Wearable art at Galería Izamal
By Henry Vermillion

Art Opening Sat, Dec 1, 6–8pm Galería Izamal Mesones 80

This year Galería Izamal celebrated its fifteenth birthday in San Miguel with a big anniversary party. Those who follow the life of art galleries know that 15 years alone is plenty to celebrate. But more than surviving and prospering, the cooperative has kept its standards high. For those interested in investment, its artists’ work has appreciated in value each year. The seven painter members and its jeweler reflect a wide range of styles and tastes.

The gallery will welcome friends and newcomers to a pre-Christmas show of new and varied work with a reception for the artists December 1. The space will be completely re-hung for the occasion.

Izamal jeweler Maria Bracho is having an important showing of her work in Colonia Polanco in Mexico City for the month of December. Her space here will be filled for the month by David Nobbe, the well-known maker of fine gold and silver bracelets, rings and necklaces. Many of his motifs are drawn from pre-Hispanic art.

What makes a fine gallery? A dedication to quality, certainly. In the case of Izamal, variety has added spice to the visual pleasure.

Beautiful abstract paintings (Britt Zaist), vigorous and inventive abstract expressionism (Javier Garcia), and rich, poetic, stylized angels, unicorns, and animals (Marion Perlet) may be next to the handsome striking modern images of Steven Cary. Henry Vermillion will show a new series of wood and linocut prints. He also will show a large oil mountain landscape and other new work. Juan Ezcurdia´s work needs no introduction. His unique, whimsical, simple-but-subtle creatures in acrylic have made him, in his 10 years at Galería Izamal, possibly the painter most in demand, the most popular artist in San Miguel. His work is shown now in both the US and Canada. 

Jaime Goded is in a class by himself. He has an international reputation as a draftsman and painter, and has taught film and sociology at UNAM in Mexico City. He is a published poet. His work—sculptural, on paper, on canvas, and in projects difficult to describe, such as a recent series of beautiful handmade wood boxes, containing printed poems—is humorous, human, but sophisticated and is one of the undiscovered treasures of our growing city.

What are the newest trends in art today? During a recent month-long stay in New York City, this writer was surprised to find so much figurative painting in Chelsea, the current major gallery scene. Much of the painting was narrative as well, a no-no for 50 years in the art world. This revival was capped by a giant show at Gagosian on 21st Street, with dozens of Willem de Kooning’s last paintings. These are mostly simple, clean, pure abstracts done when the older painter suffered from Alzheimer’s, a condition which rendered him incapable of doing little else besides painting. At that, he was clearly still a master. This tradition of innovative painting, solid craftsmanship and fad-free art continues at Izamal.

Galería Izamal is located at Mesones 80, next door to Teatro Ángela Peralta. It is open seven days a week, from 11am–3pm and 4–8pm.

Building bridges
By Stephanie Murphy

Art Opening Puente Art Program Sun, Dec 2, 3–6pm La Escuela Privada San Rafael Norte

This year’s celebration will be the third annual opportunity for San Miguel residents to experience first-hand what can happen when neighbors work together to form a bridge between cultures. A very special show and sale of art created by the children of Puente (Bridge), a nonprofit neighborhood art center and school in colonia San Antonio is planned for this weekend.

Three years ago, Carey Berkus, an interior designer from Santa Barbara, moved to Privada San Raphael, a small street in colonia San Antonio, with a lively mix of Mexican and American families. The neighborhood children filled the air with the sounds of playing and laughter.

“It reminds me of my old neighborhood in New Haven, Connecticut,” says neighbor Larry Murphy, “where the life on the street was vivid, intense and colorful.”

“Every day,” Carey says, “I walked through the neighborhood wondering what I could do to bridge the gap I felt between the two cultures living side by side, but not really connecting.”

She became friendly with some of the children, and one Saturday afternoon invited a few of them to come into her street level studio to join her in “making art.” Every week more and more children would knock on Carey’s door asking “Cuando estan las classes del arte?” Before long, the studio was filled every Saturday afternoon with the sound of cumbia music, kids dancing and all of them making art with crayons, paint, scissors and craft paper.

