Sacred Birds in flight
By Edward Swift May 2, 2008 San Miguel de Allende


Art Opening
Pájaros Sagrados
Sat, May 3, 5–8pm
Generator Gallery
Fábrica la Aurora
Artist Talk
Sun, May 4, 11am–noon
Demonstration
Photorealism with Watercolor
Thu, Jun 12, 9am–noon
75 pesos, limited seating

Kelley Vandiver’s Pájaros Sagrados (Sacred Birds) are flying again, this time in the Generator Gallery. The exhibition consists of 30 giclee prints of his original watercolors which sold almost as fast as the artist painted them. From May 1 to the end of June you can see the entire flock—blackbirds, lovebirds, finches, cardinals, roosters, parrots, bluebirds, you name it—all dressed up as Catholic saints and various Biblical characters.

Rendered in painstaking detail, the birds are decked out in robes trimmed with fur, elaborate collars, cuffs, muffs and headdresses. Every feather and ray of light is delicately painted in brilliant colors, and the halos are luminous and hallowed. Each bird is surrounded by a brief Latin text with some of the letters highlighted in 22 karat gold dust. The text for the purple finch dressed as the Blessed Mother reads: “All ye that pass by look and see if there could be any sorrow like mine.” The mournful finch is seen against the Hill of Golgotha with the empty tomb in plain sight. St. John the Divine is represented by a rooster, and his text is like an alarm clock. “For behold. A clear voice resounds and cries out against the darkness. Amen. Alleluia.” One of the most popular portraits is that of Delilah, a deceivingly sweet-faced lovebird. With scissors hanging on a cord around her neck she is ready to snip, snip, snip any lock of hair that comes her way. Her Latin text is the most seductive: “When she poured the wine she handed it with a kiss; delighting the eyes, she held the world in thrall.” She is just another wicked woman with the face of an angel. 

Although the paintings are serious, witty and clever, they are never demeaning, mean-spirited or sacrilegious owing to the artist’s empathy with his subject matter and his skill with the brush. He has captured the correct emotions on the faces of these feathered friends. They are human and their suffering is real.

Vandiver is a resident of San Miguel, but the idea for a series of bird portraits began several years ago in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he was then living. Miranda, an African Grey Parrot, was the inspiration. He raised her from a tiny chick, fed her with a syringe, and she grew rapidly all the while displaying a strong, sweet-natured devotion to her keeper. She developed a large personality, an even larger vocabulary and she enjoyed carrying on complete conversations with herself. Vandiver admits that life with Miranda was like having another human being in the house. 

After about five years, Miranda’s sweet disposition changed, the artist recalls with a shiver. “Because she desired a real parrot companion, she became frustrated, mean and deeply evil. She screamed without stop. She chewed up my apartment. She bit me constantly, always going for the tender places. She would clamp down on my hand with her deadly beak and wouldn’t let go. I couldn’t shake her off me. Soon I began fantasizing about her dying in horrible, painful, gruesome ways. In my mind, I had her beheaded, stabbed, hung and burned at the stake—anything that was painful with prolonged suffering. Then I began sketching Miranda in historical Catholic scenes. In each sketch she experienced a brutal death just like many of our saints. Sketching her demise was the only thing that helped me cope.” 

After it became apparent that Miranda would never return to her sweet disposition, she was banished to an aviary in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. Her new owner had high hopes that she would accept one of the other African Greys as her mate, but to this day she has brutally disfigured every suitor that has come her way. 

Soon after Miranda entered the aviary one of Vandiver’s clients saw the sketches and asked for a series of 14 paintings of different birds dressed as saints. Out flew the Cardinal Cardinal, the Mother and Child, Saints Veronica, Sebastian and Valentine, along with the Stations of the Cross in which Miranda stumbles and falls.

Today all the residents of Vandiver’s aviary are on display. Some are flying high; some are flying low; but they are all flying together for the first time. What else can be said, except to offer a prayer: Blessed are the animals of this earth, for they too are the children of God. And please, dear Lord, send Miranda a few moments of happiness for she has inspired great things. Amen. 

