When José Francisco Treviño was around 15 years old, his art teacher and mentor at Fulmore Middle School gave the young artist all his oil paints and old brushes. The teacher, Mr. Bozart, was leaving town for other opportunities and wanted to make sure that his student used the talent he clearly saw within him. It was a fateful gesture, one that turned Treviño firmly down the road to a career in art. Soon after, the young man produced his first painting, which he still has.

While at Travis High School, he won an award for another oil painting, and the teacher would sometimes let him teach the class. Upon his graduation from high school, though, his formal art education stopped.  With an intense desire to produce art, Treviño then learned by observation, going to galleries and studying different artists' techniques and approaches. Through trial and error, he taught himself their techniques.

The Austinite also followed the example of the masters in painting from the world he knows. Like the famous French artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Treviño began painting bar scenes, street scenes, the everyday worker in his environment. He even incorporated his personal life into his work. In one painting, the artist depicts his difficulties with alcohol, with two men situated around a table offering advice to a third, who doesn't seem to be taking it. In another, the self-portrait Uno de Los Quemados, Treviño depicts himself in the work uniform of the job he had at the time, sitting in a landscape inspired by his trips to Mexico and partially engulfed in stylized flames. Here Treviño chronicles that period of his life when he was part of a controversial Chicano art collective, Los Quemados. Made up of such prominent artists as Santa Barraza, Carmen Lomas Garza, Cesar Martinez, and Amado Peña, "the burned-out ones" referenced the artists' nonconformist, political attitude toward the established art world of the time, when it was difficult for many of them get exhibited in mainstream institutions. "I paint myself into my art a lot," explains Treviño. "And I think it is because I'm still trying to figure out myself."

Treviño's life changed profoundly in 1973; that's the year the artist met his future wife, Modesta.  "I feel my life changed into a different phase when I met my wife," says Treviño. "She showed me a lot of things I didn't know about, and my art starting reflecting that. At that period, we did a lot of traveling into Mexico and Guatemala and saw a lot of things. I started seeing things in a different way because of her experiences. Our two experiences together kind of gelled to create this new vision I had on my part." Treviño pays homage to his wife in his art -- but not always with sweetness. A large humorous painting of Modesta titled Little Miss Self-righteousness is part of the Mexic-Arte exhibit. Done in the 1970s after the two had a disagreement, it shows Modesta with exaggerated features, the mood of discontent captured clearly in her face.

In one of his self-portraits, Treviño has placed himself walking down road with the hills of Ixtapa, Mexico, in the background. He explains the painting and the enduring relationship he still has with his wife this way: "I've always felt my life as if I was on the road. And I used to do lots of roads in my paintings after I met my wife. This road represents the road of life to me. The time I am awake I'm going through a journey in life and this [little fairy-like creature] represents my wife. When I met her, she said, "This way.' And she still says that."

A technique that is a constant in Treviño's work is one he calls "reality breaking away" or "cyberspace." For it, the artist paints a gauzy and spotty membrane-like substance over a portion of a piece. The effect is like focusing your vision on something so that your peripheral vision is like spots or grains of reality. As you move away from the subject, you can't see anymore until everything disappears, reality disappears.

Treviño takes a developmental free-form approach to his art. "I have the imagery in my mind and the composition to start, but sometimes I don't have the ending" he says. "It's like we take a trip without thinking where we're going. We just want to take a trip, so we get away and take the trip and go where we feel like going. Well, I just start painting. I start with the faces, then I move away. Like I didn't really intend to have someone sitting inside a bar, but that's what came out. And sometimes I start something and I don't get finished for a long time."

After creating art for so many years, Treviño realizes that the more techniques and styles the artist learns, the more freedom he has to express his ideas in any style he feels like. "It's like a musician that knows how to play a lot of instruments," he says. "He can play classical or he can play ragtime or comical little things. I don't like to be just standard.  I can't be contained in one thing because it all interests me. It's part of my spirit, not being contained. I know we are all contained in a sense, but in my art I kind of fight it because I don't like to be put in one category. When the artist stops exploring, he becomes stagnant. He doesn't excite anymore."