Feeling Lucky

I have been feeling the pull of Mexico, and so, in a nostalgic moment was re-reading the blog. It does become a sort of travel journal. At any rate, I noticed how much I used the word "lucky" as in "We were lucky", "Lucky us", "if we're lucky", "as luck would have it", "We got lucky"....because perhaps a lot of travel is luck, and believing in luck. All of which I thank my lucky stars for every day. :)

Cooking Class in Oaxaca

We always have a free day on the tours so people can choose something they really want to do that might not be included.  This year we arranged for several people to take a cooking class.  Here's a photo Lark took from the class. I'm not sure exactly what they're making here but  is that sauce not the most beautiful color green?

Some Places we Like to Eat in Oaxaca

Did I mention that part where we always find time to go out for an enchanting meal or two?

Because, Hello, we are in Oaxaca. And we are artists. And we must fuel ourselves to make the good art. Here's an all time fave especially for late night drink or desert - Mexico city based Los Danzantes.

A Book of Hearts

 Giving it a whirl...

 

 Trying our hand at printmaking.  

 

Heart stamps that we printed and shared and pasted into an accordion book.

Chapulines anyone

Lithograph someone was working on at the San Pablo Cultural Center.

The grasshopper - Oaxaca's totem animal!

Drawing Bunnies - El Senor Conejo

In the dining room at the Casa, sitting on top of the big yellow hutch, there is an assortment of clay rabbits, mostly of them playing musical instruments. Jane says a group from California bought way too many of them and left the overflow at the Casa.

So, because, deep down, we really are art geeks at heart, many a night during the tour, before bed, a few of us could be found sipping hot chocolate and drawing our terra cotta bunny of choice.

It was just a lovely evening ritual, drawing before bed.

And stay tuned because I think we're going to have a little show of our bunny drawings at Noisette Bakery, sometime around Easter.

Perhaps a little fundraiser for the folks at En Via.

Always time for a little Shopping

Okay, yes, it's fair to say we did do a little shopping.  Here's me in the middle with a couple of my compadres holding up our rug haul.   All the rugs were handwoven with natural dyes and we bought them right at the workshop where they were made.....The rug on the far left is all shades of indigo....be still my beating heart.  Every now and then it's fun to gather in the library of the Casa and have show and tell with what we bought that day.

Off the Beaten Path

Here we are at the lovely, old, colonial church of  Santa MariaTiltepec, built as a village church, no doubt by locals, sometimes around the late 1500's - it's exterior is elaborately carved on almost every surface 

and, if you look carefully, you'll see that it's not the same side to side, it's asymmetrical and then you'll see flowers, and vines, and serpents,  and mythical animals and the whole effect is kind of chunky and blocky as if the builders  have taken it apart piece by piece and and then reassembled it.  This is the folk art of the 16th century being built at the same time they were building magnificent cathedrals 20 miles away.

And then, if you turn away from the church and look in this direction, this is what you see!  Can we say, sort of the middle of nowhere!  But green and bucolic and peaceful and commanding quite the view.

We saw people picking avocados, herding sheep, and repairing roofs as we drove through this tiny little puebla.

 I was so excited to take the tour here because it's something special and it's off the beaten track. Many guide books don't even mention it.  And every time I have been to Tiltepec the church has been locked and not a soul in sight.  This time I was with our guide Pablo and was hoping he could find someone to let us in.  He went off on his errand and we sat and sketched. Some drew the church and some the countryside.

Then lo and behold, a mere forty five minutes or so later, along came Pablo, the caretaker, and his son, on a burro, who was holding the key to the 400 year old door.  I had one of those died and went to heaven moments when they opened the door, revealing candlelight flickering in front of all three of the 17th century altars inside this small village church.

Pablo and the caretaker, who was so kind to take time out from his busy day working his ranchito, to give us a private little tour.  You can see Jill & Victoria sketching in front of an altarpiece in  the background on the left.

Above photo is the retablo/altarpiece dedicated to the archangels. 

While we were there about five people from a nearby village came with flowers and candles and sat up in the front and said some prayers.

And here's  a super old baptismal font where you see carved legs made to represent serpents.

I saw another one kind of like this one at Cuilapan.

But I have never seen a column carved like a cactus like this one here.

This was one of the high points of the tour for me and a really special day.

Irmgard Johnson Show at Museo Textil de Oaxaca

 

The Museo Textil de Oaxaca, definitely counts as one of my top twenty favorite small museums in the world.  It has three rooms downstairs always devoted to a single show and then another smaller more artist driven show upstairs.  

 

Can we just say they, once again,  totally nailed it with another amazing show? This one was devoted to the collection and field notes of early ethnographer and  textile collector Irmgard Johnson who lived and worked in Mexico until her recent death in 2011 when she was well into her nineties.

 

The textiles were amazingly beautiful and the photos of Irmgard traveling rural Mexico 

 were really inspiring.  We're talking by horseback on  dirt roads in the 30's.   But what took this show to the next level were the unbelievably detailed hand and type written field notes, drawings, and sketches she made of textiles and people she encountered.  There's a little sample above.  She didn't believe you could accurately ascribe meaning to a piece without talking directly to the maker -   The level of devotion she had to her studies is something I have so rarely encountered. And apparently, without her notes and her collection ,huge swathes of Mexican indigenous textiles knowledge would be lost. 

