Santa Barbara Seen:
The Art of Pedro De La Cruz
Community-Minded Artist’s
Latest Work Unveiled at
Santa Barbara Wine Auction
By Matt Kettmann | November 7, 2024
In the early months of the pandemic, those dark, disturbing days of 2020 when no one knew what sort of future would come, humans everywhere searched for signs of brightness and hope. There was an especially vivid flash in Santa Barbara that summer when the work of an artist named Pedro De La Cruz graced the cover of Santa Barbara Magazine and started popping up on many of our social media feeds.
Recalling the portraiture of Picasso, storytelling of Rivera, tranquility of Mexican villages, and allure of palm-lined shores, his vibrantly colored, easygoing but emotionally evocative pieces brought brief sunshine to our lives, reminding us of the good days and providing consolation that they’d eventually return.
By then, De La Cruz was already a known quantity to those in the know, a full-time painter working in a tiny Funk Zone studio who has a penchant for wide-brimmed hats, denim jackets, and checkerboard shoes. When one of his works sold at a charity auction for $100,000 in 2018, he even more quickly became a favorite of private collectors and discriminating galleries.
But for those of us not up on what’s up in our city’s visual art scene, discovering De La Cruz during that time was a revelation. Whether squiggly portraits of long-haired women, stark black-and-white sketches of mariachis, or rainbow-colored pueblo-scapes, his works exhibit a combination of confidence and contentment, acting as studies of people and places comfortable in their own skins. Most of all, a De la Cruz piece kinda makes you smile.
That’s especially true for those of us who love to live here. I’m tired of the phrase, but “I feel seen” by Pedro’s pieces. He captures that sunny, convivial side of Santa Barbara that drew so many of us here and compels us to stay, despite high prices and bigger opportunities elsewhere.
Granted, that’s not the whole story of Santa Barbara, but two-dimensional pieces rarely cover it all. Instead, Pedro’s art serves as a positive-minded platform for celebrating this place and bringing its diverse populace together, a community-building effort he diligently carries out away from the canvas as well.
There’s a healthy amount of escapism too, which may be why it struck such a chord during the pandemic.
He explained his work flow while showing me some recent ink drawings: “There’s no going back. You have to be in your zone, to find the joyful peace in that moment. The tea in her hand?” he said, looking at another image. “That’s the only thing that matters to me. Everything else disappears.”
Popsicles to Private Collections
The oft-told legend of Pedro De La Cruz starts on the streets of Tijuana, where he was raised by parents from the states of Jalisco, which will later inspire his colors, and Sonora, which lent the village aesthetic. He’s poor and barefoot on streets of broken glass, selling popsicles to get by.
His grandfather was a respected architect in Mexico, but his parents’ generation was more about working hard blue-collar jobs, his mom cleaning houses and his dad installing carpets. They came to the United States in the 1980s when Pedro was 10 years old and settled here, where he graduated from Santa Barbara High in 1992.
He found solace in art at a young age — his first commission was from his uncle during high school — but pursuing as much wasn’t really in the cards for his family. “I did it quietly more than anything,” explained De La Cruz, who studied the works of masters like Matisse, Modigliani, Kahlo, and Basquiat. “It wasn’t really our culture. You get real jobs.” (His mom still wonders when he might get a real job.)
Thinking that he might follow in his grandfather’s footsteps, De La Cruz took a drafting class at SBCC. “Architecture gave me that formal foundation of design,” he said. “It taught me about space and how to construct. If the stairs don’t fit in the house, the whole place doesn’t work.”
He worked a series of jobs, including for the county’s probation department, where the military mindset of juvenile hall messed him up a bit, and at Saks Fifth Avenue, where he learned what getting laid off meant. “They said it wasn’t personal,” he recalled. “But it’s very personal. I don’t have any money!”
While painting at his townhome studio near the now-defunct Hidden Oaks Golf Club, De La Cruz started layering in jobs, promising to never put all his eggs in one basket. “I didn’t like the idea of someone else controlling my destiny,” he said. “I had backups to the backups.”
He was working at the Museum of Art when he decided to paint full-time. That move was inspired by another artist, the late Chris Potter, who was a very close friend of mine. Unbeknownst to me, Potter’s son and De La Cruz’s daughter went to school together, so the two of them would often judge the kids’ art shows together. At one event, Potter spoke to the class about his decision to leave his stockbroker job and paint full-time.
“Damn, that’s the guy I want to be,” De La Cruz recalled, as my eyes welled with tears. “I was one of those little kids,” he told Chris a few months before he died. “I wanted to be like you.”
De La Cruz dove into the work, painting prolifically while teaching himself how to be a successful entrepreneur by ingesting YouTube videos and podcasts about sales, marketing, and client acquisition. After visiting a Keith Haring show at The Broad in Los Angeles, he realized that art shows can be events. “I was just breathless,” remembered De La Cruz, who then brought similar energy to his pop-ups and openings. “The whole thing was an experience. You walk through and come out transformed.”
Thanks in part to that 2018 auction, which was for Storyteller Children’s Center, where his wife worked, he got placements at galleries in Montecito and Santa Barbara. Then the commissions started coming more frequently — they are now the bulk of his income.
He’s frequently invited into the private areas of wealthy clients’ homes to assess the walls and plot paintings. “You’re granted access to a place where someone who is not an artist wouldn’t have access to, so you gotta walk in confident,” he said. Determining what someone wants can be its own art form. “I’m not a psychologist, but I get a sense of people.”
Kim McIntyre, who’s been connected to the art world most of her life and now owns the gallery Art & Soul in the Funk Zone, said that De La Cruz is one of the most collaborative and hardest-working artists she’s ever come across.
