Officially Selected for the Festival Season
October 2024
Jesse Trevino: The Artist. The Man.
Director:
Randy Beamer
Producer:
Randy Beamer
Writer:
Randy Beamer
Selected for the following category(s)
An amazing, true story of a legendary San Antonio artist, who lost hist painting and drawing hand in combat in Vietnam, but at the urging of a fellow amputee, taught himself to paint with his left hand. Then, despite constant pain, undiagnosed PTSD, and many personal problems, he pushed himself to become San Antonio’s best-known and most-beloved artist, with works in the Smithsonian and huge tile murals that are now city landmarks, one of them nine stories tall on a downtown hospital overlooking a historic park. He also overcame poverty and discrimination, born into a family of 12 children in Mexico, then raised on San Antonio’s poor West Side. But after winning an art contest in grade school at a local museum, the child prodigy set his sights on getting his work in museums permanently and won a scholarship to the prestigious Art Students League of New York.
Drafted a few months later, he could have avoided military service because he was born in Mexico. But like others in his big family, he chose to serve his adopted country. But he was ambushed three months into his tour of duty, a booby trap and a sniper’s bullet nearly killed him, shattering his right leg and severing nerves to his right hand, which would lead to amputation. Years later, after four wives, five children, and constant battles with those he loved the most, he beat stage four throat cancer, and as he was finally feeling up to new challenges and more murals, another cancerous tumor in his face led to a very risky surgery.