He destroyed his art and began a 20-year journey of solitude and
soul-searching. But now Beto de la Rocha wants to create again.

BY MICHAEL QUINTANILLA, TIMES STAFF WRITER

Not long after his involvement in a landmark exhibition of Chicano
art, Rocha (as he prefers to be known) destroyed every one of his
paintings and spent years seeking solitude and answers in a
darkened house and a dog-eared Bible.

But on a recent Sunday at Arroyo Books, those who have gathered to
view an exhibition he helped curate--historical photographs
chronicling Los Angeles' early Mexican-American community--are
grateful for what they find: a happy, smiling, public Rocha. A
Rocha who has resumed his art.

"I'm not going back into isolation," he tells an admirer who
greets him with a hug. "Beto's back."

Twenty years ago, Rocha defected from the Chicano art scene, broke
and disenchanted by the glamour and attention that a
record-breaking 1974 exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum
of Art had brought him and members of Los Four--artists whose work
had finally found mainstream acceptance.

Fortune, says Rocha, failed to follow the fame his work had
garnered. Impatient for success, he split from the quartet, which
included Gilbert Lujan, Frank Romero and the late Carlos
Almaraz--artists who eventually established individual careers,
some of their works later selling for more than $50,000.

He divorced his wife and gave up a job as a fine-arts instructor
at East Los Angeles Community College. He moved into his father's
Lincoln Heights home, closed the drapes, placed heavy locks on the
doors and lived in seclusion, venturing outdoors only for
groceries or to take odd jobs, mostly in carpentry.

He read the Bible all day--every day--highlighting Scriptures,
folding the corners of pages, memorizing verses. He took to heart
the commandment not to make graven images and destroyed his
artwork--considered by many, including his peers, as the best
Chicano art of its time.

He ignored all pleas from friends, mostly artists who worried
about his welfare. They heard about his 40-day fast, his body
withering away from 145 pounds to 78. Eventually, they stopped
calling, stopped dropping by.

And Rocha, who had come to regard all artists as "wicked and
decadent," had himself been labeled by friends as "the lost one."

At his home, a small one-bedroom apartment he pays for with his
monthly disability check, Rocha, 57, explains why he left.

"With the museum thing, I expected the whole world to open up to
me. (But) nothing happened," he says, recalling that time as a
young, hot artist toasted at parties and lauded for his talent. "I
didn't know how to wait for success, how to be patient. I had this
idea back then that once you began to work as an artist you could
buy your car and have food to eat and raise your family. That
doesn't happen. Very few people make any money at this
profession."

He began to question his life--and future--as an artist and his
role in el movimiento of the 1970s. "Being Chicano was new to us.
We never heard that term," he says, adding that it was a struggle
for him to deal with his own identity "and an aesthetic criteria."

So he quit painting because his soul demanded it, he says. "I had
to come to grips with who I was." He needed "a method to my life."
He turned to religion "because I wanted to be civilized. Back then
I was hateful, not kind. I was just nasty." And God, he says,
provided "the law, the rules, the commandments" that he
followed.>br>

His only son, Zack, then a young boy, unknowingly also helped his
father find answers during that turbulent time. They shared an
incident neither will ever forget.

"Zack asked me if he could have a landscape drawing of mine. He
was holding the drawing in front of me: 'Daddy, can I have that?'
I said, 'Hey, that's mine,' " Rocha recalls, pausing to fight back
his tears. He grips his cane

"Here was a very tender young boy asking for this thing--a piece
of flat canvas with paint, an object, a nothing--and I denied it
to my son, a human. How could I have been so possessive?" His
voice cracks with emotion. "As you can see, it is painful for me
now."

Later that night, Zack and his father ripped artwork off the
walls, pulled it out of closets, from under the bed and behind
doors. Beto plunged scissors into gorgeous landscapes, intricate
woodblock prints and abstracts--many that had hung at the county
museum--shredding everything he had ever created. Then, in a trash
can, he burned the tattered scraps, splintered frames,
paintbrushes and easels.

"That was my moment," he says. "That's when I told myself I no
longer want to be an artist."

Zack de la Rocha, now 25 and a member of the rock band Rage
Against the Machine, painfully remembers that time.

"I remember that incident having an impact on me because I was
very fond of my father's work. I loved his colors, the imagery. I
found what he did fascinating. My dad was engaged in artwork that
was political in nature, it was part of the Chicano movement, part
of history," Zack says.