Edward Swift lives in San Miguel. When there were no more than a dozen birds in Vandiver’s aviary, this article appeared in Atención in a slightly different form.

“Imaginary Horses” in La Aurora
By Valerie Mejer

Art Opening
Sat, May 3, 5pm
Valerie Mejer Galería/Estudio
Fábrica la Aurora 

Horses, probably more than other animals, have a mythology all their own. This collective show featuring four Mexican artists—Luis Camarena, Juan Ezcurdia, Jaime Goded and Valerie Mejer—presents four different visions of the mythology and poetics that surround the figure of the horse. Although the artists are from different backgrounds, they share a common interest in and work with the field of literature.

The most metaphysical aspect of this poetic vision is represented in the pieces by Luis Camarena. His work is mostly associated with the works of Giorgio de Chirico and he is represented by a surrealist gallery in Paris. Two horses in the background of what might be a displaced circus, a factory at the left, the ocean on the horizon create a mythology of what a horse is doing in the world, offering a pure appreciation of the question.

Juan Ezcurdia’s work offers a more playful dimension that makes us think of the most primitive representation of animals, like horses we could imagine drawn on a cave wall, yet with a whimsical approach and full of primary colors. Jaime Goded brings in different media: ceramics, wood sculptures and paintings in watercolor. In his work the inner body is recreated in colorful lines.

The building of the animal is made by lines that are more directed towards a movement, a signature of his own that obeys its own logic. When one says that Goded’s work is personal that means that he creates someone, a being with a name, a story behind the playful vision. Goded, a published poet, will read one of his stories as part of the opening.

Gallery owner Valerie Mejer presents a collections of works not only related to poetry but created in collaboration with poets. Some of the pieces were done for an Italian poet, Antonio Prete, and others for a collection of poems that will be published in the US called The Cadence of the Hooves.

A reading of one of her poems included in the anthology is part of the opening. 

Valerie Mejer is the owner of the Valerie Mejer Galería/Estudio at Fábrica la Aurora.

Painter in exile: Peter Leventhal
An interview by Bill Pearlman

Peter Leventhal is one of the best-known and best-loved painters in San Miguel. His paintings can be seen in many places, including the Berlin Bar. His paintings have a certain joyful, even orgiastic quality. The figures seem to live in a sensual bacchanalian atmosphere, often full of music and festivities. He is currently working on an extraordinary series of narrative paintings based on actual historical events during the Mexican Revolution of 1910.

Peter and I are having a coffee in the little café out at the Aurora Galleries, where Peter has his studio. He recently opened a show featuring a triptych piece with these Revolution scenes at Museo Alhondiga de Granaditas in Guanajuato.

Bill Pearlman: To start, I’d like to get a picture of what you think is the genesis of your art. What made it happen in the first place?

Peter Leventhal: OK. My father was a textile designer in New York City; he did high-end design for clothing and upholstery, silk-tie design for Cerutti and other designers. He had his studio at 59th and Broadway, across the street from the theater impresario David Belasco. My father hated abstract expressionism. So I grew up around paints and brushes. My father used to take me to the Waldorf Cafeteria, where we would see people like Jackson Pollock. My father was interested in landscape painting.

BP: What about art school, did you go or plan to go?

PL: If I had gone, it probably would have been to Pratt or Parsons, but I didn’t go. I trained myself; I went constantly to the Metropolitan Museum, Brooklyn Museum and the New York Public Library. At the library, I got to look at master prints and started drawing, which I loved. As a teenager, I also got interested in iconic representations of American culture and published a limited edition of a magazine I called “The Great American Paper Bag,” which contained my drawings of things like roller skates and frogs; I don’t know why frogs.

BP: Where did you hang out in NYC in the sixties and seventies?

PL: The Village mostly. Christopher Street.

BP: Who were the painters you loved early on?

PL: Rubens, Goya. But in 1949, when I was just 10 years old, the Dutch Government sent a show of Van Gogh’s work to New York and I was impressed with his use of color. My father pointed out to me how Van Gogh made his blues, I remember, and how I wanted to try for that same blue.

BP: Did you travel in your early days?

PL: Yes, in 1960, I went to live in Paris for two years. This was before things were really happening there, but a good time for me to get to know Europe.

