With Jose Bellver, that’s one big totally amazing creative experience

Scott Dickensheets

Thursday, May 8, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.

The monkeys are packing heat. They've got automatic weapons and belts of ammunition looped around their shoulders, and once you know their story, you almost can't blame them for wanting to shoot things up a little.

But they're not going to pull their triggers, at least not anymore. For one thing, these aren't real armed monkeys; this is art! For another, as depicted by artist Jose Bellver in the gorgeous black-and-white drawing tacked to the otherwise bare walls of his Pahrump studio, they have the slumped postures and defeated eyes of beaten rebels. "They really look like troops that have been exhausted," Bellver says.

And their defeat is chillingly final: In the background, Noah is pulling out in the ark; these are the monkeys left behind, sacrificed to The Flood, collateral damage in God's war on the wickedness of man. No wonder they're simultaneously confused, hacked off and resigned to their fate.

Yes, it's an intellectually complicated commentary on man's relationship with nature, man's own animal component, the primal power of Genesis and the quandaries of leadership, but before you get into all that, what you notice is, this dude can draw. These apes don't represent apes or signify apes or suggest apes; there's no abstraction or primitivism masquerading as individual style. They flat-out look like apes. The rendering is deeply nuanced, perspective is maintained. Only after taking all that in do you begin to absorb the biblical themes.

"People always look at me like I'm really weird," Bellver says, looking only mildly weird in unkempt hair and offhand clothing clearly selected without an eye toward prevailing fashion. His years in America have not pressed the lilting accents of his native Spain from his voice. "'Why is he doing this religious thing?' they say. Because that is not the kind of thing you are supposed to be doing. It's totally amazing."

"Totally amazing" seems to be his favorite phrase, dropped frequently into his elliptical conversation to express varying degrees of surprise, satisfaction and, occasionally, total amazement. But in this case it's not all that remarkable that he's taken the unprescribed path. Nor is it surprising that, having decided to execute artwork on a Genesis theme, he sides with the animals. A man between continents, he has an outsider's eye.

"I was thinking in terms of using Noah as a leader," he says. And not a particularly good one, in Bellver's mind. What kind of leader sails away in his leader ship, leaving so much behind? "The guy just left everything; it was like, 'F--- you!'"

Bellver believes that life consists of two forces: one creative, the other destructive. The apes, abandoned and betrayed, give in to the latter, as evidenced by the guns and the ruins around them. "They're destroying everything, they don't know anything else," Bellver says. "They don't know why they are doing these things, but they just do it."

This explanation has been delivered amid many pauses and digressions. "I feel real strange trying to talk about this thing," he says at last. Because pictures have a logic of their own, visual meanings not readily translatable into verbal explanations. "It's clear enough to me in terms of the image. ..."

How much do you love what you do? How willing are you not only to love it, but to live it, to let it take charge, to let what you do meld into who you are until they are indistinguishable? That's the central dilemma and main romance of what might be called the art life.

So this is the art life as lived by Bellver, recipient last month of a long-overdue Governor's Arts Award and arguably the best painter in Southern Nevada: a spare, 1,100-square-foot studio/home four houses down an unnamed gravel road at the edge of the known world. It's nothing fancy, a primer-spotted grayish frame house, with roughly a third devoted to his nonswinging bachelor pad and the rest to his studio. Bellver built it himself, board by board, nail by nail, during an 18-month period a few years ago.

There is, by design, a monkish aspect to the place. The ceiling is high, the layout strictly functional. There is no art, his or anyone else's, on the living room walls. Simple furniture sits on the austere tile floor. The only purely decorative touch is the Governor's Arts Award itself, an odd silver bowl that sits unsteadily -- the bottom isn't exactly flat -- on the wood stove. It's a space made for contemplation, for staring at the vista of desert mountains framed by the small window.

It's achingly quiet out here, and you imagine that days can pass with the only sounds being the wind, his dogs, a few domestic clinks and rattles, and, for 10 or 12 hours on some days, the whisking of paint brushes against canvas. Long hours in the studio, that's part of the art life, of course. A scene from years ago: Bellver is looking at one of his paintings, a huge rendering of a religious figure. He's mentioned that he painted it with a small-tipped brush. He's been asked how many strokes it took. "More than a million," he estimates. Totally amazing.

But to his mind, the building is without a doubt his finest work. "I did everything else myself. It's really an ordeal. The whole thing has been an amazing ordeal."

He lives out here for the serenity, the lack of distractions. "I wanted to be away from everything. I was fed up with the noise, people bugging me all the time...."

How much do you love what you do? Enough to spend days at a time living in a half-built house, exposed to the broiling summer afternoons and freezing winter nights, in order to build a place to do it? "Imagine being here, no electricity, no insulation," Bellver says, recalling a time he was stranded here during heavy rains, his truck hopelessly bogged in the mud driveway.

"I didn't have a bed. All the dogs of the neighborhood would sleep here. We would hold each other to stay warm." One summer, he killed 15 scorpions in the house.

Totally amazing, all right, but it had to be endured. "It was my commitment to my studio, to my work," he explains.

And to his peace of mind. As an artist he has sometimes been admired more than bought, and has weathered periods on the edge of a financial cliff. This place represents stability, wrought by his own hands.

Plus, he loves it out here, scorpions and all. He rhapsodizes about the mesmerizing charm of the desert; he says he has stared at it for hours at a time, taking it in, all track of time lost.

