MARGARETTE DAWIT: MASTER LANDSCAPE ARTIST 
By Margaret Failoni 

Art exhibit Dawit, Corral, Leventhal, Guillén Mon–(N)Sat in Sept, 10am–(N)2pm, 5–(N)8pm Galeria LeNoir Jesús 2A Centro 152-3191

Accomplished landscape artist and long-time San Miguel resident Margarette Dawit is showing several new works at Galeria LeNoir throughout the month of September, along with figure paintings by Santiago Corral and Peter Leventhal.

Her work is masterful and accomplished, so we encourage you to stop by. It is a pleasure occasionally to see really good landscape painting, as is the case with a small series of acrylics on canvas by Dawitt.

Dawit is a very gifted painter with a wide range, but the landscapes are masterworks. She is gifted particularly in depicting the desert-like vegetation prevalent in central Mexico. Perhaps her sensitivity comes from her South African childhood surrounded by desert, or acquired during the more than 20 years she has lived in San Miguel.

Apart from her stature as one of the pivotal figures in the San Miguel art scene, Dawit has captured the heart of serious collectors with her distinct style, whether landscapes, figures or her beloved horses. Exact naturalistic representation is the goal of Dawit’s ambitious painting. What she usually achieves is a dramatic, brilliantly yet subtlety colored and sometimes idealized view of a very picturesque setting at a time of day when the light effects are most memorable. The cacti prevalent in these landscapes intrigue the artist: they allow her to observe and treat specialized problems of light and atmosphere. Above all, it is as a technician that the artist cannot fail to engender the admiration of artists, for in the very mature works she achieves a distinctive and remarkable quality of light. This is accomplished through the careful blending and application of gentle, smooth and free brush strokes of color as opposed to thick encrustations. Often stone, leaves, etc., are defined not only by painting da

rker lines about them, but by allowing canvas around a passage of pigment to delineate contours. Thus, even when her color palette is of a limited range (not often), Dawit achieves a quality of light, usually of sunset or very early daylight, which has an uncanny verisimilitude.

A gifted teacher to many successful artists (young and old), we regret Dawit has given up teaching to dedicate her time to painting. 

Landscape painting in Western art

Chinese artists painted landscapes with brush and ink on silk as early as A.D. 400, but in Western art prior to the Middle Ages, landscapes appeared primarily as simple backgrounds to figures. In medieval manuscripts, landscape extensions of religious and secular images developed very rapidly, until by the early fifteenth century, nothing stood in the way of full-fledged landscape art except perhaps custom and patronage. A few watercolor studies by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) are generally considered the first Western examples of landscape art.

Throughout the Renaissance, artists treated landscape as incidental background (the Sienese school excepted). Rome had become the world center of art by the seventeenth century and its several colonies of painters included many from Northern Europe, which included the Germans, Adam Elsheimer and the Fleming, Paul Bril, who strongly influenced the growing popularity of landscape art. Elsheimer passed along this interest to Carracci and through him to the Guercino, both of them figure painters from Bologna who also worked in Rome. 

One of Bril’s pupils, Agostino Tassi, taught Claude Lorraine (1600-82). With Claude, a Frenchman whose entire career was spent in Rome, landscape achieved a definition which was hardly to be challenged until the nineteenth century.

Nicolas Poussin, the great French figure painter who also lived in Rome, met Claude’s challenge late in his life by turning to landscape. 


By the eighteenth century, landscape painting was dominated by the growing demand for views of famous places, Venice and Rome above all. Works by Canaletto (1697-1768) and Francesco Guardi (1712-93), both native Venetians, are superficially similar, but careful observation reveals the crisp draftsmanship of the former and the more painterly eye of the latter. 

In England, landscape painting had no status and it was not possible for artists to make a living by practicing it. Thomas Gainsborough (1727-88), England’s most accomplished portraitist, might very well have devoted his career to landscape, had there been any demand for it. He placed his portraits on highly developed landscapes in the midst of foliage of Britain’s great parks. He drew landscapes constantly and he left a brilliant series of oil compositions. 

Richard Wilson (1714-82), a prosperous portrait painter, visited Italy, fell in love with the work of Claude Lorraine and abandoned his former work to face starvation and experiment with a new manner of painting almost a century ahead of his time. 

