"Artisans of Michoacan - By Their Hands"

Monday, January 26, 2009

MARTIN ANDRADE PHOTOS

Dear readers:
Martin passed away suddenly on Jan. 27, 2009. I feel privileged to have known him and spent time with his family before he left us. Please keep his family in your thoughts and prayers.

Thanks,

Travis M. Whitehead

Martin works on a large laca plate with the

image of a droopy-eyed sun for a client from Spain.

MARTIN ANDRADE PHOTOS

Martin Andrade paints designs in mordente into a
laca plate.

Palm trees, a deer, and colorful flowers embellish

this small plate.

Martin painted a scene of Los Viejitos into this

batea. Isla Janitzio rises over Lake Patzcuaro in

the background.

Sunday, January 25, 2009

ARTISAN PROFILE - MARTIN ANDRADE RODRIGUEZ

MICHOACAN - ARTISAN PROFILE - MARTIN ANDRADE REWRITE
By Travis M. Whitehead
PATZCUARO - The droopy-eyed sun, shrouded in a golden mane of tempestuous fire, stares from the wine-tinted wooden laca (lacquerware) plate as butterflies traced in Italian gold struggle through a tangle of sunflowers and water lilies. They wait desperately, suspended in mid-transformation, for the paint to rush from Martin Andrade Rodriguez's brush and saturate them with the metallic technicolor fury adorning his plates, jewelry boxes, and lockets. Golden rays shoot from the delicate lips of fuschia-petaled blooms, bulbous flowers shimmer with warmth, monarch butterflies flutter above cobalt blue flowers and violet buds.

"I do it with my imagination. I don't draw my designs on paper like some people do," said the 52-year-old artisan, thick folds of flesh around his jawline broadening into frequent smiles, a powerful nose reaching toward his cheeks.

Lacas perfiladas en oro (roughly translated as lacquerware trimmed in gold), first arrived in Mexico from the Orient in the 1600s on ships making port calls in Acapulco. While those pieces were covered with motifs from the East, local artisans adapted the skill to their surroundings, covering the pieces with monarch butterflies, calla lilies, sunflowers, images of Los Viejitos, traditional foliage, and other impressions.

Martin, who began studying the craft at age 17, immediately impressed me with the liquid professionalism of his explanations. He spoke with the articulate flourishes of one who had given numerous presentations of his art. Martin's explorations with laca have taken him to Guatemala, Venezuela, Chicago, Sacramento, and New York. "I just do the drawing using a very fine brush. If I had the drawings, it would be easier and faster. But I think handicrafts should be more spontaneous. I have changed my designs, but I just see what the people like and try to improve. Every artisan has a different style, different colors, different designs. In the work of the artisan, they shouldn't steal the way they do it."

His wife Maria brought cold glasses of tangerine juice for myself and my companions, who included Trinidad Martinez Garcia from the Casa de las Artesanias - House of Handcrafts, returning to her kitchen where she prepared a mid-afternoon meal of beef, beans, and minced squash with onions and cream cheese; her skillfull compositions sent a chorus of delicious smells frolicking down the hall, heightening my senses as I explored the riotous jungle of images that had escaped from Martin's imagination into his work. Outside the door, Yeri the family dog dozed beneath an arbor covered with yellow campanitas flowers, red arteries of color reaching around bell-shaped blooms. Yeri's sidekick Tomas (Tom and Jerry?) was nowhere to be seen, possibly exploring the pine woods surrounding the home on the outskirts of Patzcuaro.

The power of Martin's work, springing from the thermal hot spring in his soul where new forms of life continuously evolved, conjured visions incomprehensible to the physical eye. The vibrations of a tropical bird's wings radiated from dishes, gusts of air were tossed into the room by the pounding of colorful jewels in mid-flight. A hummingbird darted from a saucer, then dove back into the glistening darkness; butterflies caressed flowers with their graceful touch while the very music of this luxurious wilderness flew into the room.

Martin's apprenticeship began at age 17 when he went to work at a store in Casa de Once Patios, a collection of shops near Plaza Vasco de Quiroga in Patzcuaro. The business sold plates decorated in the laca technique, and Martin, through careful observation, meticulously pieced the process together on his own. "Everybody that does this kind of work is very jealous, so it's very difficult to get someone to teach you. When I wanted to learn, nobody wanted to teach me, because they were afraid of the competition, that someone will make better work than you."

After five years of patient study, he had finally acquired enough skill to produce his own pieces, embarking on a career that now spans decades and has earned him numerous awards that include the Galardon Nacional del Arte Popular Mexicana 1988, and first place in the laca division of the Day of the Dead crafts competition in Patzcuaro in 2008. He feels a great deal of gratitude toward the talented practitioners from whom he learned the craft. "It doesn't matter they didn't want to teach me. I think of them as my teachers."

