Day 2

Name: Walter Arista

Profession: Street Artist

Location: Harvard Square

Question: Why are you here? What brought you here?

Answer: My originals. My watercolors.

Wandering from the underground T system into the heart of Harvard Square this evening, I immediately spotted about four or five potential subjects for today’s interview. The most inviting and available of them was a dark man on a wooden crate, someone I would have guessed to be homeless. Surrounding him were four or five paintings, the most eye-catching of them a watercolor of a fortress on a rolling green hill. I was sold.

Excitedly, I grabbed my digital recorder and asked the man for an interview.

“No, no, no,” he laughed, hiding behind his blue eyes.

I pleaded. He shook his head. I asked again. He asked me for a cigarette. I turned on my recorder and the interview began.

What I was first surprised to learn was that Walter Arista, a native Peruvian of about 60, was not a panhandler, but a dedicated artist.

“I was selling my art over there [in Peru] maybe, uh, fifteen years ago, selling sculptures. Lots of sculptures. Then I was supposed to go back there but I’m here!” he laughed. The man’s energy in contagious. “In the summer a long time ago there was advertising to paint here and I painted sculptures over here.”

If the man was a sculptor, why, then, was he selling paintings?

“Because then you have to have the shop, the tools, the metal,” he explained. “It’s easy to do watercolor. You can do it almost anywhere. It dries quickly. It costs less.”

We both took a moment to survey his work. Admitting that most of the locations he created were fictional, he also seemed to find inspiration in Peru and New Mexico, the latter of which is where he spent about 12 years of his life.

“I was living in New Mexico, but I have family here. All here. Yeah, I got brothers, sisters. They’re in towns far away, but I was married, too, and I was living with my wife. Then I get divorced. I worked for a couple of universities. Did the garbage. Fixed the lights,” he said. “My wife was a social worker. She was from Peru, too. I met her in Peru when I was fourteen years old, but I didn’t see her for twenty years. Then I met her here in Boston. [Laughs] Life is strange, no?”

Considering Arista’s vagrant lifestyle, such a brush is strange indeed. According to my new acquaintance, though, he isn’t difficult to locate at all.

“A friend of mine called me,” he explained. “I did not see him for more than twenty five years. He find me. He disappear. But after 10 years, he find me again, tell me he was in Florida. He told me, ‘Come over to Florida,’ so I went to Florida. I spend a year and a half there, selling my art.”

His daughter, a lawyer and a “good singer and dancer” in Portland, Oregon will be the cause of his next move this Spring.

“In a couple of months, I go to Oregon to see my daughter. I want to have my studio in the springtime. I want to go to work there. I start with the sculptures and pick other work. I enjoy more to work with that better because it’s painting, too, you know? I use like a paintbrush to make the shapes. Cutting with torch, like a tattoo. And then I use blades in different places. And then I make the sky, the mountains, the mesas….”

His voice and attention clearly trailing off, I took the opportunity to shake the man’s hand and conclude the interview.

“It was a pleasure meeting you,” he said between a wide grin.