2008 Tepeyac's Fundraising

So I got copies o this invitation I made for the Asociacion Tepeyac de New York, This annual fundraising event held a the Tavern on The Green in Central Park In October 2008. The purpose of this event was to get founds for the many programs of Asociacion Tepeyac, some recognized people at the event were The Ambassador of Mexico to The United States Arturo Sarukhan and the columnist at the New York Times Albor Ruiz.

Pantomime horse

Pantomime horse is the name of the song in a video where the Danish top model Eva Padberg is in. The video is almost monochromatic with shades of yellow and blue. There is an influence from the early cartoon works. The music in the background sounds quite experimental and repetitive. The characters fly over a moon/plantet.  I already feel like riding one of those hands! There is a really cool moment in the end when the figures levitate to form the planet back. Eva has an amazing web site, one of the bests I have seen! You have to Google her to see it.

A Painter of the people

Hermenegildo Bustos
Last year in a trip to Guanajuato I bumped into an event at the Alhondiga de Granaditas with paintings by Hermenegildo Bustos. There were about 20 pieces, mostly portraits. I was surprised when I saw that some of the people painted in those portraits had the same last names (Castillo - Barajas) as my great grandmother's family. Later this year I knew from my grandmother that we have had relatives in Bustos's native town since the last century.

Hermenegildo Bustos was a Mexican painter born on april 13th in 1832 in Purísima del Rincón, Guanajuato, a small town located about twenty miles from León, my native hometown. Along with Juan Nepomuceno Herrera, and Jose Justo Montiel, Hermenegildo Bustos is one of the most important artists of the second half of the XIX century in Guanajuato.

Always creative, Bustos would start every portrait as an exciting new proyect. Painting from nature, he inmortalized the people of his native Purisima and made them portraits with an uncanny accurate technique. The Amerindians, Mestizos and Criollos are all painted in a way that we can recognize them as the new evolving people from Mexico. He painted souls, he painted beyond what he saw. Looking at Busto's sitters is like looking at a memory lovely painted. My fantasy is that his models were courious people from a small old town in deep Mexico, And with great passion Bustos, was tring to give us an impression of who they were, challenging the passing times and probably a catholic traditionalism, of the region.

The sizes of his paintings were often small, he used oils and painted over metal, a very common method at that time in that region of Mexico (I personally have seen a really old painting of this style in my grandmothers home). His brushstroke is very loose and delicate. The backgrounds of his portraits are flat and somewhat grey, his palette is quite basic earthy and vibrant. Bustos's portraits seem traditional, but are actually modern. Bustos was an autodidact. He declared him self as an "amateur indian". There is no evidence of formal instruction in his paintings, he learned from books, and from the religious paintings he saw. He was an excentric person and besides being a painter, surprisingly he had different occupations such as iceman, quack doctor, gardener, moneylender, musician, tinsmith, building foreman, carpenter, and sculptor.

Octavio paz said: "After his death, in 1907 Bustos was almost completely forgotten. Like the rest of his nation, La Purísima was enveloped in the turmoil of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Around 1920, the country at peace once again, we Mexicans began to scrutinize our past: we were looking for clues about what we had become, not what we once were. We were looking for ourselves. Popular art seemed simultaneously to be evidence of what we were and a confirmation that the nation had survived."

A few years later critics and students of Mexican culture began to discover Bustos's life and work.

A young and yet seasoned illustrator and painter

Saturnino Herrán

Born in July 9, 1887 in the city of Aguascalientes. In 1897 he took private drawing lessons in his native city and in 1901 entered the Aguascalientes Academy of Science. He took classes with José Inés Tovilla and Severo Amador, who taught him drawing and painting. In 1903, to round off his studies, he moved to Mexico City and attended the night classes of Julio Ruelas in the San Carlos Academy. In 1904 he was a number-holding pupil in the group taught by the prize-winning Catalan painter Antonio Fabrés in the National School of Fine Arts, where his fellow pupils were Diego Rivera and Roberto Montenegro. In 1906 he attended classes given by Leandro Izaguirre and Germán Gedovius in the National School of Fine Arts. Herrán did majestic paintings of Mexican Indians, giving them heroic strenght and dignity. In 1910 participated in the exhibition commemorating the Centennial Anniversary of Mexico´s Independence. His figures have been associated with the traditions of Spanish art, particularly the work of velázquez and José de Rivera, and also the Catalan modernism. Due to Herrán´s quality as a colorist, it is not surprising that he occasionally designed stained-glass windows and was a seasoned book illustrator. The ambition to be a mural painter appeared at the end of his brief career, and in 1911 he completed large-scale paintings in the School of Arts and Crafts. He died on October 8, 1918, at the height of the aesthetic revival of Mexican art.

I think that If Herran had lived enough he would have changed the course of the mexican muralist movement. His figures are graceful and his brush strokes so fluid. His work has always influenced my conception of nationalistic figurative art.