Rembrandt’s The Mill and Ruben’s Chateau de Steen with Hunter, which were both shown on a loan collection in England in 1815, profoundly affected Joseph Turner (1775-1851) and John Constable (1776-1837). These two paintings and other works by Dutch and Flemish landscapists formed the base of Turner’s and Constable’s remarkable break with tradition.

Young French painters were affected; Delacroix is said to have repainted the whole landscape background of his Massacre at Chios. The most influential French landscapists of the mid-century were Corot and Gustave Courbet. Without them, it is unlikely that Monet and Cézanne could have formulated their styles.

The Impressionist landscape painters were Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley and Camille Pissarro, followed by the Post-Impressionists: Paul Gauguin, Vincent Van Gogh and Georges Seurat. Landscape painting had come into its own as a highly desirable and collectible genre. Such works as Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte, Van Gogh’s Corn Field with Cypresses and Gauguin’s Tahitian landscapes were considered art worthy of museums by the Post-Impressionist movement.

Landscape was a major achievement of nineteenth-century painting, outstripping that of previous eras, so it is not surprising that in the twentieth century it went into decline. Early in the century, however, Les Fauves carried Van Gogh’s passion and Gauguin’s color to a new conquest of nature. Matisse, Derain and Vlaminck prepared the way for such German Expressionists as Emil Nolde and Ernst Kirchner. The color improvisations of Wassily Kandinsky gradually emerged from his early landscape paintings of the Bavarian Alps.

In the interim between the world wars, the most significant landscapes were perhaps those of Paul Klee (1879-1940). Highly imaginative, they are exquisite variations on the theme of nature, rather than records of the outer world. In the forties and fifties, the Austrian landscapist Oscar Kokoschka painted an impressive series of large “portraits” of European cities. 

American artist Charles Demuth (1883-1935), adopted the form of Cubism to a fresh view of nature; he caught the very primness of Puritan America in some of his architectural compositions. Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) and John Marin (1870-1953) employed some of Cubism’s shortcuts to give a modern flavor of representation to the New England seacoast. Artists such as Fairfield Porter portrayed small-town America, while Edward Hopper brought to the forefront the alienation inherent in the large urban areas with his “cityscapes.” 

Master landscape photographers such as Ansel Adams brought back a certain interest in landscape art, if not in landscape painting. Digital technology allows new experiments in photo landscape art, as seen in galleries and art fairs throughout the world. Advanced technology has thus renewed interest in landscape art, and therefore in landscape painting, which never really disappeared but patiently sat on the back burner.





Going down to Section C
By Edward Swift

Art opening

An Evening of Music, Wine and Art Sat, Sept 1, 6–(N)9pm Section C, Fábrica la Aurora Calzada de la Aurora

Many of the galleries and shops in Section C (northeast wing) of Fábrica la Aurora will remain open on the evening of September 1 to celebrate An Evening of Music, Wine and Art. Why is it, we wonder, that most of our visitors arrive at the café and stop there without going a step further. There’s so much more.

On the patio you will find: Mary Rapp, Hilo Negro, Juan Ezcurdia, Christopher Fallon and Kelley Vandiver. Inside Section C are Andrea Flores, Pepe Cerroblanco, William Martin, Emily Severinsen, Buenas Noches, Factoría and Mariló Carral, Espacio. 

Born in Mexico City, Mariló Carral is an extradionary colorist whose large canvases of landscapes and vases of flowers can be sunny and happy and deeply brooding, drawing you into a dense forest of emotions.

Many of the visitors to her gallery prefer to see only the joy and the exuberance in the paintings, but scratch the surface and you’ll find a wild streak of rebellion and restlessness lurking beneath a deceivingly beautiful surface.

Next door to Espacio is Factoría, a gallery of six resident artists: Magdiel Pérez, David Kestenbaum, Mai Onno, and Miguel Ángel Morales all of San Miguel, and Cecilia Gutiérrez, and Américo Hernández from Léon, along with invited artists, Marisa Boullosa, Karina Alvarez and the late Lothar Kestenbaum, known as the grand sculptor of San Miguel who for many years was the holder of the Chair in Sculpture at Bellas Artes.

Just about every day, I notice something different on the Factoría walls. A recent arrival was Karina Alvarez whose paintings are composed of thousands of small graphite circles. One is entitled “24,220,” the exact number of circles the artist drew. You’re invited to count them. 

