By Bobbi Mlynar
mlynar@emporiagazette.com
Jose Alvarado is blessed with a balanced brain — mathematic and logic on the left side, art and creativity on the right.
The Emporia High School senior already has completed an enormous landscape mural on display now the Flinthills Mall and a smaller mural for the EHS library.
“He’s really a gifted student,” said Jose’s painting teacher, Joshua Pavlik. “He puts a lot of value, a lot of highlights and shadows into his work. I filled out scholarship information on him, and I don’t do that for too many students.”
While Jose plans to major in aerospace engineering at Wichita State University, he likely will designate art as a minor, he said. Creating art in a variety of forms is something he has been doing successfully for several years. He recently received a Silver Key award for his work from the Scholastic Art group.
“The art really came from my mother’s side of the family,” Jose said, adding that “I was really inspired by my brother.”
The brother, Carlos, 28, also is an artist and a role model for his younger brother.
Jose, the son of Jose and Lubia Alvarado, took sculpture and drawing as a freshman, skipped art classes altogether as a sophomore, enrolled in computer graphics his junior year and decided to enroll in a painting class as a senior.
He had designed a T-shirt used for an annual car club show at the mall, which prompted then-mall manager Misti Hampton to commission a mural by Jose for the mall. Though most of his experience had been in pastels and sketching, he quickly adapted his talent and techniques to painting with acrylics.
“I visualized it in my head and put it on paper first,” Jose said. “I just winged it, I guess, and I guess it came out all right.”
The mural, which measures 28 feet by 9 feet, depicts a silhouetted windmill against a glowing sunset and landscape. He said he was a little nervous about starting a project of that scope, but admitted that he enjoys a challenge, even when it is a bit intimidating.
“It was a little hard in the beginning,” Jose said. “I kept going on and off. Then the manager at the mall said ‘Do it.’ It was pretty challenging, actually.”
The greatest challenge was “trying to pull the colors together,” he said. “I had to experiment and see what worked.”
Jose devoted most of his leisure time to finishing the mural, working weekends and weekdays until 9 p.m. at first.
“The first week, I really didn’t eat much,” he said. “I just ate like a candy bar and kept on painting.”
He finished earlier this year, and in the meantime picked up another commission for a mural when EHS media specialist Carmaine Ternes asked him to create something for the school’s library.
The result is a 6-feet-by-4-feet head and torso of a Spartan on a background of deep shades of teals and blues, with music, arts and theater, sports and science represented on each corner.
Pavlik found his student’s finishing two major artworks in one semester remarkable, but not surprising coming from Jose. Such an accomplishment is rare and requires unusual dedication and motivation.
“He’s one of those kids that whatever he decides he wants to do, he’s going to be great at it,” Pavlik said. “He’s going to succeed in life.”