Barry Capece flips a switch. A disco ball starts to spin, shooting specks of light that skip across the faces of John Wayne, Bruce Lee, an Indian in a headdress, a unicorn, a group of dogs playing pool and about 30 other black velvet paintings that decorate the walls. And that's not counting the 6-foot Elvis with the Hawaiian lei.
"This is the Las Vegas, hunka-hunka-burnin'-love room," says the owner of the Velvet Elvis nightclub on Houston's west side.The paintings' kitschy allure has proved to be irresistible to some bar patrons, so Bruce Lee and his black velvet pals are now bolted to the wall.
Black velvet is the Spam of the art world. Beloved by a segment of the population, it's paraded as the paragon of bad taste by another. It's so offensive to highfalutin' aesthetic sensibilities that it's appealing. So bad, it's cool. It's become raw material for the Age of Irony.
A rainbow arches over slabs of factories in an industrial section of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. Somewhere under this gaudy-hued arch, artists toil in a studio heady with the fumes of oil paints - the studio of Ernesto Sanchez.
If there's a velvet painting hanging above a bar or a living room sofa in Texas or Toronto or Sydney, Australia, there's a good chance it came from this city across the border from El Paso, Texas. Painting on velvet is a cottage industry here. Throughout this poor, sprawling city, artists work in homes that have been changed into mini-factories. Living rooms become studios; bedrooms, velvet storage rooms; and courtyards, velvet-on-stretcher assembly plants.
Most people who ask for an "Ortiz" or speak of the expertise of "Sanchez" don't know that the successful artists no longer concern themselves with the tedious painting process. Like Renaissance stars in Florence, circa 1502, they employ a stable of artists who paint in their styles. They sign the paintings and the paychecks.
To find Sanchez's studio, you go through a home's indoor hallway and out into a courtyard, where a teenager staples velvet to wooden stretchers. Then it's up an outdoor stairway and through another door. The studio is crammed with stacks of painted velvets, buckets of thick paint and a half-dozen jean-clad painters.
Sanchez's son, Ernesto, flips through a photo album with 247 pictures, the studio's repertoire. Customers order by number.
In a warehouse in El Paso, 60,000 black velvet paintings are stacked in piles 10 feet high.
Mike Burton, vice president of the export company Chico Arts, flips through some paintings as if they were records in a record store. "Here's a ship," he says, surprised. "We don't do too many of those anymore."
Seascapes are out. Southwestern scenes are in. German shepherds? Out. Rottweilers? In. Bullfighters are old hat. Kenny Rogers is hot stuff.
"Velvet is not easy to paint on at all, as a lot of people found out," says Dan Fergus, whose gallery at Brasil cafe in Houston hosted a showing of black velvet paintings earlier this year. Visitors to "The Velvet Show" bought about half of the 40 paintings, a pretty good percentage for his gallery.
Fergus thinks black velvet is a fitting art form for his funky poet-hangout cafe. "I like putting it up as a counterpoint to contemporary art."
Velvet painting wasn't always the harbinger of bad tastes.
"In the pre-Victorian era, painting on velvet was considered `the flower of all things desirable in the education of young ladyhood,"' writes Jennifer Heath in "Black Velvet, the Art We Love to Hate" (Pomegranate Artbooks, $17.95).
In her book, Heath explained some of the attraction for black velvet artwork: "Whatever the subject, its emotional and theatrical levels are intensified with tortured radiance. But playfulness inevitably shines through even in the most solemn pictures."
On the phone, Heath now admits: "I don't actually care if I see another one as long as I live . . . but I grew very fond of them for a while there."