Carey was becoming the “maestra del arte” to the neighborhood children. “She also was the maestra to those of us who observed her interacting with the community,” observes Murphy.

As the Saturday afternoon classes became more organized, the children have had the opportunity to explore puppetry, sculpture, painting, construction, music and dance. Trips to community galleries, parks and museums have opened their eyes to a larger world.

The classes are free to the children, and with 30 to 40 children attending on any given Saturday, help has come from Mexican and American volunteers as well as from visiting internationally recognized professional artists. Mothers of the students bring snacks and often help with works in progress. Neighbors and other sanmiguelenses who have seen the positive work of Puente have donated tables, benches, materials and money to the school.

Today, Puente is a presence in the community. It truly serves as a bridge between our cultures.

Stephanie Murphy has been a San Miguel resident and neighbor of Puente for three years. She is active in the San Miguel Quilt Group and is introducing some of the older neighborhood girls to the joy of sewing.

Exploring the beauty of the simplicity
By Yasuaki Yamashita

Ceramic Exposition
Yasuaki Yamashita
Fri, Dec 7, 7pm
Sala de Arte Mexicano
Bellas Artes
Hernández Macías, 75

It has been 10 years since I began making ceramics. I have done several exhibitions and my pieces have been selected to take part in the highly esteemed biennial sponsored by the Franz Mayer Museum in Mexico City.

For this exhibition, I attempted to return to the beginning of my career as a ceramist and present simpler things among a back drop of other things. To do a simple cup of tea and to give it a special place, creativity and beauty is, for the ceramist, the most difficult task. These pieces are on display beginning December 7 in the Sala de Arte Mexicano, Bellas Artes.

Oil paintings with a sense of spirit and place
By Lulu Torbet

Art Exhibition Ivan Wastchenko & Silvia Velàsquez Nov 15–Dec 6 Valerie Mejer Gallery Fábrica la Aurora

Ivan Wastchenko’s evocative oil paintings will be on exhibit at the Valerie Mejer Gallery at the Fábrica la Aurora until December 6. Belgian born, an engineer by training, his paintings reveal a deeply creative and spiritual nature. His extensive travels have taken him to Africa, South America, the Far East, Canada and Mexico. He learned the “vocabulary” of painting as he traveled, searching for the landscape, culture and ambience that resonated with his own sensibility.

This he found in the south of France. As he explains it, “Something for me has to have a soul, and something of a mystery about it. Otherwise I can’t paint.” Soul and mystery are certainly evident in his paintings, with their clearly European sensibility and sense of place.

His major subject matter is close-up views of towns and villages, places where people live. Though there are no figures in his night-lit street scenes, no one sipping coffee in the cafes, the viewer nevertheless has a keen sense of their presence, and an innate understanding of their lives. Many of his canvases look as though he had crept quietly onto the scene after everyone had gone, yet they still eloquently tell their story.

A sharp play of light and shadow characterizes Wastchenko’s paintings, as well as a sense of intimacy, or enclosure.

His paintings have a very specific and protected viewpoint, as though you were looking through a window or through a break in a dense hedge or overhanging trees through something to get a glimpse of what lies beyond. This sense is enhanced by the way that the artist distorts perspective. There are no straight lines.

Wastchenko underpaints his canvas in a color complementary to the finished painting he envisions. He then draws his subject loosely with charcoal, so that the finished scene seems to turn in on itself slightly, giving it a sensual and lived-in look.

Wastchenko, who lives in San Miguel, has also done commissioned paintings and graphic design for commercial use—such as for a prestigious violin competition and for Bandol wine. A short film of his paintings was produced for French television.

Photographer and painter Lulu Torbet had a graphic design studio in Manhattan before being lured into the writing game. She is the author or ghostwriter of over thirty books, most of them in the area of crafts, psychology and memoir.





Silvia Velásquez’s latest travels
By Ana Quiroz

Silvia Velásquez has lived and worked in San Miguel since 1991. For this show, she is exhibiting her recent work painted in Tepoztlan, Morelos from February to April of 2007. Tepoztlan is a small town surrounded by mountains, south of México City.

Silvia placed her canvas under those big rocks and painted under the mountains instead of on top of them to detonate the forms and crevices that produce their magnificence. She worked in the dry season, end of the winter and early spring which brought out the red tones from the clay instead of the tropical green common to this region.

