeah, this is where we want to go.’ I interviewed a lot of people, and I put their stories on the wall.”

The vandalism would prove to only be a temporary setback for an artist who has made a career of putting stories on walls...

You can see his work in restaurants, sports bars and travel agencies and on the sides of buildings throughout the city.

Over the course of four decades, the artist has learned not to have any illusions about what it takes to keep food on the table.

“I have no ingrained philosophy that says: ‘Oh, this is fine art. I'm not gonna degrade myself by doing commercial art.’ The minute you make a painting and you give it to your friend - that’s art. The minute the friend gives you five cents - that’s business.”

Rivera-Resto began developing his artistic and business smarts as a boy in Las Piedras, Puerto Rico. But, it’s not like an art career was any kind of goal.

Images transfixed him as well. For instance, the head of a pig with an apple in its mouth at a market stayed with him for days, and he was compelled to try to duplicate it on paper. The more he practiced the better he got. Such sketches led to his first professional commission.

The pastor of a prominent Pentecostal church saw some of 16-year-old Rivera-Resto's work and hired him to do a mural on the front of a new temple that the church was building. The young artist did him one better. 

Over the course of six months, he painted a 2,275-square-foot rendering of the Garden of Eden around the altar. Rivera-Resto says this monumental work caused quite a buzz on the island, leading to over two dozen more mural commissions. He says it was his personal art school.

“At 17, I was making more money painting murals than my father who was a plant manager at a factory, where they made hospital and office equipment,” he said. “Everybody paid me cash. I never saw the money. My father collected it and put it in a savings account in my name.”

He says he also started acting in local theater productions as a way to escape a shy personality.

“I loved the acting because that's one way to be Errol Flynn,” he said. “Nobody dies on stage. You're the hero. And because Errol is a fencer, I took fencing.”

Being on stage was a step towards the glamorous life he’d always dreamed of, but a Cleveland relative had a different idea. Without telling him, great-uncle Esau submitted some of the boy’s work to an art school here, and he was quickly accepted as a student. But, the young artist found he wasn’t suited to the rigors of formal education. The teachers bored him and he was paying for school with a part-time job as a welder at night, which didn’t help his attention span.

“I hated every minute of it,” he said. “I didn't want to know about aesthetics. I didn't want to know how I felt about something. Tell me what color to mix with which color. I'll handle the rest.”

That sort of pragmatic attitude stood him in good stead as he went looking for painting jobs. His brother came to Cleveland and the two of them lived together to save money.

“I don't drink, I don't smoke, I'm very frugal, don't do drugs,” he said. “This is when Cleveland was at the worst – in the early 80s, middle 80s – and jobs were hard to come by, but I was always getting them, and I thought I was doing okay.

He painted signs. He did murals. He even did some Spanish tutoring to make ends meet. But it wasn’t enough. He started losing faith that he could survive on painting. So, he took a job as a program director at the Boys and Girls Club, and he even did a stint as a Burger King manager to help pay for a degree in art education at Cleveland State University.

He figured if he couldn’t make a living as an artist, then he could teach others what he had learned in the real world.

“I'll be one of the few people who can actually say I've been there,” he said. “And I can do it in Spanish and English, and I'm very theatrical when I teach my class. It's a performance.”

Rivera-Resto says he limits his teaching gigs to one-time lectures and presentations, due to the preparation time he needs. He’s spoken at Kent State University, the Cleveland Institute of Art, Cuyahoga Community College and some Cleveland Public Schools.

His performance talents proved to be useful in selling himself as an artist and designer to the occasional corporate client, and his Spanish language skills came in handy, as well. In the 1990s, Rivera-Resto did some consulting work with the Cleveland Indians to help acculturate some young Latino players to their new city. For instance, he designed popular slugger Carlos Baerga’s house from the furniture to the silverware.

Rivera-Resto juggles between one to five projects at a time. He estimates 75% of his income, these days, comes from restaurant and nightclub design, which includes a mural in many cases.  A good portion of the remaining 25% comes from private commissions.

And his old Errol Flynn itch is being scratched by working with Cleveland’s LatinUs Theater Company – a troupe that performs plays in Spanish with English subtitles

“In theater, you make no money, period,” he said. “You do it because you love it. You make maybe your expenses, but not necessarily make a living.”

It’s just another activity to fit into his busy schedule.

“A typical day means I try to go to bed at 4:00 in the morning, because I need to go to bed,” he said. “And then, I'm angry because I had to go to bed and couldn’t stay up doing something else.”

Those early morning hours are generally filled with reading everything from a classic Hispanic author to a dish-washing manual to Steven Hawking. And if he’s particularly vexed by a design problem, he’ll often turn to video games as a distraction.

By contrast, his wife of ten years, Nancy, is a morning person who acts as the family bookkeeper. In return, he turns his focus to her every weekend.

“’Honey, I am your slave on Saturday. Anything you need to do anything you want to do, I'm with you,’” he said. “She's a girl from Jersey who keeps reminding me: ‘We bury people in walls in Jersey. Just keep that in mind.’”