When I first visited Martin, he had already completed much of the design work on the plate with the droopy-eyed sun, destined for a Spanish client who saw his work in a hotel and commissioned the piece. I had watched closely as he painted sharp-peaked onion domes around the perimeter with the mordente, a glue made of copper oxide, garlic, azarcon (an orange pigment), linseed oil, and other ingredients that he boils together so the gold laminate, which comes in delicate thin sheets, will adhere to the plate.

A laca piece begins surrendering the colorful wilderness huddling in its shadows when Martin boils the wood to prevent its breakage later in the process. This step draws out the resin from the wood and seals any cracks. Artisans can also achieve this by allowing the wood to simply soak in cool water for four or five days, but Martin prefers the quicker method through boiling. After this step, he allows the wood to dry outside, but not in direct sunlight. After sanding, he applies seven or eight layers of laca (lacquer), an industrial substance, which he described as "like a car wax. It's called laca automotiva."

He allows each layer of laca to dry and then sands the piece before applying the next coat. After Martin has applied all the laca, he paints the designs in mordente. Each ingredient of this glue serves a specific purpose: garlic as a natural insect repellent, copper oxide to give it body, and greta, a substance that gives the gold its shine. After laying the mordente, he places delicate sheets of gold on top, rubbing lightly to make the thin layer adhere to the glue.

"The importance of putting the mordente is, for some reason, if you don't put that base it's very dull. It won't have the same shine. We have tried it before with other substances and it doesn't work. It doesn't have the same shine."

We broke for lunch, moving to a kitchen wrapped in orange stucco and taking our places at a lengthy tile counter that separated a larger room from the kitchen area. Maria, dressed in jeans and a white shirt with beige flowers, moved with the frenzied energy of a hummingbird as she made final preparations; she quickly served up clay bowls filled with the delicious meal, a glorious medley of flavors that also included a long pale green chile stuffed with ham and cheese.

"Is it very spicy?" I asked as she tended tortillas on a plate heated by a whispering gas flame.

"Not very," she answered, plopping the tortillas into a napkin with needlepoint flowers on the counter. I indulged myself in the delicious beans and the beef, taking a second helping of the chopped squash, and somewhere in the midst of the exuberant conversation sallying through the kitchen, I learned that the chile was quite hot. I cautiously sampled the ham and cheese inside, and found that the chile had christened the filling with an invigorating zip that I thoroughly enjoyed. I tried a piece of the chile and found it much too overpowering, and Triny took over, wrapping it in a tortilla and devouring the fiery bullet with ease.

The meal was delicious, which did not surprise me. On my first visit, Maria had served another meal of soup swimming with generous chunks of fish. They had told me then that they had moved to this home eight years before from Martin's native Tzurumutaro, where they protested their neighbors illegally cutting trees."We were against it," said Martin. "The people that were chopping down the trees didn't like us because we were against it. So we moved."

After we'd finished the mid-day banquet of beans and carne (and frightening chiles) we returned to the work area where Martin explained that he spends a great deal of time passing on his knowledge to others, teaching schoolchildren, university students, even the handicapped so they can support themselves. He cherishes the opportunity to stimulate the interest of young people.

"Sometimes in the afternoon I teach children how to do the work. Some of them can't walk. I teach them because I want them to learn so they can have a way to live."

Many of his and Maria's nine children have shown interest in the craft. Martin Jr., age 27, does laca work and clothing design. His daughter, Itzel (A Mejica name meaning "eternal flower along the way"), 17, paints some of the images, and then Martin puts in the shadows; 16-year-old Yuritzquiri ("little girl" in Purepecha) also paints, and so does 15-year-old Victor.

Young Jesus, who'd just turned 11, began studying the designs about two months ago. "He's interested in learning," said Martin. "I give him little chores, not too difficult. How to draw. I have himpracticing on a piece of paper."

Jesus, a thick frock of hair crowning his jowly face, fidgeted in his chair as he talked about the trade in which he had just begun his own apprenticeship. He expressed a deep admiration for his father's work. "I'm very proud," he said, his grubby hands twisting the tail of his black T-shirt.
"I would like to travel like my father," he continued, adding that he draws maybe an hour a day after finishing his homework. "I practice how to make flowers."

He already has some ideas about what he'd like to put on his own laca plates when he's older."I would like to put birds instead of butterflies, when I have learned enough to do it right, maybe when I am 17."

Sometimes, young students become Martin's teachers. He recalled a children's class he taught in which a boy began to erase something he'd drawn. "I told him 'No, leave it alone.' He said it was a flower but it was not perfect. I said, 'Nature is not always perfect.'" He chuckled a moment as he recalled the lesson he'd learned from this encounter. "You learn from everyone, sometimes kids. Even some of the people you teach."

