By O’Dette Havel
November 16, 1984
reprinted from El Paso Times
He’s famous for all five.
"People used to ask my mother if she knew I would be an artist," Acosta says, a partially consumed can of beer in his hand. "She’d say, ‘Yes, he’s been drawing flies since he was 3 years old’." His shoulders shake a little as he chuckles, carefully watching to see if his visitor gets the joke. He smiles broadly and then laughs. In fact, when Acosta has visitors, laughter fills his Lower Valley studio. He is always "on."
The artist has lived in El Paso since he came here as a baby ("My mother and I were bosom friends," he says) from Aldama on the outskirts of Chihuahua City. Stints in the Army and school kept him away for a while. But for most of his 63 years, Acosta has lived and worked as a painter in El Paso.
Sunday, he will be inducted into the El Paso County Historical Society Hall of Honor at a banquet, for which he’ll "borrow some shoes and wear a little suit." It may be one of the few times his friends have seen him dressed up.
In his studio, Acosta dresses casually: white printed Western-style shirt, corduroy pants, nondescript shoes, a paint-spattered butcher’s apron tucked into his belt and the omnipresent paper bag hat.
"I’m very neat," he says. "I never get paint on the floor or all over."
Though the once-white apron is covered with paint, the parquet floor, just as Acosta says, is immaculate.
"When I was building this studio, I knew I had to have a parquet floor for dancing. Mexicans love to dance."
And dance he and his friends do – on the smallest excuse. Which is why his parties have become legends.
Bill Kwiencinski is only one of hundreds of guests to whom Acosta has played host.
"Manny goes to great lengths to put on good parties," he says. "We had one planned in conjunction with his opening at the Americana (Museum, where Kwiencinski is curator). He scheduled a poetry reading, mariachis and flamenco dancers. Then, we went to his studio and there was more entertainment – all night. All types of dancing, music – it was just great.
"And tremendous food. He really likes to celebrate."
A tour of the Acosta’s studio/home starts in the spacious living room with unpainted plaster walls.
"People keep trying to donate paint, but I like it this way," he says. The walls, he playfully estimates, contain 10,00 nail holes from hanging paintings during shows.
The rails of the balcony are each colorful horizontal stripes that were patiently painted by Acosta’s friends.
"I gave them the paint and they painted away."
A grand piano, its lid raised to its full height, looms next to a monstrous bookcase – each shelf stuffed with book of every type – psychology, astrology, art.
A tour continues through a second workroom with curtains that control light for sculpting. And then, after a left turn, the piece de resistance, the "party kitchen." Not just the kitchen, but the party kitchen.
It is clearly a room designed for the serious host. Cabinets are packed with many of everything: nearly two dozen Mexican pottery menudo bowls are stored next to an immense stack of blue and white plates. A neighboring cabinet houses a collection of etched wine glasses, beer mugs (a stein a friend brought from Germany was too tall and therefore sits atop the refrigerator) and "everyday glasses." A broom closet serves as a liquor warehouse. On a table outside the kitchen’s entrance are army-sized, industrial-strength pots and pans.
A dedicated chef and entertainer, Acosta is equally serious about his painting.
"As far back as I can remember, I always scratched and doodled," he says. "But I wasn’t encouraged, and the schools had few art supplies, you know?"
So plain pencil sketches and makeup and set designs for the community theater group in which he and his father were active became his creative outlets.
He brings out pictures of scenes from plays, many of which he not only designed but also painted as well. Thumbing through the stack, he laughs as he recalls some of his theater experiences with the El Paso Players.
"They wanted me to do walk-on parts, but I have such an enchilada accent I could only play a dumb cop. But I raised a curtain on many a production," he says.
"Then, when I directed the Passion Play, all the women always wanted to play the Virgin, and then you should have heard what the other women would say about the one who’d been cast." He laughs. "There was more passion behind stage than on stage."
Acosta did not decide to be an artist until he saw paintings during World War II. During the years he was in Europe, he says he took every opportunity to visit museums and see original art.
"I remember my first huge canvas of an earl or someone in France, at the Louvre. I had known about all these things from books, but they looked tiny."
Goya portraits of the Spanish nobility especially impressed him.
"Remember how some of the other artists would paint people so they would be all beautiful? Well, Goya would show the way they really looked."
He crosses his eyes and his tongue sticks out of the corner of his mouth.
"Some of them were really something."
After the war, he returned to the United States and studied art at the Texas College of Mines, the University of Texas at El Paso, University of California at Santa Barbara and Chenouard in Los Angeles. At the Texas College of Mines, he studied sculpture and drawing with Urbici Soler, who sculpted the monument on Mount Cristo Rey. It was through Soler that he met Peter Hurd, one of the Southwest’s most famous artists and one of Acosta’s close friends until Hurd’s death earlier this year.
Throughout Acosta’s career, he has painted the things he loves – family, friends, bullfighters. His style is realistic – he works with calipers to get proportions perfect – and his paintings capture the spirit of the person portrayed. Recently, he has experimented with a more fanciful painting style and new subjects. He pulls some examples from a storage room: a still life with chilies and fruit baskets, a Mexican ceramic tree of life with Eve lustily eyeing Adam and an Indian headdress resting on a tumbleweed.
Opera or other classical music at full volume fills the studio when he paints still life. But when working with models, their banter is music enough.
"I keep them alive with comments like, ‘Oh, you have purple in your ear’ or ‘Your skin is green," he says with a grin.
John Meigs, a New Mexico art collector, artist and author, met Acosta through Hurd some 30 years ago when they worked together on murals Texas Tech University.
"The most important thing about Manny is he’s perhaps the most sensitive and human person that I’ve met in a long lifetime," Meigs says.
"He is full of the good things of life, and his problems in career and surroundings have never defeated him. My only regret is that it has taken so long for him to become recognized for the complete artist that he is."
Bill Rakocy, curator of collections at the El Paso Museum of Art, met Acosta in 1969.
"I was immediately taken by Manny’s intensity, his unusual, personable quality that is a mixture of humor, friendliness and talent," Rakocy said. "It’s very unusual to find that mixture in people. I don’t know a person who works harder at his art."
Acosta sits in his studio, bathed in the natural light he so loves for painting. Taking a short break, he studies his model, now relaxing, across the room. The artist’s peppy banter and the model’s shy replies are gone within a few minutes.
He toys with a mahlstick, a broken violin bow he uses to brace his hand when painting on top of a wet canvas surface.
"When I see a face, I see it as a painting," he says.