Her landscapes blend clay tones with a clean, clear blue sky, painted with freedom and loosened with her brushstroke that years of experience had given her. Silvia represents nature with admiration for its grandness, not with nostalgia from romanticism. Her paintings have a delicate quality of line even if their brushstrokes seem hasty.

In face of the mountains, human beings are always represented below.

Silvia Velásquez, in this series, molds with a developed sense of color and a loose stroke, a new and complete vision from the sacred mountains.

Mary and Christ icons on display for December
By Karen Karabasz

Art Exhibit Maryjane Miller’s icons Generator Gallery Fábrica la Aurora Calzada de la Aurora

Maryjane Miller’s icons of Mary and Christ at the Generator Gallery are exquisitely rendered in luminous colors. Her new body of work, The Mary Collection, presents a series of 16 paintings executed in classic egg tempera and gold leaf. Some of the pieces are further embellished with hand-hammered pewter by Valentin Gomez, her husband.

Miller worked on this collection for the past 18 months and has “learned a lot about the connection and complexity of motherhood.” Prior to that, she had been painting icons for 10 years and taught icon painting in both Mexico and the United States.

The traditional icon imagery, handed down as symbolic language, is a reflection of an eternal archetype, in this case, that of mother and child, which speaks of a relationship that is by nature common yet infinitely mysterious. The Orthodox Church and its long history of iconography have made the Mary icons into language of theology that teaches about love and the quiet surrender that accompanies it. Miller’s icons give credence to the Orthodox beliefs as well as depict the myriad aspects of motherhood and the profound union between mothers and children. Her own style of tempera painting is rendered in lush layers of brilliant colors that create visual as well as spiritual depth. Her paintings are large, vertical in format, with arresting frontal imagery that communicates directly with the viewer.

In Mary of Tenderness, the mother sits on a chair and the Christ child is pressing His cheek affectionately against hers. Mary, according to Miller, is “the manifestation of a love which creates and surrenders its creation.”

In Christ and the Universal Mother, however, the mood changes from one of closeness and sharing to detachment and knowledge of the change her Son will bring to the world. As Miller puts it, “Mary and Christ are two parts of a whole; they teach us about relationships and what it is to be fully human.”

The Mary Collection will be on display until the end of December. It is brilliant, compelling and not to be missed.

Karen Karabasz is a full-time contemporary iconographer who resides in San Miguel.

Traveling impressions with Patricia de la Parra
By Melanie Harris de Maycotte

Art Opening Patricia de la Parra Sat, Dec 1, 6–8pm Galeria/Atelier Fábrica la Aurora

Our world is one of complexity and rich diversity that encourages us all to dream. Moments, places, people and happenstance, simultaneously distinct and the same, occur at once and yet are unimaginable until encountered by the eyes and ears and never truly appreciated until enjoyed by all five senses. Travel is our unique gateway to these moments, an intense time of self-reflection in the faces of others, an opportunity for us to rejoice in our lives through those of others and sometimes to allow our hearts to empathetically be sad, as well. Always something is learned on these extremely stimulating odysseys. It is this poetic side of travel that Querétaro-based artist Patricia de la Parra expresses in her upcoming exhibit, Impresiones de viaje, a show of her newest paintings and collages inspired by recent travels outside of Mexico.

There is a tangible reflection of the artist in each of the lands she visits and has portrayed on paper. As a young sociology major at UNAM in Mexico City, Patricia had been very fixated on the human experience in its most intense manifestations. In her explorations to relate to all aspects of the human experience, Patricia found herself drawn to the abstract expression through the art of others, finding that each human being is constantly evolving, and to portray that evolution is best done through abstraction. It was through her studies at Bellas Artes and through some atelier classes that Patricia discovered her talent as a painter and her true gift to interpret and produce beautiful works that appeal to a wide audience, while always carrying that underlying tone of empathy for the human experience. She celebrates 17 years as a professional artist of the people with this show.

