Pete Escovedo – Paintings on the California Tour

Pete’s Story

Say the name “Escovedo” in Oakland, and right away there’s a chance that music starts playing in your head. It features beats that ruled before hip hop, and when it first came to Oakland it lived as well outdoors as in a club or on the road. Between today and its arrival in the 1920s and 30s, evolving from the confluence of Black and Mexican musicians, Latin Jazz gained and held prominence in its own social milieu and in the larger public sphere.

But one of its most important local figures was oddly atypical of the outward celebrity and exposure of the music and its successful makers. Peter Michael Escovedo, born in 1935, recounts in his lengthy memoir My Life in the Key of E an unbroken course starting in the private life of family, and weaving precariously in and out of the fortunes and gauntlets of the music industry – alternately propelled by his wife and children and pulling them along in tow.

Photo © 2014 Malcolm Ryder

Recognized as one of the major icons of his musical form, “Pete” constantly demurs and instead insists on appreciation for the accomplishments of his children as artists. The memoir’s tone has a blend of matter-of-fact resignation to being smaller than life with no self-pity but also serendipitous uplift with little ego. That makes it somewhat astonishing that his inner spirit – an authentic humility – did not somehow attract far more social support of his business, as it did cultural.

Photo © 2025 Malcolm Ryder

But his telling of the story does nothing less than announce the grace and redemption of hard work and a kind of genius of his self-knowledge – the engines of his music life.

This makes his own accomplishments as a recognized musician both exciting and poignant. He won major music industry awards including Grammys and for Lifetime Achievement, and he was deeply entrenched in the worlds of Carlos Santana, Lionel Ritchie and Prince, but his own deserved fame never prevented failures that were more important to him – not having a long-running club and a house permanent and large enough for holding his full family as a home.  

Despite that, he persevered and now is 90 years old. His secret?  “Grounded” is a word that easily comes to mind, with Pete being a role model. This idea plays two ways when we visit the current show of his visual art at The Grand Gallery in Oakland’s Jack London Square.

We know his music life was intensive; so looking at the collection of vibrant colored paintings and elegant line drawings, it’s hard to not ask, “when did he do all this?” 

Show and Tell 

It turns out that, in his own words, Pete turned to painting to help relieve the stress of being in the music business. What we see in the paintings is his focus on his internal life, the private one, dedicated to celebrating his love of his family members. They are portraits but are based on an iconic portrayal, one that makes them almost symbolic to us as well as emotionally essential to himself. Going from figure to figure, his style’s vocabulary finds the same virtues again and again in his subjects, making the images both distillations and celebrations of how they are meaningful – and grounding – to him.

We also learn from his memoir, as well as from friends of his family, that while his very famous daughter, percussionist Sheila E, has always been very much in his life, it was his other daughter, actress and artist Zina Escovedo, who further convinced him to pursue his painting as much as he might music. Speaking about her own work on Instagram, Zina guides us: “When you look at my art work, take a moment to feel an emotion. What do you see in the abstracts or paintings of music, would it be joy, sorrow, confusion, ...”  This reveal of her own sensibility as an artist points easily towards Pete’s footing in the emotional underpinnings of abstraction.

The current exhibit of his painting includes several venues concurrently. The Grand Gallery show in particular comprises works that are more recent and have an important difference from his earlier works. Those earlier ones were, in our usual parlance, more expressionist and seemed to be more about experimenting with a range of ways to gesturally represent emotion and ideas. And individual earlier pieces seem concerned with holding together more aspects of a moment or memory than are tackled in the now more straightforward iconic style displayed.

Viewing the Oakland exhibit's works, there is a quick association of the flatness, drawing, and color of its figurative abstraction with the well-known outcome of Picasso’s and Matisse’s exposure to African art. But while that older “Primitivism,” echoed in these new Escovedo works, is both attractive as form and also politically loaded as appropriation, we can appreciate that in three particular ways Pete's work transcends that outdated label.

In one, the maxim holds that “good artists borrow, great artists steal” ... For artists, the meaning of this is in understanding how other artists' work is valuable to cultivating their expressive capabilities, being more about making than about results.

In a second: Escovedo’s emotional authenticity links his images directly to the narratives of his personal experience. Those experiences are truths, not fictions, not mimicry of decorative symbols, and not mere visual theater about things he knows.

And third, in visual art, natural figuration is as old as pictures are; but conceptual representation, the intent of iconic images, came equally long ago. Its purpose of representing the spiritual and ideal is the common thread that Escovedo picked up for his newer work.

Noting that, the curation of the works suggests some exploration of how much abstraction is a goal or instead is a language; a destination style, or instead a way to get to the work’s completion. This is highlighted when we compare the black and white line drawings on display right below the paintings. Without color, the drawings are far more minimal than the paintings. But the drawings immediately make us thoughtful about how and why colors were chosen in the paintings, which we see largely share the line work of the drawings. But the paintings show subtle variety and possibly evolution, as well. In a couple of paintings, we can see this line drawing having subsided to being just the edge of two different colors touching each other; in that way, the contrasting colors do the “drawing” in the image, hidden in plain sight.

Another intriguing touch is in how Escovedo sometimes leaves the eyes in faces without pupils while in others the pupil appears but almost symbolically, as a triangle rather than a circle. This choice can be the difference between the figure feeling more distant, timeless, and observed, rather than the figure seeming to be an observer and more emotionally engaged in the moment – whether with the artist or with the viewer (ourselves). But undeniably, when there is a face before us, we always look at the eyes and experience whether we can look into them as well.

Portraiture always holds the option of showing someone the way they want to be seen or the way that the artist wants them to be seen. In this case, knowing how much Pete feels his own identity through his relationship with the family members, his dedication to presenting those members becomes a kind of self-portrait, too.