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Monday, July 21, 2008

Art Community Mourns Budding Talent

By Hailey Heinz
Copyright 2008 Albuquerque Journal Journal Staff Writer
       Lawrence Vargas won his first prize for painting when he was 4 years old.
    He hadn't started kindergarten but was already two years into his painting career. "Winter in Taos," the painting that won that prize, was only the beginning of a career cut tragically short in the early hours of July 13.
    Vargas, 23, was fatally shot in a parking garage at Third and Copper as he and his friends were returning to their car after a night at a Downtown bar.
    The death of the young artist has rocked the arts community.
    Local artists say they remember him running around Old Town as a child, unconscious of the fact that he was already becoming renown for his work.
    "To lose someone so talented so young, it's a tragedy," said Fermin Hernandez, who owned an art gallery in Old Town at the time. "It's not just because of the death of a young man, but also the loss in the community of a really promising artist."
    Paintings by the younger Lawrence Vargas — the family calls him Lawrence Charles to avoid confusion with his father — have appeared nationwide on T-shirts, note cards and Christmas ornaments. His father, Lawrence Vargas Sr., or "Big Lawrence," is a well-known artist who used to own a gallery in Old Town. He now works out of his home studio and still sells his son's work as well as his own.
    But while the art community mourns the loss of a budding talent, his family grieves for a young man who loved to give, who hoped to become a firefighter, and who had worked to forge his own identity outside the art world.
    In his eulogy, his mother, Terry Vargas, told a story of when Lawrence Charles was in fifth grade and noticed that a friend in his class had old shoes with holes in them. He wanted to give his friend a pair of his Michael Jordan sneakers but didn't want his friend to know. So he had his mother take them to his teacher, who gave them to his friend, saying they were from a secret someone.
    "Even then, he knew how important it was to preserve his friend's dignity," Terry said.
    Selfless dreams
    Although the outside world knew Lawrence Charles mainly as an artist, his parents said he had been taking a break from art.
    He stepped away from art in high school and focused on sports, friends and being a teenager. His parents said he had recently talked about returning to painting but didn't get a chance before he was killed.
    When he died, Vargas was working as an animal handler at the city's Animal Welfare department.
    "He loved it there," Terry said. "They called him the Chihuahua whisperer because he could get those yappy little dogs to quiet down."
    He hoped to be a firefighter and planned to enroll in EMT classes, but Terry said he was thinking of postponing those classes because they interfered with too many of his 16-year-old brother David's sporting events.
    "He was willing to put his life on hold for his brother," Terry said, her voice cracking as she read over the eulogy she had prepared for her son.
    The family is focused more on Lawrence Charles' life than his death, reluctant to talk at length about how he died or his killer.
    But they said he was always the designated driver, making sure to get his friends home safely at the end of the night. They said they had warned their son it was a more dangerous world than the one in which they had grown up.
    "Kids used to fight with fists," Terry said.
    'He touched lives'
    Lawrence Charles and his friends were trying to get home the night he was killed.
    Instead, they wound up in the wrong place at the wrong time, his family says.
    It's not clear from police documents exactly who started the fight, but it's clear it wasn't Vargas.
    Joseph Espinoza, a convicted felon out on probation, was in a black Cadillac blocking the exit to the parking garage.
    Police say Espinoza, 29, got into a fight with one of Vargas' friends and went after them with a gun after they tried to walk away.
    Police have charged Espinoza with Vargas' death and are looking for him.
    At the time of the shooting, Espinoza was on probation for having a deadly weapon or explosive in jail, according to corrections records. He had pleaded guilty to kidnapping charges in 1997, and has been arrested on charges of criminal sexual contact, assault, and breaking and entering.
    As Lawrence Charles' family copes with their own private grief, they said they have been stunned by the outpouring of love for their son and by how many lives he touched.
    The Rosary held for him was standing-room only in one of Albuquerque's largest Catholic churches, filled with people telling stories of how he impacted their lives.
    "He's going to be missed," said Big Lawrence, who struggled with his son's decision to take a break from art but ultimately understood it. "He said he wanted to touch people's lives in other ways, and now I see that he did."