The figure does come into play in Patricia’s work. A face or hand or eye will emerge from the folds of color and handmade paper, merely referencing the physical body. There is also a vibration in her work similar to that of music, as if you were observing the cultural beat of the land she is interpreting, through the overlapping of images and textures. Of interest in Patricia’s work is the amount of influence that two of San Miguel’s favorite and most accomplished artists, Ed Osman and Leonard Brooks, play in her composition. Galeria/Atelier is very happy to provide Patricia de la Parra with her second one-woman show December 1. There will be a cocktail reception with the artist from 6–8pm.

Melanie Harris de Maycotte is the director and curator of Galeria/Atelier. She grew up in San Miguel, attended the University of Texas in Austin and studied sculpture in an atelier in Florence, Italy.

Galería Atotonilco holiday season morning coffees
By Susan Page

Gallery Open House Galería Atotonilco Dec 8–23, 11am–6pm Call 185-2225 for directions

Galeria Atotonilco’s featured artist this season is Mauricio Hernandez, whose large-scale paper mache figures and scenes are featured in the Banamex collection of Great Masters of Mexican Folk Art. Hernandez’s calavera (or skeleton) figures selling bread, pottery, baskets, or masks stand two to three feet high. Galeria Atotonilco, featuring fine quality folk art, kicks off its holiday open house season with a coffee and pastries reception on Saturday morning, December 8 from 10–12am. Usually open by appointment only, the gallery will hold open houses and sales on every Saturday and Sunday from now until Christmas, with the exception of Sunday, December 16, when the gallery will be closed. Open house hours are 11am–6pm, and the dates are December 8 and 9, 15, 22, and 23. Selected items will be sale priced.

Skeletons taking part in everyday life is a common theme in Mexican popular arts because they represent, in one figure, the duality of life and death. And the intrinsic humor in them is a never-ceasing delight.

Mauricio Hernandez and his wife, Estela Mendiola, work in nearby Guanajuato. Largely self-taught, they have been creating their figures since 1988. Their work is in high demand by collectors and not always easy to find. Along with the Linarus family of Mexico City, they are considered to be Mexico’s foremost artists working in paper mache.

The gallery also carries a large selection of pottery from Tonala, near Guadalajara, a ceramics village since pre-Hispanic times. This season, the gallery has commissioned a large supply of the rarely seen, much beloved, and affordable animals by Angel Solis—dogs, birds, fish, rabbits, and also large, decorative jars, all beautifully decorated with soft colors. The Solis family is one of the oldest traditional potting families in Tonala, and they are experts in the laborious, pre-Hispanic technique call brunido, in which the surface of the pot is burnished with a well-worn stone to a soft, satiny finish. No glaze is used.

A wide range of vintage Mexican textiles is one of the gallery’s key collections. Old serapes make gorgeous bedspreads or wall hangings. Some of them come from villages that stopped weaving fifty years ago, so they are truly a piece of Mexican history.

Susana Valadez will be at the December 8 and 9 reception with her full selection of the finest quality Huichol jewelry.

To get to the gallery, drive north on the Dolores Highway five miles from the Libramiento intersection. Turn left at the giant Pepsi billboard. Go a short way and turn left where the main road turns left. Drive a half mile on the bumpy dirt road to a white house and yellow house together on the right. Turn right between these houses, and follow the long, curvy driveway to the red gallery building.

Susan Page is the founder and coordinator of the San Miguel Authors' Sala.

An evening in the country
Art Opening
Monica Galera Studio Showroom
Sat, Dec 1, 5pm–9pm
Near Atotonilco

The Monica Galera Studio showroom near Atotonilco opens December 1 with a full evening of mini-courses and demonstrations, showroom tours and cocktail receptions. At 5pm, you can find out how to collect natural fibers in gardens and nurseries. At 5:30pm, see a demonstration in the workshops of how to work with paper, felt and other materials. Showroom tours begin at 6:30pm. At 9pm, the party continues nearby at the outdoor restaurant Las Terrazas of the Hotel Casa de Aves (special package 150 pesos). The new complex features a gallery and boutique, workshops, gardens and retail sales of paper, cotton, wool and other natural fibers. Since it’s about 15 miles northwest of town off the road to Dolores Hidalgo, it would be best to confirm directions at (415) 185-2111 or mg@monicagalera.com.