That's a crucial lesson in the life of an artisan, that craftsmanship is a voyage of discovery without end. "I am always learning. In this kind of work, we are always learning."

Older, more traditional designs, such as paisley tear drops splashing from simple flowers suspended from curvilinear vines, sometimes compete with his more original works: sparks of gold exploding from rum-colored blooms with curved petals, bands of white swirling through violet pools, amber-colored monarchs fluttering through leaves cloaked in prismatic emerald.

"Sometimes people will ask us to make Oriental designs, like dragons. But I don't want to go out of the normal designs of the region."

He turned now to the project at hand, the droopy-eyed sun on its way to Spain. "I like to experiment. Like this little sun, this is a new design. There are some other people that have done it, but I try to do my sun curvy. Each one has his own style, own color. Like this one, I put colors that look like sun colors, and that's what we do. It's what tradition is made of."

His own tradition has provided a wellspring from which the human imagination can express itself across his plates, where fresh young minds oblivious to limitations can colonize their lives with vivid images lurking in their dreams. Martin's creativity, festering, pulsating, heaving, rushes across the plates reclining restlessly in the shadows, providing a fountain of inventiveness. From that jungle-shrouded wellspring arises a river that flows into deserts of atrophied perceptions, beckoning their stalled visions to pursue again their own emerging dreams.

FRANCISCO BAROCIO JACOBO - PHOTOS

Maria de los Angeles works on a small hand-sized
Catrina.

Maria, left, and her husband, Francisco Barocio
Jacobo, work in their shop.

Francisco puts the final touches on a husband and
wife pair of clay figures.

And elegant Catrina with flowers
on her fancy dress.

Francisco Barocio Jacobo places

Catrinas in his oven for firing.

ARTISAN PROFILE - FRANCISCO BAROCIO JACOBO

MICHOACAN – ARTISAN PROFILE – FRANCISCO BAROCIO JACOBO
By Travis M. Whitehead
CAPULA – From a lump of clay, Maria de los Angeles created a being of morose elegance: a foot-tall skeleton called a Catrina enraptured in an elegant evening gown covered with flowers. As Maria cut out the Catrina’s chest cavity to make room for the ribs, her husband, Francisco Barocio Jacobo, busily molded the parrots that would crawl up the figure’s dress. The Catrina was part of an order of 15 “Frida” Catrinas dressed to resemble Mexican artist Frida Kahlo for a store here in town. She would soon join the others on a shelf, some with monkeys perched on hips or shoulders, where they waited for their appointment with the round brick oven outside the workshop. Just a few hours before, these exquisite figures had been lost in a bag of dry dust but they had been transformed in the workshop of these two artisans into tangible apparitions of death's Gothic comedy.

Outside the workshop, Manchas the pit bull, who had demanded a perfunctory sniff of my hand before allowing entrance to the yard, dozed next to the round brick oven, about 3 1/2 feet across, where Francisco would fire the Catrinas. A bicycle rested in front of pink geraniums growing next to the house, clothes dried in the sun, and a mound of lumber and pine logs lay like splinters gouging the air. A stack of neatly-placed firewood waited near a much larger oven – about 10 feet in diameter – in which Francisco’s father Antonio and his mother Sara placed large jarros upside down.

Francisco and Maria had first captured my attention at the Domingo de Ramos Crafts Fair in Uruapan where their pieces portrayed a broad spectrum of existence, showing the narrow impasse that lies between the grotesque humor of life and a boundless gulf on the other side. A group of thoroughly intoxicated male Catrines sat spread-eagled against a saguaro pouring beer down their skeletal mouths; richly-dressed Catrinas sat with legs folded beneath them on boats with baskets of fruit and flowers. Other Catrinas danced about joyfully, while a pot-bellied Catrine with an ammo belt and a rifle wore a wide smile and commanding moustache. Another, much more reserved Catrine wore a black and white tuxedo. Perhaps they all represented different aspects of the physical world’s tug-of-war with its own demise, seeking to replenish itself with the pristine humor that offers a retreat from the shores of eternity.

Making Catrinas requires many years of practice. “I learned from watching other artisans around town,” said Francisco, 34. “It’s a tradition. I get ideas from the Revolution. I try to make something comical, like a guy trying to hug a girl and she’s pushing him away.”

“Frida,” interjected Maria, 32, pointing to a black clay figure with Mexican artist Frida Kahlo’s distinctive hair piece around her head. She had been painting a dancing Catrina – a bailarina, still headless – endowing her with hands holding out voluminous skirts adorned with a sea of vines and dappled with red or yellow flowers. Maria chewed slowly on a piece of gum and leaned close to the Catrina she was painting.

“It takes me two hours to do the one like the man in the tux. Then I let it dry for a day or two. Then I put it in the oven for five hours at 450 degrees. It takes me one hour to paint.”