BP: You mentioned Van Gogh’s color. One is struck by some of the power you have with color in your own work, and the sort of bacchanal or erotic atmosphere of your paintings. Can you talk about that?

PL: Sure. I liked Rubens and Bruegel. And got to know the Venetians at the Met, Titian especially. The erotic quality is the impulse of life. I try to find in my work both the erotic and what I’ve come to see as a reflective element in the erotic. I’m not that interested in nudity per se, but the life impulse that is so strong that the clothes of the figures fall away by themselves.

BP: Do you find parallels in modern writers like Joyce and Lawrence?

PL: Yes, but even earlier, Rabelais especially. But in my work, what I do comes to me. I get to states when I’m working when time does not exist and I am outside myself. I think a lot of artists will tell you this. Also, if you look at my work, the people don’t look at one another: each figure is living in his or her own sensation. My work is about states of feeling, pre-mentation, a sort of daydreaming. When I’m working, I’m aware of light changing in the room, but I’m deep into intuitive feeling states.

BP: Jung talked of psychological types, especially the major categories of thinking, feeling, intuition and sensation types. 

PL: Yes, I like what Jung says. I also read Susanne Langer, who was a big influence as a philosopher of art. Her views interest me about the richness of life in art. In my work, you comprehend the world as an intelligence of the senses, including a narrative of sensation. It’s not subtle; it’s about a release I need to make and I discovered it with color.

BP: You see yourself as a colorist, then?

PL: Yes. I’m very interested in relationships among different colors. Color means vitality in many ways, and the body and movement of bodies. I’m also interested in classical motifs.

BP: But I also noticed at a recent show at Gallery Noir you did mostly drawings on canvas.

PL: Yes. Drawing remains important.

BP: And you also do sculpture in wood.

PL: Yes. That is another way of working and I have a different studio for sculpture.

BP: But let’s go back to some original concepts for a minute. Can you talk about the classical conceptions that empower your work?

PL: Sure. Classical myths are behind it all. The original concept in the Greek cosmology—I read Robert Graves and others on this—the three original forces were Chaos, Earth and Eros. Eros pre-dates the progenitor gods. Eros is pre-Dionysian. Eros is also order, a kind of dynamic order.

BP: I got to know Graves quite well on Mallorca. Nietzsche was also interested in this realm.

PL: Yes, but I’m talking about Eros as a force before the antithetical gods, Dionysus and Apollo. You get similar structures in the Vedas. And you also get a degeneration of the power of Eros in the Roman Cupid, who becomes emasculated.

BP: Back to painting: who has been important to your development? Of the moderns, let’s say.

PL: Earlier painters, Rubens and Bruegel, for sure. Picasso, at least some of his work. And for color, Bonnard. And Max Beckmann, the great German expressionist. Beckmann saw clearly the modern dilemma: the collapse of Western civilization, which began in World War I and then grew worse during World War II. 

BP: You said something about living in exile. Can you say a little more about that.

PL: Yes. I went back to the US from 1997 to 2001, but I found I could not live there. It repelled me too much. So I found I can live and work here. People are congenial here. So, like others before me, I live in exile here.

BP: Can you go further in your understanding of your disenchantment with the US?

PL: OK. We’ve got to go back to Walt Whitman and Melville. Whitman was the most erotic of American writers. His work is charged with energy, he bares himself in the poems. For Whitman, life was immeasurably great. Melville uncovered the dark side of the American psyche—the dark seed, bad money, megalomania, spiritual greed, the interdicting fundamentalism in American life, the horrifically rotten behavior. So the job in the US is to try to repair the damage that has been done to American life. Some people are already making the effort. I grew up in a special time. I loved my childhood. The life I knew was warm and civilized. 

BP: And in Mexico, how do you see life here?

PL: In Mexico, the energy here is open, people don’t care (in a good sense), I can work here in the open, whereas in the US there is proscription and repression which repels me and hurts. 

BP: What about San Miguel in particular do you find congenial?

PL: San Miguel is a unique place; several cultures meet and sometimes have an uneasy relationship. But it’s easy and pleasant here. I like it. 

