When he was a child, Guillermo Delgado’s mother would entertain him with stories about his grandfather, a stern, mustachioed rancher in northern Mexico. The story he remembers best concerns his grandfather’s abrupt death.
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The images of his grandfather, the pistols, and the orange Pep bottle stuck with Delgado and inspired him to create a series of nine monoprints, Pep, Pistolas y Abuelito, now on display at Mi Casa Su Casa restaurant in west Lincoln Park. The 30-year-old artist grew up in Chicago’s Little Village and spent summers in Mexico. Although he never met his grandfather, who died in the 1940s, Delgado does recall the vibrant colors and textures of Mexico. He prefers to visualize a subject before he paints it, and he thought about the story of his grandfather for two years before deciding how to present it. Separate images of his grandfather, the pistols, and the Pep bottle are each repeated three times in vibrant colors: pink, yellow, orange, blue, and green. They’re anything but morbid. Rather, they’re a celebration of his grandfather’s demise, in keeping with the spirit of Dia de los Muertos, a joyous remembrance of loved ones.
Delgado says he began seriously pursuing art in 1988, after he became a vegetarian and “started seeing things more clearly.” But it wasn’t until a few years later that he figured out the power of repeated images. He took a screen printing workshop at the Textile Arts Centre and “fell in love with the medium.”
