Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Photograph by George Sakkestad

John Espinola shows the pastoral Italian scenes he painted at Campo di Bocce in Los Gatos.

Art comes naturally to Los Gatos muralist

By Suzy Ramirez

After "a lot of doodling" in his sophomore year of high school, Los Gatos artist John Espinola has gone on to fulfill his desire to create art in a broad range of media.

Originally from Santa Clara, Espinola moved to Los Gatos in 1973 after serving in the U.S. Navy and received his bachelor's degree in art, with a painting concentration, from San Jose State University. At the requests of friends, Espinola created signs and did other freelance work after college, eventually deciding to start his own business.

"When I started doing things in the town, it just naturally turned into a business," Espinola said. "I started meeting others in the sign business and expanding my knowledge. I still get a lot of commissions through fellow artists in Los Gatos."

As proprietor of Artworks Design Group in Los Gatos, Espinola has been creating murals, signage and stained glasswork for the past 20 years, giving everyone from private homeowners to restaurant patrons artistic creations to admire.

His commissions include signs for the Los Gatos Toll House, RMK Financial Group in San Jose, and benefit events at the Hayes Mansion in San Jose and many other private commissions of stained glasswork and murals.

Espinola's latest work adorns the lounge and bar of Campo di Bocce, Los Gatos' new bocce ball facility, restaurant and bar. The mural's Italian country scene portrays a stucco villa, oxen and an oxcart on rolling green hills, surrounded by a late-evening golden sun setting behind the Tuscany meadows.

Tom Albanese, owner of Campo di Bocce, opened the facility with fresh memories of a recent trip to Italy, and he was set on the idea of a mural in the club. A mutual friend brought Espinola and Albanese together, and they agreed on a landscape of ancestral Italy.

"I couldn't believe the conversation after I got off the phone with my friend," Espinola said.

"It was kind of like a vision that I knew I was going to work here at Campo di Bocce. I would look in the window a few months before the place was open and think about how I really wanted to paint a mural in there."

The process involved in creating murals like the one at Campo di Bocce includes first sketching out an idea on tracing paper in black and white, Espinola explained. After making a few adjustments, he draws a full-color version to scale.

Espinola used this process, along with his affinity for landscapes, to create the Campo di Bocce mural. He completed the 3- by 15-foot mural in just three weeks, drawing and painting with acrylics on masonite.

While work can sometimes be sporadic for an independent artist, Espinola has been keeping busy. The talented artist was just commissioned to create another mural at Peterson Middle School in Sunnyvale. This mural, to be painted on a school wall, features different images of children playing on the basketball courts, visiting in the quad and taking care of the nature area.

While each commission has its own unique challenges, creatively and physically, the process of rough-sketching the idea and discovering new aspects of a topic through research is where Espinola receives the most inspiration, he said.

For a long time, most of the artist's work was making signs, but lately the bulk of his work consists of murals--his favored medium. Starting with signs has opened all the other doors, he said.

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