BP: Some of your new work has Mexican history as a theme, with several artists like Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros involved in the histories.

PL: Yes, Mexico is loaded with great stories from its modern history. And I’m trying to get to it in these paintings without the trap of cant, without being cute. I’m looking for important icons of twentieth-century Mexican history. 

BP: Good. I’d like to take a look at some of the new work.

PL: OK.

We walk over to Leventhal’s studio in Fábrica la Aurora. Two paintings hang outside the studio itself. There’s a predominant sense of flesh and bodies in various stages of relationship with one another. A sense of celebration or bacchanal or dionysian revels might also enter the description of many of his works.

BP: What’s this one called?

PL: “Serenade for an Aerialist.”

BP: Now I see, looking at this painting, that the figures are not looking at each other, for the most part. Is that what you meant by reflective eroticism?

PL: I’m interested in the unknowability of the other. 

BP: A sort of serenity seems to be happening for each figure.

PL: The scene is relaxed. Music is playing. A sort of bacchanal, you might say.

BP: And this one with three major figures in the middle?

PL: It’s called “Olympians in Puerto Vallarta.” 

BP: And the figures? 

PL: Based somewhat on Dionysus and his Maenads. The central figure is also my father, dressed in uniform. During the World War II, he was in the Navy and fought all over the various theaters of war. And the other figures represent women in his life. And the background is actually Puerto Vallarta; that’s the church near the central square. 

We go into the studio proper, where several paintings are underway, all with a sort of burnt umber/reddish background with the beginnings of figures emerging out of the redness.

BP: What does the red background give you in these works?

PL: It’s a traditional way of working. The dark red or brown gives you a greater tonal range and it’s easier with that darkness as a backdrop. The quality of the tonality will be different going from dark to light.

BP: Now this painting: I’m looking at what appears to be a woman bleeding in a church?

PL: Yes, this is an event in Mexican history. The woman is Antonieta Rivas Mercado, an influential Mexican active in the twenties. She had no success in relationships. She was involved with José Vasconcelos who was Minister of Education under Obregón. Rivas Mercado helped artists, founded the Teatro Ulises and was a major player among the famous artists of the twenties and thirties. She actually killed herself in Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, despondent over relationships. 

BP: I notice the faces of Diego Rivera, Siqueiros and Orozco in some of the other work.

PL: Yes, I’m trying to find in Mexican history narratives that will lend themselves to new work. This one here concerns the photographer Tina Modotti, and a man she was seeing, who was shot while walking on the street in Mexico City with Tina in the twenties. The man believed to have shot her longtime boyfriend (also a subject in this painting) was Vittorio Vidali, who then became her partner for the next 20 years! The question is whether she had something to do with this or not. It was a volatile time in Mexican politics. The images concern the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and the aftermath, when there was a lot of revolutionary activity in Mexico. I’m interested in the arrival of Villa and Zapata, but also the cultural world of artists and others involved in the life of the country at that time.

BP: These are indeed intriguing stories and the paintings have a narrative richness to match the wonderful figures. It’s going to make a great series. Thanks, Peter. We’ll talk again, I’m sure.

PL: Thank you. I’ll interview you at some point.

BP: Sounds good. Hasta luego and be well…Nos vemos.

Bill Pearlman is a poet, actor, drama therapist and contributor to Atención. His most recent book, If Only, is a collaboration of image and poem with painter Roland Salazar Rose.

Cruz del Palmar: Casa de Cultura

Art Opening
Judith Anderson
Sat, May 3, 2–4pm
Café Santa Ana
Biblioteca Pública
Reloj 50A

On April 12, Southern California photographer Judith (JJ) Anderson accompanied a contingent of San Miguel activists to the community of Cruz del Palmar. 

Included in the community outreach project Casa de Cultura were the town historian, the general manager of the Biblioteca Pública, Miguel Kegel, and a community delegate, Magdaleno Cruz. Accompanying photographs are of some of the townspeople.

Anderson’s first photographic exhibition in San Miguel opens May 3. There will be a game for young and old to enjoy and the first 50 persons to attend the opening will receive a token photographic gift. 

For information, email JJaphoto@cox.net.