A Vision from Within - Gloria de los Santos

by Steve Rumsey

When she was a little girl, Gloria de los Santos thought there were only

four careers to choose from, and she knew, she just knew, that of those

four options, art would be it for her. She drew constantly, begged her

mother to sign her up for any lessons that had to do with the arts,

excelled in art in school. She immersed herself in art so much from an

early age that she developed quite a reputation as an artist, so much so

that in seventh grade in her Catholic school one of the nuns slapped her

once when she forgot to turn in an art assignment. Of all people, the

nun scolded her, she expected Gloria to turn in that assignment.

"It was a good slap," Gloria explained, for it validated what she

already knew about herself: that she was, indeed, an artist heart and soul.

She loaded up on arts classes though high school and her early college

years, then got accepted into the prestigious School of the Art

Institute of Chicago. Though one of the top arts schools in the nation,

the loosely structured curriculum that was in vogue during the late 70’s

didn’t work well for her, so she transferred to the University of

Illinois at Chicago’s school of art and architecture. There she thrived

under the direction of some terrific teachers, ending up as a graphic

designer with a passion for photography.

She followed her first husband to Bermuda, where she worked her graphic

design skills in ad agencies and on newspapers, but then had a severe

car accident in 1985 about the time her marriage was breaking up. That

accident changed the direction of her artwork in many ways, for when she

saw the x-rays that the hospital took of her, she envisioned a whole new

art medium. While her doctors saw in the x-ray only broken and bruised

body parts, she saw a metaphor for the artistic theme that gripped her

then and now: a view of what’s within. As she said of the view that we

see on the surface of things, "The exterior has been done already."

To Gloria, x-rays are just big negatives which she can print in a

darkroom on photographic paper and then paint with oils. The tradition

of hand-tinting photographs goes back over a century, but Gloria’s

technique takes that to a whole new level, fused as it is with the black

and white imagery from the original x-ray.

By 1987, she was back in Chicago and got a big break when she was juried

in to a happening gallery called Artemisia. Since then, she has

continued to explore the blend of photography and oil painting,

experimenting with infrared film as well.

While continuing to develop her own work, Gloria went to Hollywood,

working as a compositor on such films as "Titanic," Hollow Man," "The

Mists of Avalon," and "Inspector Gadget." She explained that compositors

are the digital artists who paint the layers on top of the frames that

the camera shoots. On the film "Titanic," for instance, she was a

"breath adder." The film was shot in the Bermudas, but the action was

supposed to be in the frigid North Atlantic, of course, where you can

see your breath due to the frosty temperatures. This meant that the

vapor puffs of each actors’ breath had to be individually painted in to

each frame of the film. Compositors worked at least 50 hours a week,

week after week, to make all the changes in the film by deadline, yet

her longest sequence in that film was maybe three seconds because the

frames run through the projector at a quick 50 frames per second. She

joked about the "floor sleepers," some of her co-workers, the "young

turks," just out of college who would work 18 hour days and sleep on the

floor, rarely venturing out or going home for the night. The long hours

make this a burn-out job, especially for someone with a family, so

Gloria was glad to leave the industry for Kettle Falls where she and her

husband now run a bed and breakfast called River Bend Lodge on the

Kettle River and where Gloria continues her work as an artist.

"I still question why I’m into this ‘inner’ stuff," Gloria muses, but

her probing of things beyond ordinary vision continues.

A good example of her vision is "The Conversion of St. Paul," shown

here. Gloria is very moved by the story of St. Paul, struck blind while

on the road to Damascus. So many people, she said, "crush their own

inner light," hiding their true being from the world and also from

themselves behind layer upon layer of mask. The painting depicts that as

bright light from within piercing the dark face of St. Paul through mere

slits of eyes and lips. The story of St. Paul is a powerful one for her,

because she believes that we all experience such watershed events in our

lives. We carry around with us the things we’ve learned in our formative

years from our parents and teachers, some of which are dead wrong. Then

we experience a "self-revelation" which changes our entire view of

ourselves and our lives. This knowledge makes us realize why we do the

things we do, and confirms that we have more control over our lives than

we realize, that we are "not a victim of fate or destiny."

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "What lies behind us and what lies before us

are small matters compared to what lies within us." This is Gloria’s

mantra and the foundation of her artistic vision.