"The place in Spain where my family comes from looks just like this," he remembers. He likes this better. "I just don't want to go. I really feel great out here. I find it totally amazing that I ended up in a place like this."

Bellver's is a busy solitude. When school is in session, he drives twice a week in to UNLV, where he's taught off and on over the years, never as a tenured professor. He's working -- more or less simultaneously -- on five commissioned projects, and he's been trying to get work together for gallery exhibits in Paris, Toronto and Buenos Aires, not to mention an upcoming show at McCarran International Airport.

"I can't wait until my life gets settled," he says.

This summer he plans to add another 300 square feet, a kitchen -- right now he cooks on a crooked hot plate -- and a storeroom for the studio. Again, he'll do it himself, although a Las Vegas architect has offered to assist him. "I'm hesitant," he admits. "I want to do everything myself, so I can say, 'Heck, I did it all on my own.'"

In his studio, Bellver leans toward the monkey drawing, squinting as he slowly translates the Spanish notations in the margin. They are headline-style phrases meant to be stamped into the piece's metal frame: "It was done by rebellious groups taking advantage of conditions..."

The piece is part of a series of Genesis-based works. The rest are long gone to Madrid for exhibition; like the monkeys in the image, this has been left behind. A rough sketch of another piece is taped to the wall: an aerial view of The Flood, intercut with images of pigs, lemons and irises. He describes another painting of those Noah left behind: "A woman giving birth, surrounded by animals."

Somehow, in his self-constructed isolation in the butt-end of nowhere, Bellver's work dovetailed with a renewed interest in the book of Genesis that would shortly culminate in the multipart Bill Moyers series on PBS and the expansive Time cover story.

"There's this questioning, quandary, an angst in his work, in the mixing of real imagery in a surreal context," says UNLV art Professor Lee Sido, who has known Bellver for years.

"With Jose, there's not a lot of difference between the artist and the art. He embodies the creative soul. His intensity and introspection of life is what his work is about."

"I think the (Governor's Arts Award) is well due," says fellow UNLV instructor Tom Holder. "He's extremely versatile. In the years I've known him, he's gone through so many styles," from bright, geometric abstractions to images of underwater life to his current religious themes.

"The fact that he was educated in Madrid means he has a solid understanding of European concepts," Holder says. "It adds sort of an international character to his work."

Says Bellver, "I took something from the Americans and something from the Europeans. From the Americans it was the ability to create images that are aggressive. From the Europeans, this Old World craftsmanship."

Sido describes him as "old school." "By which I mean the work ethic. You're only as good as the last artwork you created. He doesn't ride the coattails of the past. He's always in the present."

The present, for Bellver, means zebras.

Not just any zebras, either. He's working on a commission for a certain legendary Las Vegas entertainer

This well-heeled patron saw some of Bellver's work displayed at Piero's restaurant. "He just flipped," Bellver says. On the artist's answering machine, the entertainer left funny messages, skits, imitations of Bellver's own voice.

"I think he's a comedian," Bellver told longtime friend Patrick Gaffey. "Have you ever heard of Shecky Greene?" Bellver hadn't. Totally amazing!

And, in typical Bellver fashion, this has become more than simple piecework for cash. What began as a few Zebras now includes St. Francis of Assisi, the hands of God ... He laughs, because, boy, is Mrs. Greene going to be surprised; the painting is really Shecky's gift to his wife, and she wanted zebras in part to match her furniture. And now there's all this other ... stuff going on!

"The money he spent on furniture is going down the drain," Bellver wheezes mid-chuckle. "No, I think he is going to like it."

How much do you love what you do? Enough to keep doing it in a place tinted by personal tragedy?

Bellver's wife, Debbie, died while he was building the house, and listening to him talk quietly about it, you get the sense that he carries a load of guilt for being in Pahrump on one of his multiday building sprees when it happened.

Debbie was an artist, as well, who fashioned oddly captivating assemblages. In his studio, Bellver motions toward some boxes in a corner: bits of this and that she'd collected to use in her art. He's trying to work bits of it into his own pieces as an homage to her.

"If I keep using them, it'll be like expanding on (her) dreams a little," he says.

"I really loved that woman. Everything changed." Art, life, the art life. "It's amazing, it's like I'm seeing everything, understanding everything all over again." He remembers a drive into Pahrump, when he was suddenly seized by the feeling that he didn't know where he was, things seemed that different.

Her absence showed up in his art. "This looking into animals started to materialize after I lost her," he says. "My mother told me I'm doing this thing because of my dogs, I spend so much time with them," now that he's alone.

Asked if he's religious, Bellver gives a typically dodgy answer, a twisty-turny meditation on art and religion, God and man, during which he offers a startling comparison: the artist as Lazarus. "Lazarus really feels weird about being back," he says. "I feel about making art that way. When you're making art, you're on the other side; when you come back, people look at you weird, because you're not acting normal."

Except that it really is normal. "Art is one of the basic constituents of human nature, one of the basic instincts of man," he says. "Art is even bigger than freedom," he adds, pointing out that enslaved peoples have created enduring art. "It is much more basic."

That wouldn't be the prevailing line of thought these days, even among many art lovers. Which just means Bellver's where he's always been: outside. Outside the mainstream, outside Las Vegas -- probably sitting outside right now, lost in his contemplation of the desert as time passes unnoticed, maybe thinking yet again about the curious ride the art life can take you on once you give into it, how it can plop a kid from Spain into an improbable place like Pahrump and make him feel at home there, how it's all just totally amazing...

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