Using a Styrofoam plate for a palette, artist José Ortiz helps an elementary student form clouds for a portrait of a pink Salinas sunset. George Cervantes, a rosy-cheeked sixth grader, watches as Ortiz helps rescue the creation that Cervantes was prepared to abandon altogether. Ortiz turns the student’s frustration into a lesson, saying Cervantes should always finish his paintings so he can learn from it and make the next canvas better.

About a dozen other students are making Salinas Valley landscape paintings using photographs as their guide. The younger students shoot rubber bands at each other while the older ones either paint intently or assist others.

The Alisal Center for the Fine Arts offers this visual art workshop along with music and dance classes to Salinas youth. The 20-year-old organization reaches a total of 200 children a week, working out of local schools.

Twice a week the visual art students cram into this small classroom at El Sausal Middle School on East Alisal Street. The classroom has three long, paint-sprinkled tables but hardly any shelves. One underutilized computer sits in the corner.

Ortiz, who is wearing a beige sweater and light brown corduroy pants, says eventually he’d like to expand the art program to include animation, short films and air brush work, but that takes space. “In order for us to expand more we need the room,” he says.

Ortiz will likely have his wish granted in the next few months because a Salinas City Council subcommittee has recommended that the Alisal Center move into the Breadbox Recreation Center on North Sanborn Road. If the City Council approves the plan, the Salinas Boxing Club will move to Closter Park and the Alisal Center will be the main occupant of the former bread warehouse.

Instead of the Alisal Center’s artwork sitting on the edge of a chalkboard at the middle school, the paintings could be prominently displayed at the recreation center. Ortiz says he’d love to add an art gallery and cafe at the Breadbox as well. “We are trying to create a space or building to have all this stuff,” he says, pointing to bottles of paint and paint thinner. Right now, Ortiz adds, the only cafe in east Salinas is the Winchell’s donut shop.

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Ortiz makes horizontal brush strokes, showing a student how to make the sunrays in her portrait look like they are bursting through the clouds. A student behind him paints lettuce onto a portrait of an assembly line of farmworkers harvesting the crop. Ortiz doesn’t criticize students’ work, opting instead to help them until they are proud of it.

“We don’t want to use the words good or bad,” Ortiz says. “There is no right or wrong, only what you like and don’t like.”

Ortiz, who was recently recognized by the Arts Council for Monterey County as their professional artist of the year, started teaching with the Alisal Center in 1992. He also founded Hijos Del Sol, a muralist movement that does stunning work around Salinas and in Chualar. Their work includes murals at the Teamster’s union hall at the corner of East Market Street and North Sanborn Road and on the side of the Monterey County WIC building at 632 E. Alisal St.

His young artists’ exposure extends beyond walls. A 2007 Safeway Hispanic cultural calendar features paintings by Alisal Center students. And every fall Ortiz and his students put on a Day of the Dead art exhibit for the Pajaro Valley Arts Gallery. This year’s exhibition will center on suicide, a theme introduced after an Alisal Center student committed suicide in November.

The workshops keep students coming back even after they graduate high school and move on to college. Juan Garcia graduated from Alisal High School two years ago yet still makes it back the art classes when he is not busy with work and college.

Garcia applies a light brush stroke of blue to the sky background of a landscape painting of the Salinas Valley. A rubber band and a red bracelet dangle from his wrist as he paints standing up. For the past three years the Heald College student has attended the art workshops taught by Ortiz.

“I like to paint,” Garcia says. “It’s better than being on the streets with all the gangs and everything.” The criminal justice student adds that the classes have taught him the principle of mutual respect.

Ortiz says some of his students have gone on to become professional artists, architects and mechanical engineers. Although many of Ortiz’s students come from poor families, he says their capacity for art matches that of affluent children.

“These kids are no different than the kids in Carmel,” he says. “We watch the same sunset.”