Artists talking to artists
A double interview of Arturo Meade and Julie Doherty
By Arturo Meade and Julie Doherty January 18, 2008 San Miguel de Allende

Art Opening
Arturo Meade & Julie Doherty
Sat, Jan 19, 6–8:30pm
Mero Gallery
Zacateros 24

Artists Arturo Meade and Julie Doherty lived in San Miguel de Allende until last spring, when they moved to Oaxaca. In anticipation of their upcoming exhibitions in San Miguel, organized by Mero Gallery on Zacateros, they interviewed each other about art and life.

Julie Interviews Arturo

Julie Doherty: Do you think that living in Oaxaca has affected your artistic style or creative process?

Arturo Meade: I don’t think necessarily that Oaxaca has affected me yet, but the change of residence and the lack of time for painting because of the move have forced me to ask the question, why do I paint? And where am I in my personal process? It has been an opportunity to reshape my concepts.

JD: When did you start painting?

AM: In 2000, I decided to dedicate all my creative efforts to painting. Actually, it was the day after the fall of the Twin Towers. After that event, I was even more convinced that I wanted to dedicate my life to art.

JD: Who are your favorite artists?

AM: They change with time, but definitely Hieronymus Bosch. I know you did not ask me, but the Ship of Fools is my favorite painting. I think he is still a visionary.

JD: As an artist, do you have any direct influences?

AM: When it comes to direct influences, I like the way Phillip Guston approached art. I admire the spontaneity of Basquiat. However, I think I have been most influenced by Mexican arte popular.

JD: Any other creative influences on your work?

AM: I try hard to translate music and philosophy into paint. I would be very pleased to translate Abdullah Ibrahim’s music into painting, or to be as sharp and cynical as Cioran, or as profound as Lao Tsu. There is always the intent but never an achievement.

JD: You always listen to music while you are painting. How do you think that affects you? What are you listening to lately?

AM: Music has always affected my life. I’m a free jazz guy, and I admire Bjork. I would like to see a woman paint like Bjork makes music.

JD: I would call your work abstract. Is that how you characterize it?

AM: In a way. I like to paint poetic images, and, yes I tend to “abstract” the concepts.

JD: Who do you admire?

AM: Ghandi

JD: Besides Oaxaca, where would you like to live?

AM: I don’t know. I love New York, but I wouldn’t necessarily want to live there. I love Mexico. I’m happy here right now, maybe I’d try life on another planet.

JD: What do you love to argue about?

AM: Human nature and the stupidity of science.

JD: You forgot. You also like to argue about Matthew Barney.

AM: Oh yes. Him, too!

JD: What are your current addictions?

AM: Cheese.

JD: What do you like about me?

AM: About you, honey? Tus lunares, tu forma de pensar, tu sonrisa me encanta, me encanto desde que te conocí, tu creatividad, tu conciencia, tu espectro y lo que refleja, tu facilidad de hacer todo, tu apple crumb ....... y tus pompis me fascinan mi amor!

JD: Your favorite planet in the solar system?

AM: mmmmm………Saturn.

JD: Sweet or savory? Tequila or Mezcal? Corona or Victoria? 

AM: Savory. Mezcal. Both…..OK, Corona.

Arturo Interviews Julie

Arturo Meade: Contemporary art offers many options these days. Why painting?

Julie Doherty: Choosing painting wasn’t a choice, just like falling in love isn’t a choice. I am in love with painting, and for me, there is no other media that compares. It moves me in a way that nothing else does.

AM: Mention three books that changed your life.

JD: Mating by Norman Rush, Reflections on a Mountain Lake by Ani Tenzin Palmo, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing by Helene Cixous.

AM: If you had to relate certain musicians to your work, who would they be?

JD: This question is difficult to answer because what I admire in other artists isn’t always what comes naturally to me. I would love to relate my work to artists like John Lennon, who had a message of love and peace, in addition to beautiful music, or Lhasa de Sela, who is very serious and passionate and broken-hearted. But, for the moment, I think I’d compare it to Beth Orton, Sufjan Stevens, DJ Shadow, Cat Power, or Air. Are you interested in my comparisons of music and your art?

AM: Sure.

