Everyday People features the people who make the greater Ingleside neighborhood a special part of San Francisco.
CALIGO Arts Collective founding members Roque Lopez and David Gutzwiller have found friendship through creative side hustle projects.
Lopez, a mechanical engineer, and Gutzwiller, an aerospace engineer, first met while working at a software company 16 years ago. During the pandemic, each found themself engaging drawn to creative outlets like music, woodworking and photography. before banding together to paint their first mural — a blue and gold owl — on Gutzwiller’s and his wife, Ninnia Lascani, home on Grafton Avenue, inspired by Swedish illustrator and motion designer Niklas Sundin and named “Cal the Owl.”
“I was doing some woodworking and Roque was doing artistic things and we basically made a trade,” Gutzwiller said. “I said, I'll build you a coffee table if you put a mural on the side of my house. We had so much fun with both those projects that we said, Let's just kind of formalize this and make it not necessarily a business, but just like a side thing that we do.”
The collective was formed to put a name on the work Gutzwiller and Lopez were doing. Since then, it’s transformed into an open call to artists and musicians to collaborate with the duo on murals and songs.
Gutzwiller and Lopez have since completed four other murals, including one in Colorado, inside their office space at the Trellis coworking space, of their depiction of Mother Earth, and one on Shields Street of pelicans.
Outside of work and their joint projects, Mexico City-native Lopez helps create album art for and hang out with his friends and family, particularly his wife Flavia Bossi, and works out while Cincinnati, Ohio-native Gutzwiller leads the neighborhood’s weekly weekend community clean-ups through the Civic Joy Fund or teaches Zumba and kickboxing mixed classes at the Stonestown YMCA.
The Ingleside Light caught up with the Lopes and Gutzwiller to learn about their creative work.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What inspired you to pursue art as your side gig?
Gutzwiller: Honestly, I feel our entire friendship has been based on dabbling in each other's hobbies in many ways because Roque has always been a cartoonist. I've always been into various music, and I'm a big metal fan. I've dragged Roque to all kinds of metal shows, and he's helped me with woodworking projects, and then we got into photography for a while together. We were into bird watching for a while, so I think really it's just we kind of enjoy hanging out in the framework of some kind of artistic hobby.
Lopez: I've always been art curious. For example, my dream job would have been working as an animator at Pixar, but being in Mexico, growing up there were limitations. I just ended up with the closest thing I could find, which was engineering. I have always loved drawing and sketching, but it was always kind of like a me thing, until I started, like David said, overlapping in hobbies with him.
David Gutzwiller and Roque Lopez are both engineers by trade. | Anne Marie Kristoff/Ingleside Light
How does your process for a mural or project take shape?
Gutzwiller: So, it's iterative. The way we've done it so far, now granted it's a relatively small sample size, is we'll be in touch with someone. So far, it's been pretty poorly defined. It's like, here's a wall. Do something with it. With one of them it was pelicans, that was basically the extent of the instructions and then we just iterate with the people, so with the pelican, for example, the actual design there started off with the pelican idea and then we had all the different ideas of like OK actually the the weird lines that mimic the ocean that actually came from a sticker I saw in a Zeitgeist bathroom of the Mellow Yellow logo and so it's very iterative. Roque is the talent here. One of his secret powers is that he can take extremely vague instructions and come up with something really awesome.
Lopez: I suck at creating anything from scratch, but I'm a little bit like, I guess, ChatGPT, very original. I get a prompt and then I start explaining the rules. The other part of the process which is laborious, but that's what we really enjoy a lot. One weekend day, we pulled anything like 12 hours from the sun up to sundown just painting. Those 12 hours are hard work because it's really climbing up the ladder or the scaffolding, mounting everything up, and dismounting everything at the end of the day. It's a lot of work, but you know that's the part that actually goes like butter.
Gutzwiller: We're essentially hanging out the whole time because we just like to shoot the shit, listen to music.
What’s one piece of advice you have for those who want to get into mural making or take up art as a hobby?
Gutzwiller: Just do it. It's just paint. You can always paint over it.
Lopez: And all of our best projects have always been something that we just started doing. If you stop thinking about the limitations or the risk because these are things that you haven't done or whatever, I would say just put a positive spin on it, right? If we mess up a mural, what's the worst that can happen? You just paint over it, and then it's a wall again, right? No harm done. You always try to find that that will help you unblock yourself.
Anne Marie Kristoff (she/her) is a recent graduate from San Francisco State University's journalism program. She enjoys writing about the arts, entertainment and nature.
