José María Alejos Madrigal cut delicately through the wet clay, removing a thick slice between the two ribs of a lamp with the distinctive, bulging ridges of a cactus. His wife, Cecilia, sat a few feet away, pressing bits of clay into a round mold to imprint them with tiny indentations, then placed them on […]
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Her bold hands coax the thread through white cotton, relinquishing a fragment of the kaleidoscopic hues within her soul to cavort freely across the snowy landscape. The joints of her fingers moving with a tender dexterity, Hermelinda Reyes Ascencio pulls the filament through the fabric surrounding a needlepoint flower, radiant with shades of violet, magenta, […]
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“In the paintings of Jorge Monroy we see the hand of a master, the expression of an artist, a cultivated talent forged by the hammers of study, constancy, dedication and creative energy.” Godofredo Olivares Jorge Monroy’s art is well known in Mexico because his charming watercolors have appeared every week in the newspaper El Informador for more […]
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Saulo Moreno Hernandez is a 71 year old sagacious, self-effacing artist from Tlapujahua, in the state of Michoacan. One of his works is featured in the Americas Gallery of the British Museum in London. One of his early ‘calaveritas’, which are imaginative statues of skeletons depicted as alive and in various poses and garb, was bought by […]
Continue ReadingDuring her heyday from the 1920s to the 1930s, unconventional artist Carmen Mondragón was demonized in much the same way as the fire-breathing creature of legends past. A defiant voice in the midst of a repressive era, she was mischaracterized as a madwoman and even a witch. So pervasive were these falsehoods that even after […]
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Mexico City in the 1920s stood on the threshold of a new era. Although the country had won its independence from Spain in 1821, it became obvious by the early 1900s that the economic gap between rich and poor—and the social gap between the Spanish-descendant and Amerindian-descendant—had only increased following the departure of the Spanish. […]
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Exploring Mexico’s Artists and Artisans Richard Hay Reagan had three great loves — art, jazz and Jeanora Bartlet. Jeanora is now a sprightly octogenarian and as we chat at her home in Bruton, Somerset, England, she is, initially, not too keen to share memories of her late partner. I had originally sought out Jeanora because […]
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Return to the U.S.The following year, Rick decided to return to North America. With financial help from brother Pete, he flew back to California. Jeanora took several of Rick’s large paintings and returned to France, planning to sell them in Paris to raise her own plane fare back. En route, she raised some funds by […]
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Agustín Victor Casasola was not a painter or a poet or one of the many intellectuals or revolutionaries during the early decades of the twentieth century who consciously strove to forge a Mexican identity. Yet, as witness and recorder of those tumultuous years, his influence was as great and may prove to be more lasting. […]
Continue ReadingMusic is the universal language that crosses all barriers and penetrates the heart. There was no composer who understood the emotional draw of music better than Agustín Lara, and no song writer who has captured better the soul of the Mexican people. Agustín Lara’s career spanned nearly 70 years. In that time, he penned over […]
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