JD: I’d compare your work to Manu Chao, Brian Eno, Calexico, the DeVotchkas, Beruit, Zoe, and Serge Gainsbourg.

AM: Mention three places you missed in San Miguel.

JD: La Colmena, without a doubt, is first on the list. I also miss early mornings at the Gruta and the Sunday morning breakfast buffet at Mama Mia.

AM: Mention three of your favorite contemporary artists.

JD: As with books, it’s very hard to limit myself to just three. However, David Hockney, Frida Kahlo, and Basquiat are three artists who totally knock my socks off. They are, I guess, The Beatles of contemporary art, for me. For now. The answer to this question changes every week.

AM: What do you want to show in your work?

JD: I think that’s a question you never totally answer, and therefore, you must keep on painting. Every painting is an attempt to answer that question.

AM: Are women making enough art these days?

JD: There are many contemporary female artists working today whom I really love and respect, like Cindy Sherman, Dana Schutz, Elizabeth Peyton, and Nan Goldin, to name a few. And there have been many influential women artists—though, in my opinion, there are not enough women represented in established galleries and museums. But that, of course, is just the art world. Women have always been involved in creative activities, at home, through craft, and professionally.

AM: What is your favorite number?

JD: One hundred. I’m kidding. It’s ten. Or maybe it’s five. Or three. Or six, which is also a beautiful number.

AM: Name the places where you have lived for more than 6 months.

JD: San Rafael, California, as I was growing up, then intermittently during my twenties, when I was broke and had to crash at my parents’ house. Palo Alto, California, for my four years of college. San Francisco, California. San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas. Mexico City. San Miguel de Allende. And finally, Oaxaca, for the past six months.

AM: Your favorite place on earth to be alone?

JD: I love to be alone – at home, at the movies, at the beach, on a hike, in my car. The only places I do not like to be alone are on airplanes or at weddings.

AM: Are we going to run out of resources in the world and are we heading back to barbarism? Or is science going to save us?

JD: This question is very you, Arturo. I think we both agree that we are on our way back to the Stone Age. However, I think it is something we need to accept rather than stop with science. Life is entirely too elaborate as it is right now and the price we are paying for our luxuries is too high. Eventually, I’d like to live in an adobe house without electricity. To be on the safe side, I also want to learn to start a fire by rubbing two sticks together.

AM: What does red taste like?

JD: Chocolate with chile peppers. Mole poblano. Peanuts.

AM: What does yellow taste like?

JD: Sherbet. Mashed Potatoes with butter. Peach yogurt.

AM: What does blue taste like?

JD: Sea water, fennel, gummy bears, apples.

On Saturday, January 19, Mero Gallery is hosting two openings for artists Arturo Meade and Julie Doherty. Meade will be opening a solo exhibition of his painting and sculpture in Mero Gallery on Zacateros. Immediately following, Julie Doherty will show her paintings at the Fonda Rosa on San Antonio Abad.

A dialogue with paint
By Lulu Torbet

Art Opening Internal Dialogue Alan Siegel Fri, Jan 18, 7pm Bellas Artes Hernández Macías 75

The show “Internal Dialogue” presents two diverse groups of paintings by longtime artist Alan Siegel. The first, “The Tightrope of Ambition,” is based loosely on a collection of drawings that Siegel produced when he first came to San Miguel 11 years ago. At the time he was in a state of despair in the face of trying to make art. This compelling series is largely about the artist and his demons. But all of Siegel’s work is grounded in his lifelong love of painting and drawing, so even these ostensibly “storytelling” works reflect his enjoyment of the basic act of working with paint.

“The process starts out as an abstract painting, in which I use gestures and encourage accident to create an interesting surface and composition,” explains the artist. “The subject matter, though I roughly reference the earlier drawings, emerges from the ‘soup’ of paint.”

The most ambitious painting in this group is “Opera Buffa,” 12 scenes on wood panels joined to make a coherent larger work, approximately 54” x 88”. Intensely personal, it depicts the artist’s fall from “the tightrope of ambition” into the nightmare of failed performance. Siegel admits, “It is along with the other multi-panel paintings— dark comedy, lightened, I hope, by the passage of time and the pleasure I take simply in the act of painting.”

