Divine intervention: with talent and not a little faith, artist Manuel Nunez has found a way to blend the spiritual and the corporeal in his allegorical artwork

Art Business News, March, 2004 by Jenny Sherman

My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.

For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;

The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land;

The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.

These lines, lush with romantic imagery, could appear in any volume of poetry. They are, in fact, a selection from the Bible's Song of Solomon. The songs are heady, their sensual phrases steeped with the smells of cinnamon and myrrh, while honeyed tongues and scarlet lips put forth comely speech. Though thousands of years old, the verses still make one's pulse race.

But that's not why artist Manuel Nunez selected them to complement his piece, "Arise My Love." To him, the words represented God's love of the Church, and his painting is an allegory.

All of Nunez's work tries to convey a religious lesson. Each painting depicts beautiful, ethereal women draped in gauzy robes. Rather than seducing with their feminine allure, however, the painting's subjects are intended to celebrate virtue, passion for the Lord and the struggle to overcome the trials of the physical world in pursuit of the rewards of the spiritual.

The metaphor in Nunez's own life is hard to miss. From his start as a fashion illustrator and through his hesitant first forays into the world of fine art, he has struggled to find a way to meld his religious beliefs with his artistic talents. It has been a difficult search at times, but one that he feels is finally yielding fruitful results.

The 47-year-old Nunez has always pursued art as a career to support himself and his family. "It was really the only choice I had," he said from his home in San Pedro, Calif. "I was always a really bad student. I'm dyslexic, so I really didn't have too many choices. Art was the only thing I could fall back on."

It wasn't the direction he wanted to head, however. His father, a talented musician who had written hundreds of songs and recorded nine Spanish-language albums during the 1950s, had never been financially successful at his vocation. "My only concept of an artist was as a starving artist" Nunez said. "I never thought of an artist as being successful."

But in high school a teacher introduced to him the concept of commercial art, and an education at The Art Center College of Design, then in Pasadena, Calif., started him in a career as a commercial artist. He created fashion illustrations for ads, as well as album covers and some movie posters. The work was lucrative, until it started drying up in the late '80s when the economy crashed.

About the same time, Nunez was finding himself drawn in a different direction. He and his wife decided that he should pursue his potential as a fine-art painter. "At that time we had three small children, so it was definitely a tightrope without a net;' he said. "We sold our house, and that was the money that we had to survive on while I developed my body of work:'

Nunez did just that for about a year. He started shopping his artwork around at various galleries, lugging the pieces out of his van, but was disappointed when gallery owners wouldn't grant him an audience.

By 1992, the Nunez family had hit rock bottom, in debt and living off of their credit cards. Nunez had decided to give up his fine-art dream and had scheduled an interview for an illustration position with Disney. An artist friend of his, however, offered Nunez one last shot. Robert Blue had convinced his publisher, Ralph Gorton, the owner of Summit Publishing in San Luis Obispo, Calif., to meet with Nunez.

"I thought, 'this is it," said Nunez. "We had dinner, and he wanted to sign me up.... He took all the work I had in my van, maybe seven pieces. My wife and I were completely ecstatic. We freaked out." By the next day, Nunez found a message on his answering machine: Almost everything had already sold, and Gorton was asking for more.

From that point on, Nunez said, his career has taken off. He now has limited editions produced by Summit Publishing, and his originals are offered by nearly 15 galleries.

He's also been able to develop his style away from its illustrative, commercial-driven roots. "Obviously, my first work was very, very influenced by fashion;' he said. "In the beginning, I couldn't be more off, as far as the way [women were] depicted. I was completely, completely off." Nunez said that he regretted doing one piece so much that he purchased the remaining prints from his publisher to pull them out of circulation.

As painful as his early efforts were to him, Nunez said, it was a learning experience. "[My style] has really evolved a lot, thank God. You can really see a clear transition, from beginning until now. It's gotten a lot more innocent, pure," he said. "Being a Christian, it's really disturbing to see where things are going as far as entertainment, advertising and the media. Everything has to have some form of sensuality. You cannot get away from it.... I have no desire to even be remotely connected to any of that.