Mai Onno, born in Estonia in the chaotic era of World War II, emigrated to Canada as a teenager. An art scholarship brought her to San Miguel in 1957 where she studied at Bellas Artes and married Lothar Kestenbaum. “A bold colorist,” wrote the late Robert Somerlott, San Miguel novelist and director of PEN. The paintings of Mai Onno “explode with a spectrum from bombshells to rainbows.” She taught her son, David Kestenbaum, to draw realistically, and today he is a noted sculptor who runs a foundry in San Miguel Viejo and shows his wood and bronze sculpture at Factoría. 

Sculptor Miguel Ángel Morales, born in Monterrey, is a master in the use of cement. Some of his sculptures may first appear to be paintings, but they are actually composed of thin or thick layers of cement on or surrounded by wood, metal or glass. The sculpture has both a lightness and a solidity that testifies to the artist’s profound respect for his materials. Sr. Morales tells me that cement involves a different rhythm of working and great patience. Patience he has in abundance; when he applies a layer of cement it’s as smooth as Liberty Silk. When I apply it, it’s lumpy and bumpy and falls on the floor. Houses turn up frequently in his sculpture. One of his ambitions, in fact, is to study architecture. 

Aztec mythology and cosmology interest Magdiel Pérez. Animals, particularly dogs, are seen in many of his paintings, which resemble ancient wall paintings. He says that animals represent spirit guides who accompany us on the transition into the next world. He believes that the animals that surround him in this life are the souls that were close to him in another existence. A visionary, he paints not what he sees but what he knows from ancient histories and lifetimes.


Juan Ezcurdia also includes dogs in many of his paintings. When I asked him why, he said that he loves the shape of dogs, their legs, ears and noses particularly. He also said that dogs are our primary contact with the animal world; they are a shamanistic animal. As guides they lead us into the unknown; they point the way and keep us safe. Dogs see, hear and smell things beyond human capabilities, and therefore they add a certain poetic, mystical quality to Ezcurdia’s paintings as well. 

It’s impossible to write about all the artists in Section C of the Fábrica and it’s a shame to leave anyone out. Something to keep in mind, however, is that William Martin has recently moved his gallery from Centro into Section C. His space is grand, with walls of deep red and orange oxide on which his realistic landscapes and still lifes explode as a feast for the eyes. He, like the rest of us, is very easy to find. His grand opening will take place toward the end of September. That will surely call for another celebration on a grand scale. 

Julio Quintanilla at Casa Michoacana 
By Edgaro Kerlegand

Art opening "Los Colores del Fuego" Fri, Aug 31, 7pm. Casa Michoacana  Calzada La Aurora # 23

Painters, writers and sculptors would meet in my parents’ house when I was 15. They embraced the great freedom of forms that the universe of the Mexican painters gave us.

My personal work favors realism and classic drawing, so I have been little aware of abstract painting and nonfigurative styles. However, after my arrival in San Miguel, I was surprised by a painter, engraver and ceramist who made me remember that young artist’s rapture. Maestro Julio Quintanilla has a nimbleness of form that evokes Kandinsky or Arshille Gorky, and at the same time transports me to the dreams of the old Mexicans. 

Quintanilla was born in the Yucatan peninsula, but today is a distinguished member of an artist group in the state of Guanajuato. He is a master of ceramic glazes; textures crystallized in the kiln offer the viewer a freedom in color rarely seen elsewhere.

He is a man of complex ideas, abstract thought and overwhelming expressions. When this complicated structure of thoughts comes out in art, the softness in rhythm seduces us such that we feel obligated to touch those works like forbidden fruit.

He studied at “La Esmeralda,” the engraving and painting school in Mexico City, and represented us successfully in Cuba and the United States.

Casual viewing at the Bordello

Art reception

Steven and Noah Mendelson
Thurs, Sept 6, 4–(N)6pm
The Bordello Galeria
Casa de la Turca
Organos 19

On September 6, the Bordello Galeria will host a casual viewing of the rare Steven and Noah Mendelson father and son art show. Both artists will be present to converse and answer questions. Their work is two-dimensional, in media ranging from photo-montage to thick oil painting. A selection of new work is present within the mix. The Bordello Galeria is at Organos 19 (off Hernández Macías, north of Insurgentes).

At the August 16 opening reception, $1500 was raised to benefit Jovenes Adelante, a local charity that provides college scholarships for needy students..