The second set of paintings, “Images from the Interior,” is even more focused on the nature of paint and other media, and their role in the inspiration and creation of art. Siegel remarks: “In experimenting with various combinations of media, I found a technique that, under certain circumstances, causes the paint to form organic patterns on the painting ground. These patterns relate to forms in nature that are familiar to all of us. They appear in root systems, sea fans, and a seemingly endless variety of phenomena in the natural world. These prepared wood panels provide me with a unifying, though infinitely varied, surface that enhances the picture plane. As I live with these complex surfaces, propped against the walls of my studio, they begin to suggest ‘phantom images’ that I bring forward, using a variety of techniques, to make paintings that are in a sense a marriage of accident and free association.” The end result is that while the imagery is often subtle and indirectly applied, at times seeming to gla
nce off the lush surface, the subject and surface are always intimately bonded.

Although this is Siegel’s first major show in San Miguel, he has had shows at many major galleries in the US. For many years he was represented in New York by Nancy Hoffmann Gallery, as well as by Cordier and Ekstrom, Robert Miller and others. For a period of time he gave up painting and became involved in making one-of-a-kind sculptural chairs, mostly out of wood. He also produced limited-edition chairs out of wood and metal that were met with great success in the same galleries where he had formerly shown his paintings. “The irony is that making the chairs liberated me from all I knew and expected of myself with painting,” Siegel said. “And they were successful to boot. I was free and I was happier.”

Of his recent work Siegel says: “In returning to painting, my first love, I feel a new excitement and joy in being in the studio.”

Photographer and painter Lulu Torbet had a graphic design studio in New York before being lured into the writing game. She is the author or ghostwriter of over 30 books, most of them in the areas of crafts, psychology and memoir.

Artifacts reflected
By Melanie Harris de Maycotte

Art Opening Sebastian Canovas & Rodrigo Lara Sat, Jan 19, 6–8pm Galería/Atelier Fábrica la Aurora

The New Year evokes thoughts of change in the minds of most everyone, whether it is as a reflection of the changes made in the past year for the betterment of oneself or the ones needed to be taken in the upcoming year in order to better oneself, as betterment is a common goal of change. The newest exhibit at Galería/Atelier illustrates this very notion of change through the work of the extremely talented Mexican artists, Sebastian Canovas and Rodrigo Lara.

Both of these artists are well known to San Miguel. This is the second exhibit for Canovas at this gallery, and a visible change is exactly what his admirers will note with the progress they see in each of his new paintings.

 More power, new color palettes, different structures, new materials; he is not a man afraid of change. Canovas’ newest abstract painting series is titled Reflections. These are works that address the subconscious with colors, structures and tones that evoke emotions similarly to how music would. In each painting a definite mood is tangible and, as the title suggests, they are reflections of the various events the artist experienced in the past year. All of the paintings were conceived while experiencing the day-to-day changes life brings—some good and some melancholic. In general, he had a better than good year with numerous exhibits in Mexico, Switzerland and Germany.

Rodrigo Lara may have been your sculpture professor at the Instituto Allende if you were fortunate enough to have studied sculpture there in 2002–03. A former graduate of the Instituto, Toluca-born artist Lara has had numerous doors open to him because of his talent which has allowed him to travel, work, teach and exhibit around Mexico and in Chicago. His talent has also recently been recognized in international magazines—Ceramic Art and Perceptions out of Sydney, Australia and Senses out of California—the word is getting out. Lara’s most recent series for his show at Galería/Atelier is titled Artifacts and is a personal exploration of how fear and love, and the intensity of both of these emotions, affects and changes the body. They are beautiful ceramic and metal figures with intense expressions that almost speak to you.

Galería/Atelier always seeks to offer its public a unique pairing of painters and sculptors, and this exhibit really is an exemplary show of the talent found in Mexico. There will be a cocktail reception with the artists from 6–8pm. For more information, contact the gallery at info@galeriaatelier.com.

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

Poetry in the artist’s heart
By Alejandro Baez

Art Events Lena Bartula Tues, Jan 22, 7pm, Lecture Cuale Cultural Center Wed, Jan 23, 6–10pm, Opening Sol y Luna Contemporary Josefa Ortiz de Domingues 155-A Puerto Vallarta 332-113-0475

Puerto Vallarta’s Sol y Luna Contemporary announces the return of artist Lena Bartula in her second solo exhibition entitled, “La Noche Verde.” The artist will meet and greet art lovers at a reception in the new gallery space in Old Town. An expatriate from the US since 2004, Bartula lives in Pozos, a former mining town northeast of San Miguel. In the past few years, her works have been seen at Galeria Izamal and Café Santa Ana.

