By Neal Pollack
Some of the larger ones, Chamizo says, took him more than two years to complete. Others look like he shot them off in about two minutes. They depict many of the interests Chamizo has accumulated in his 61 years: baseball, Cuban music, Latin-American history, and the movie Casablanca, which he’s seen more than 100 times. Some are portraits of his friends and business neighbors. Quite a few feature colorful quotes he’s heard while listening to sports talk shows on the Score.
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Paintings currently on display include Sun-Times sports columnist Jay Mariotti dressed as a cowboy and drinking a Budweiser, an alien with an extended eye coming out of his chin and draped with a banner reading “Chicago Man–Year 2,000,” and Jesus Christ pointing at Moses and saying, “Moses, where are my Cuban Peoples?” with Moses responding, “They are all in Miami Beach, God.” There is also a “wild woman” emerging from a jungle setting surrounded by an entourage of male concubines, an epic sprawl about the Spanish coming to North America, a recent work paying tribute to Tito Puente and the band El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico, Geronimo holding a bloody scalp, and Zorro running through an enemy with a sword. More than a few feature some sort of alien being.
Chamizo is broad-shouldered and potbellied with sleepy-looking eyes, a drooping mustache, and an extremely casual demeanor. His family moved to Cuba from Seville when he was 12, but he remains proud of his Spanish roots; he says he’s descended from the Sevillian painter Murillo on his father’s side. When he opened his barbershop on Estes in 1990, his wife told him he should call himself “the Barber of Seville.”
Nonetheless, Chamizo continues to paint Ditka. Recent works include Ditka flipping the bird and saying, “Don’t give me any crap,” and Ditka riding a motorcycle naked.
“I’m gonna keep looking around until I find something. Till I find the pot of gold, huh? Everybody wants to be famous. What the heck. That’s the end of the movie. The bottom line. You don’t wanna work for peanuts all your life….I lost four paintings about three or four weeks ago. I was so stupid. I took six of these new paintings I made to this woman; she wanted to see them. So she bought two. And I was supposed to take four back. I put ’em on top of my van, and I forgot. About an hour later, I said, ‘Oh shit.’ All of my work, blown to pieces.” o
