Arts Alive San Antonio

By JASMINA WELLINGHOFF, Editor

Traditional artists painted landscapes, still-lives, religious themes and portraits of mythological and real heroes.  San Antonio contemporary painter, Mary Helwick paints heroes, too, but her heroes are working men who work in essential but risky jobs like construction.

As a construction manager for the City of San Antonio, Helwick knows and interacts with these men, and a few years ago, she decided to portray them in their work environment.

“Not only do they inspire me, but they educate me as well,” she wrote in a statement. “They are the hard-working tradesmen, craftsmen, laborers, equipment operators, foremen, superintendents, etc., who physically construct our buildings, and bridges, and who maintain our utility systems.”

The project that put her into daily contact with them was the expansion of the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center, when she donned the hard hat and climbed high into the sky on scissor lifts and boom lifts to inspect the work in progress. The expansion project was finally completed in 2017. Between 2014 and 2017, Helwick painted the workers’ portraits with their enthusiastic approval.

The results of her artistic labor are currently on view at the Bihl Haus Arts Gallery in Mid-town. Appropriately named “Hard Hats: Portraits of Construction,” the exhibit features 18 portraits of construction workers, including her self-portrait, and a large painting of San Antonio’s skyline, which is the only painting for sale in the show. This is her first solo exhibit.

So how did she go about approaching these tough guys about doing their portraits”

“I did a portrait of one of them and I showed it to him on my phone, and he loved it. With the others, I asked them for permission to take photos of them as we were finishing the construction job. Most of them were flattered. They were excited. “Why do you want to do my portrait? They asked. But all the workers trusted me about how I was going to portray them in the paintings.”

Most of them had not seen their portraits before this show. Since it took a while to have this exhibition, some of them called me over the years asking, “Hey, when are you going to have that show? I want to be invited.”

Helwick eventually approached Kellen Key McIntyre who was the executive/artistic director of Bihl Haus Arts until a few months ago. Though she did not get an immediate approval, McIntyre eventually decided to include the show in the 2023 exhibit calendar.

For a budding artist like Helwick, the exhibit is a huge step forward. Though she loved art as a child, Helwick decided to pursue a formal education in construction science, earning a B.S degree from the College of Architecture at Texas A&M University and pursuing a career in that field. But art was still calling to her.

“Over the years I was missing my art,” she said. “I’ve always had that passion for art. I went to art shows and wondered whether I could do what I was seeing at those shows.”

 So, after about thirty years she decided to go back to her first love. To help get into it, she took classes at the Coppini Academy of Fine Arts, studying with muralist Armando Sanchez, whom she refers to as “my mentor.” More recently she also took classes from the popular teacher, Juanita Garza, who looked at Helwick’s class work one day and declared: “I think you have what it takes,”

“I asked her what she meant and she said, ‘A lot of people sign up for art classes thinking it’s easy to learn to paint. I can teach them but some people just don’t have the ability and you do’.”

“When she told me that, it was a big load off my shoulder because I was wondering if I still had it,” noted Helwick. “Juanita gave me that confidence that I didn’t have. She included my first painting in this little exhibit that we had and somebody wanted to buy it.”

After so many years of working in the technically precise construction industry, Helwick is now enjoying expressing her creative side that has been dormant since childhood.

“Many people have urged me to take the show to other cities,” she said. So now she has her eye on Houston and Dallas, perhaps via Fredericksburg and Kerrville.
——————————————————————————————————————–
“Hard Hats: Portraits of Construction” will be on view through June 3; Fridays-Saturdays 1 p.m. to 4 p.m.; Bihl Haus Arts, 2803 Fredericksburg RD., 78201; 210-383-9723; www.bihlhausarts.org