Inspired by Spanish language poetry, Bartula has been borrowing words, phrases and titles from Federico Garcia Lorca for her paintings this year.

Of Lorca, Bartula says: “His works speak of life and death, love and longing, and resonate deeply in the hearts of artists everywhere; mine is no exception.”

It isn’t that the artist thinks of Lorca as Mexican, but in studying Spanish, she finds that bilingual poetry books are helpful in reading, hearing and experiencing the soul of the language. Lorca, who was born in Granada, is considered one of the most important poets of the twentieth century, and is among the most widely published in several languages. Bartula’s current effort is a departure from her first Sol y Luna exhibition last year, in which she used phrases and words from her own poetry. Even the color green takes on a new significance for her, after diving into his stratosphere, and that too is noticeable in these new works. In the title piece, “La Noche Verde,” a large horizontal painting on wood, a blue-green sky features a floating tube that squeezes out a mysterious, magical substance onto an ochre desert. Other paintings, like “Un Aire de Voces Secretas” and “Ni la Noche, Ni el Dia,” present not what Lorca might have imaged, but an abstracted vision from the artist’s imagination.

Lorca is not the only poet whose words enter into this artist’s painted vocabulary. From another land, another era, Rumi, the thirteenth-century seeker known for ecstatic poetry, profoundly contributes to the sensibility and aesthetic of her latest paintings. “The Joy of Existence,” a vertical diptych in soft greens and deep reds, exudes the mystic quality of his writings and suggests the artist’s own concurrence with his voice. The inspiration for this work was a poem titled “We Three,” while strangely enough, a painting titled “Esquirlas de Luna” (Moon Splinters), was born of the Lorca poem “Tres.” Synchronicities such as this rarely surprise Bartula these days; she recognizes that all of her heroes speak virtually the same language, throughout time and space.

More abstract than her earlier work, these paintings have lost none of the textured layering that this painter’s painter is known for. Frequently beginning a panel with collage, followed by plaster, she is likely to apply paint with a palette knife even after many passes with a brush. This multi-dimensional approach has recently found another path through Bartula’s universe of shape and form: a collection of constructed huipiles, a series she simply calls Torsos. Created from canvas, paper, thread and paint, the shirts are metaphors for bodies, referencing and representing human characteristics. In “Cada Querida” (Every Beloved), words stamped across a side panel reference a poem by Bartula, which was originally inspired by Rumi several years ago. Another, titled “Pilgrim Heart” (Corazon de la Peregrina), has a pocket cut into the area of the heart; opening it releases a long ribbon of pages taken from a variety of esoteric books, a perfect shirt for the seeker’s sojourn.

Adding flavor and depth to “La Noche Verde,” the Cuale Cultural Center will host a slide presentation and talk by Bartula on January 22.

Bartula’s homage to Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, “El Silencio,” has been held over until February 10 in Mexico City. Installed in the Museo de la Indumentaria at the University del Claustro de Sor Juana, the huipil exhibition can be seen Monday–Friday,10am–5pm, at Izazaga 92, Centro Historico.

Alejandro Baez is the owner and director of both Sol y Luna Contemporary and Sol y Luna Arte Sin Fronteras in Puerto Vallarta. Baez relocated in 2006 after years of gallery work in Santa Fe and Mexico City.

Exploring collective memory in art

Art Opening Tomas Burkey Wed, Jan 23, 6–8pm Ana Julia Aguado Gallery

Memory is something we often associate in a limited way with our personal past and individual nostalgia. However, in literature, art and philosophy, as well as in many of the ancient cultures throughout the history of man, we find a broader, more mystical perception of recollection and remembrance. While living between Chile and the United States before coming to live and work in San Miguel, Tomas Burkey researched many of the belief systems of the Maya, the ancient Egyptians, and the Aborigines, finding the inspiration that has informed his work from a young age. Join Tomas Burkey for a reception at the Ana Julia Aguado Gallery.