 

I felt really lucky to be able to see this show and, once again, learned so much about textiles. 

The textiles are never behind glass and you are always encouraged to have a direct encounter.

And the docent on the English speaking tour at el Museo was excellent.

Can't really say enough good things about this little jewel box of a museum.

The Women of Tanivet

 

 I'm still not sure exactly why I was so deeply moved by these primitive embroidered pieces made by the women of Tanivet, a non indigenous community on the outskirts of Oaxaca.

They came over to the Casa and we got a private showing of oh probably forty or so pieces.

 

 One more amazing than the next.

We're hoping to start a donation box of fabrics and threads to send to them.

And I wish I had photos of ALL of them.

.  We all bought one and some people bought several.  The women couldn't have been happier to make some serious cash.

Here they are with their pal and cultural cheerleader Marietta Bernstorff (on the right)

  A great big Gracias to the women of Tanivet for sharing their artwork with us. 

Making Cyantoypes in Oaxaca

And then another part of another lovely day under the Oaxacan sun (and clouds and rain) we spent making cyanotypes.  Jill brought many beautiful xeroxes on clear acetae which we exposed with natural objects onto the cyanotype paper.

Really want to experiment with this more.

(Side note - September was sort of a lovely time to be in Oaxaca...it rained, quite a bit but still it was sunny most every day.  And the day we made the cyanotypes was overcast but light enough to print. Plus theres 

 thunder and lightning and big drama and the countryside was lush and green from all the rain. Even a rainbow or two.)

Art Making in Oaxaca

We spent a morning gathering plants from the garden and pressing them into plasticene and making prints.....it was a delicate process....loved it.

(photo courtesy the lovely Brooke Kyle Lambard)

Humberto Bautista's Studio

 

We were lucky enough to have the opportunity to visit with the ever talented Humberto Bautista in his humble studio at the back of an apartment complex on Porfirio Diaz

I LOVE his found object assemblages.

Always love his wall of masks.

 Plus this year we went to the upstairs studio and I was so mesmerized just looking at shelves of cigar boxes neatly labeled with their contents, and all manner of crucifixes and armadillo shells that I forgot about the camera....

It was really just lovely to spend the cocktail hour drinking mezcal and pondering Mexico and masks.

 

Staying Grounded

I made a whole album I call Floors of Oaxaca which, even if you aren't part of facebook, you ought to still be able to access it, by clicking here. 

Shopping in Oaxaca

 There is SO MUCH great folk art and  handmade artisan pieces in Oaxaca, I mean so, so many pieces, that it can be overwhelming.  One place to get your bearings is the Casa de Las Artesanias on Matamoros.  You can find them because they have the ginormous puppet in front.  We always like to stop there.  It's a collective run by the artisans and so the prices are maker direct.  It's room after room.

Here's just one small wall of a room featuring woven palm pieces which kind of blew my mind.

  And while we were there, "Would we like to meet the president of the co-op?"  Well of course we would.  " And , did we know that they could arrange tours for us to any of the artisans whose work we saw at the store?   Well no, we did not know that but we will for sure file that little detail away in our bag of tricks.

El Senor Conejo

 Above a big yellow hutch, in the dining room of the lovely Casa Colonial, where we eat breakfast each morning, and sometimes lunch and dinner too, there is a huge collection of very simply made and roughly fired terra cotta rabbits.  Jane says a tour group from California didn't have room to bring all of them home so they left about twenty or thirty of these rabbits at the Casa.  Lucky us and I'm sure there's a story there.  In the meantime, on many an evening during the tour, you could find a few of us, each with our own bunny, madly drawing these lovely creatures.

And drinking a little

 hot chocolate as well.

Drawing is such a peaceful way to end the day.

Only in Mexico

 Jill and I were lucky enough to have a morning making linoleum block prints with the help of two talented women working at San Pablo Cultural Center.  Among other things, we talked with our Mexican cohort about dialectic as a superior tool for teaching.  Not kidding, her words, not mine.  All the while we're carving our blocks.

Here's Jill, brayer in hand,  getting ready to ink up her block.  And what a beautiful print it is.

And here's something fun Jill found out on our little art outing.  She was needing to buy some newsprint for the class tour but she didn't know the word for newsprint in Spanish.  Turns out, there's a particularly Mexican expression for newsprint and they call it "papel de la revolucion" or paper from the revolucion because newsprint was so widely used to disseminate info about the goings on during the civil war of 1910-1920.

How cool is that?

Making art and learning a new word plus some history all  at the same time!

Hello Oaxaca

 We are just back a week now from our Amazing Art Adventure.  So busy during the trip, not to mention the fortuitous fact that my computer went on the blink and I had to wait a week for the new keyboard to come from Mexico City so I was not so plugged in and pleasantly so.

 

So only now am I sharing some highlights from the recent trip. And in the , "You never know what you might find in Oaxaca" category, the lovely San Pablo Cultural Center, was presenting a show all about printmaking and the book arts.  We could not have planned it any better.