When his sons climbed Mount Denali in Alaska and came back with tales of their harrowing adventure, Raoul De la Sota returned to his artist's studio inspired.

The Highland Park man thumbed through books on Inuit beliefs and then picked up his brush to paint a magical landscape that now hangs in the bedroom of the 1911 Craftsman-style home.

"The Inuit people believed that the Pleiades that we see in our skies is actually the polar bear followed by seven wolves, and that the snow they kick up becomes the Milky Way," De la Sota says, explaining each of the faint hieroglyphics seen throughout the painting. "The aurora borealis is really the ancestors coming down to visit ... and they believed the first humans came from caribou.

"I just have so much fun trying to figure out how to visualize these things that I read about."

Creation stories, poetry, history and his Mexican heritage coalesce in the spiritual works of De la Sota, a tall, distinguished-looking man who will open his home and studio Sunday to showcase his art as part of the Arroyo Arts Collective's The Recovery Discovery Tour: An Economic Stimulus Plan.

The self-guided driving tour, in its 17th year, engages visitors in a broad range of art being produced by the 108 artists featured in 53 locations around Highland Park, Eagle Rock and Mount Washington.

From ceramics to fiber arts, photography to graffiti, print-making to collage, the idea, says Laurie Arroyo, co-president of the Arroyo Arts Collective, is to demystify the experience of viewing art.

"Mystery makes people shy away and feel like they're inadequate when it comes to art," she says. "With this tour, we're giving people an insight into what it takes to make art by taking the mystery out of it."

For De la Sota, discussing his art comes naturally as he leads the way through the house he shares with his wife, Leticia.

The 73-year-old teaches Mexican art history every other semester at Los Angeles City College and regularly leads art and cultural tours to Spanish-speaking countries. His house is filled with souvenirs from these and other trips, including religious iconography — crosses, the holy trinity, a sacred heart of Jesus, saints — from Mexico, Colombia and Peru that he displays around the mantle alongside pieces from New Mexico, Texas and California.

As De la Sota puts it, his collection represents the way people interpret faith through images and icons.

"In Italy, you see this medieval quality and then when you get to Mexico it's more of a symbolic representation of the last days of the cross with ladders, scale, rooster and all of this kind of stuff," he says. "But I like to think of this also as a collection of portraits of me and Leticia. I'm always the one with the horns."

In addition to growing his folk art collection, his travels inspire new works, such as a fabric collage of Machu Picchu created for a woman who joined his group on a recent trip to Peru.

It sits on a table in his studio with other fabric collages, stacks of canvases destined for an art show at the Palos Verdes Art Center in Rancho Palos Verdes, and a landscape painting he's been working on for the past year. In it, a raven flies across a starry night sky.

"This is a painting done from the poetry of an ancient Aztec ruler who was known as the great-poet king Nezahualcoyotl," De la Sota says. "He had a saying that went, `The obscurity of the night serves to reveal the brilliance of the stars,' and I just think that's so lovely."

De la Sota's work is on display at the Art Center through Jan. 10 in the exhibit "Surf and Turf." His pieces also are part of the exhibit "Hands Across Aztlan," at the dA Center for the Arts in Pomona through Nov. 28.

The artist draws a great deal of inspiration from his heritage. His maternal grandmother followed her Irish-Mexican husband to the United States in 1917 by hitching a ride on a train with her two young children, one of whom would grow up to be the actor Anthony Quinn.

On a corrugated tin that hangs above the door to De la Sota's rooftop terrace, his family's history is told through a series of images, from Christopher Columbus to the Spanish conquest of Mexico to his grandmother settling in Los Angeles.

"That's me," he says.

De la Sota studied art at UCLA, but he says his training really began when he started investigating his cultural past and identity. As a result, his work has been called spiritual because it often draws from legend and seeks to connect the earth and sky.

Constellations especially figure prominently in the work of the artist, who has been living and working from this light-filled house atop a steep hill since 1977.

Except for the backyard deck and renovated kitchen, with its hand-painted Mexican tile countertops and lower cabinet doors where once there were only curtains, the house is just as it was in the early part of the 20th century.

It is all leaded glass, wood and plaster.

Over the years, De la Sota has carved out a small wildlife corridor of sorts in the backyard where possums, raccoons, coyotes and birds of every local variety frequent.

Footpaths cut through the yard with its pine trees, bougainvillea and cactus, which is another prominent element in his art.

"Mexico City is based on the legend that when the people arrived and saw an eagle sitting on a cactus that they knew they had arrived home," De la Sota says, referring to the Aztec capital city of Tenochtitlan, meaning the place of the nopal cactus. "So, historically, it's always been part of the founding of Mexico.

"So, all of those things I use," he says, leading the way to one in a series of four paintings signifying the journey of the soul to the underworld.

A raging river infested with demons cuts through the center of the canvas. On the shore, nopal cactus representing human souls wait to cross. Each one is accompanied by a brown guide dog, which De la Sota says some people believe leads souls to the underworld.

But the river crossing is just one of many trials and tribulations envisioned by the artist. On the other side of the river awaits icy plains.

"This is what really interests me about visualizing what I only read about," he says. "I've never seen any pictures, obviously. Photos don't come out too well in the underworld."

The Recovery Discovery Tour: An Economic Stimulus Plan

What: A self-guided driving tour of artists' homes and studios in the neighborhoods of Highland Park, Eagle Rock and Mount Washington, presented by the Arroyo Arts Collective.
When: 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday.
Tickets: $10 in advance, available at www.arroyoartscollective.org and Galco's Old World Grocery, 5702 York Blvd., Highland Park; $15 on the day of the tour, available at the Charles Lummis house, 200 E. Avenue 43, Highland Park.
Information: www.arroyoartscollective.org.