Jesse Trevino, painter who persevered after war injuries, dies at 76

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 Feb. 13 at a hospice center in San Antonio. He was 76. The specific cause was not known, said his biographer Anthony Head. Mr. Trevino had recently been ill with COVID-19 and pneumonia.

In photorealistic style, Mr. Trevino painted portraits of Chicano life in San Antonio that have been exhibited across the country, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum. His towering murals on prominent city buildings are reflections of the city in which they hang.

“The thing about Jesse is that he captures the heart of his family and his communities,” Ellen Riojas Clark, professor emerita of bicultural-bilingual studies at the University of Texas at San Antonio, told 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.

Jesus Trevino, the ninth of 12 siblings, was born in Monterrey, Mexico, on Dec. 24, 1946. His father worked as a mechanic, drove trucks and delivered milk, and his mother was a homemaker.

He was 4 when the family resettled in San Antonio. He drew cartoons on the walls of his home, and his mother made him wipe them away with soap and water. At age 6, he entered an art contest sponsored by the Witte Museum in San Antonio. He won first place with a drawing of doves.

“They had it on a little easel, and I remember going up to the podium and the people were clapping,” he told the News-Express. “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.’”

He continued winning contests in high school. After graduating in 1965, he won a scholarship to the Art Students League in New York. Mr. Trevino was drafted less than a year later. As a Mexican citizen, he had options. He could repatriate and avoid Vietnam. Or he could fight. Feeling as American as “any other son of San Antonio,” his biographer wrote, Mr. Trevino chose to fight.

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.