“That’s not just about creating his art,” she said. “It’s being out in the community, being inspired by the people around him, spending time with his family, spending time with nature, listening to people, seeing what’s happening. All of these things filter back into his art. That’s why people really resonate with it.”
In her eyes, De La Cruz’s straddling of a critical line is the key to his “meteoric rise” in the scene. “In my experience, you have more of the traditional artist focused solely on their art, or more of a sales-oriented artist who is seeking out people who want to buy their art,” she said. “For Pedro, it’s very much emotion and passion driving him, but with that intentionality. That is unique and makes it really interesting to work with him.”
El Amor a La Vida @ S.B. Wine Auction
Pedro De La Cruz is not the first artist to be showcased during the biennial Santa Barbara Wine Auction, the black-tie gala held every two years by the Santa Barbara Vintners Foundation to raise money for Direct Relief and the Community Health Centers of the Central Coast (CHC). But he is the first to produce a painting specifically for the event, where it will be live auctioned before the swanky crowd. Can it fetch anywhere near the $100,000 that his 2018 painting did?
That would very much please the foundation’s president Jessica Gasca, a winemaker who owns the Story of Soil brand. “There’s just a lot about Pedro’s story that is incredible and very reflective of the work we are trying to do,” said Gasca, who credited vintner Doug Margerum for introducing the foundation to De La Cruz’s work. “The population we are trying to help through Direct Relief and CHC are the underserved communities and at-risk populations who don’t have the means to take care of their health.”
When asked, De La Cruz wasn’t an immediate yes, but he changed his tune immediately when he learned of the CHC connection. “That’s what sold me,” he said.
The next step was painting something that worked for the event. “It was hard to see something that didn’t exist yet,” said De La Cruz. “But then they said, ‘Just be you; be authentically you.’ ”
He painted a woman in a vineyard, holding grapes in a basket, with a bright yellow bird on her outstretched hand, using bright colors so that it would stand out from the gala stage. Calling it “El Amor a La Vida,” De La Cruz said that he may be the tiny bird, but that the woman is the community, holding it all up. “She’s the one doing the work. I’m just trying to find ways to help out.”
Gasca is very pleased with the finished piece, and believes that, in coming from humble beginnings and rising to success, De La Cruz is uniquely qualified to understand the people that the auction is benefitting.
“When you meet Pedro, you can see his heart,” said Gasca. “And when you see his painting, you can see his heart through that. He was absolutely the right person for this.”
See sbwineauction.org.
Community as Canvas
When I visited him a couple of Fridays ago, De La Cruz — his jeans covered in paint, his head wrapped in a saggy beanie — had just finished a rather huge piece for a client in Woodland Hills. It was originally meant to be a pueblo scene, with adobe homes, horses, chickens, and so forth, but the couple had checked out Fiesta on his recommendation and wanted to shift the painting in that direction. He took that call while on vacation in Puerto Vallarta, where the sunlight was especially strong, so he brought that brightness back to the canvas while adding flamenco dancers, mariachis, and Santa Barbara features.
He was presently working on a painting of the Lobero Theatre, which will be the cover of their upcoming program. After researching previous renditions of the landmark, De La Cruz decided to incorporate the mountains as a backdrop and two musicians as the foreground. Both the Lobero and Fiesta piece are classic Pedro: playful but ponderous, drawing you in with friendly features and making you want to stay awhile.
De La Cruz is similar in person. His manner of speaking and of being is distinct: mostly mellow and focused like a steady, subtle bass drum, but occasionally interrupted by excited, exclamatory blasts of high hat and cymbal. If we believe our genuine artists to be genuinely artistic, Pedro succeeds. “I’m not a person,” he told me over lunch at Finney’s, relaying what he told his wife when he suddenly jumped up to dance during the recent release of Jaunt Journal (a travel book he illustrated)at Gala. “I’m an artist.”
You’d have to ask him, but I like to think we hit it off during the two meetings we had at his studio in August and October. Our official interviews evolved into conversations of middle-aged, socially busy Santa Barbarans, men trying to be good husbands and fathers, watching our weight, balancing our public and private lives, enjoying this one life we get. I’d like to hang out more.
The other people I spoke to about De La Cruz confirmed my suspicions. “He has such a big following now because he is so nice; he does such great work; he’s super talented; he’s always available,” said Kristina McKean, founder of The Elephant Project, to which De La Cruz has contributed much work and time, including designs for a new pajama line with Sant and Abel. “He wants to be part of the community, and he works so hard. There’s nothing not to embrace about his artwork.”
Also a fan and friend is the emerging artist Belle Hahn, who comes from a much different background. Her late father is the famed New York City art collector Stephen Hahn, who deeply endowed the Music Academy of the West in Montecito, including Hahn Hall.
“He was really a big part of me becoming an artist, so I’ll always be grateful for his guidance and support,” said Hahn over a crackling cell phone on her way to Big Sur last week. She appreciates how they come from incredibly disparate worlds — his Tijuana compared to her Manhattan/Montecito — yet they converge on the canvas.
“Art meets in the middle, in the same place of expression,” she said. “When you create your own world through color and shape, and then you meet there, it’s a really powerful place.”
De La Cruz is intent on using such power to empower “community,” a word that leaps from his mouth almost incessantly. He’s fixated on the notion of togetherness and the nurturing of it across Santa Barbara and the Funk Zone, where many consider him to be the mayor. Case in point is his Instagram feed, where he constantly promotes nonprofit initiatives and other artists.
“I’m willing to share the eyes that are on me,” said De La Cruz, early in our first meeting. “I think we’re all one; we’re all connected. We claim we’re doing solo shows, but it’s not. It’s a group effort.”
He was particularly moved by the February funeral of our mutual friend Chris Potter, where about 700 gathered to honor his life. “It circles back to that again: Community matters,” said De La Cruz. “Fuck being a legend. I want to be part of the community.”
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