In their shop a few weeks later, Francisco and Maria gave a much more detailed explanation of their craft. The small workshop next to their orange stucco house in Capula, constructed of corrugated tin over a frame of wooden boards and crooked branches, was a hive of activity by two solitary workers who had an instinct for the clay, massaging it with a deliberate precision until it released the images locked within its grasp.

The calm demeanor with which Maria and Francisco labored concealed the speed with which they worked. Maria’s crescent lashes veiled the warm glow of her sparkling brown eyes as she pressed tiny florets into slivers of wet dough with a home-made clay pattern. Francisco, in baggy brown corduroys, used small make-shift tools to cut lines of feathers and eyes into the parrots he pinned on the Catrina’s dress. He and his wife had an intimate connection with the clay, as if they knew exactly what the material needed to release the energy within its formless mass.

From their meticulous, tedious activity emanated a sweet nectar spilling from the quiet river pouring through their souls; it was a primal luxury of invention, this opportunity to reach into the very marrow of the collective human consciousness and extract at least a shadow of its reality, softening the hot hunger of death with a moment of ridicule at its most sinister visage, the human frame stripped of its pulse and dressed for a dinner party. In the world of the Catrina, nothing can stop the festival of life, not even the specter of permanent decay.

They worked quietly at a table near a wall of porous cinder brick and chipped mortar; plaster molds for the dresses lay on a lower shelf. Porous rock protruded through the dirt floor littered with shards from discarded projects. Behind Francisco stood two stone slabs resting on cinder blocks; two gleaming spools of wire lay curled on a wooden shelf nailed to the cinder brick wall and supported with more wire.

Maria and Francisco seemed suddenly masters of anatomy, creators of new personalities, or perhaps benefactors of restless lives dormant in the clay. Maria, dressed in a pair of rolled-up jeans and red Skecher shoes, rolled out long ribbons of clay and cut them in sections, placing them in the chest to form ribs. The flowers she had pressed into the clay now blossomed across the Catrina’s dress. She draped a thin line of dough around the waist and then pressed small scallops to match the gentle ripples of the dress.

Francisco pushed a wad of clay into a mold and out popped a skull. He carefully cut away at the piece to define the eye sockets, mouth, and teeth, then fit jagged clay sticks together to form the hands and connected them to arms that he attached after moistening the shoulder. The hands rested on small pieces of wire placed in the waist and hip to keep them in place until they dried.

“The first thing I started making were little bulls and horses, small things,” said Francisco, a moustache spilling over the corners of his mouth. “I started making the Catrinas when I was 13, maybe a year after I started working.”

That’s exactly how their children, William Antonio, 9, and Viridian, 12, have begun. When they come home from school, they make small leaves and feathers and flowers, simple objects to give them the feel of the clay.

Suddenly, William Antonio poked his head through a window between the workshop and their well-furnished home. Maria stopped for a moment to speak with him, then went back to her work, a craft that she also began practicing at about age 12. Although she began working in clay at that young age, she didn’t start making Catrinas until about 12 years ago when she married Francisco.

“Before I got married, at my house we used to work at making flower pots. We didn’t make the Catrinas.” She enjoys making the figures, although they require substantially more work. “It’s more tiring. Before I got married, it was 6 o’clock when I stopped. Now it’s more like 10.”

“We start at 7 a.m.,” added Francisco.

If their children decide to approach the Catrina challenge they will have their work cut out for them. Making Catrinas is not something you learn to do overnight; Francisco learned the craft through many difficult attempts.

“It was all hard. When I made my first Catrina, they came out to be not so fine.” They come out fine now. The newest member of the Frida Catrinas, now crowned with her own exquisite wreath about her head, was set aside to dry, while several of the others were placed in the oven.

Manchas still dozed just outside the opening where Francisco now needed to put the wood.
“He doesn’t want to move,” Francisco said with a laugh. He splintered a piece of wood with a loud crack that finally roused Manchas, who moved about six feet away and plopped onto the ground.
Francisco placed sheets of tin over the oven, anchored them with a brick, then lit a single piece of wood on the bottom. He would keep a very low fire for the first two hours – anything hotter and the Catrinas would break – then increase the heat for another three hours. The process would turn them a much brighter orange, and they would be painted before delivery.

By now a good fire had started in his parents' bigger oven, sunk halfway into the ground except for an excavated area for the opening where the wood was placed. Thick smoke filled the yard with a sweet pine flavor while roosters crowed from distant yards and birds sang in the trees. Hot sunshine burrowed into the yard and Manchas moved into some shade under a truck to continue his nap.

There would be no sleep for Francisco and Maria. They still had to finish another order: 30 hand-sized pairs of Catrinas depicting a bride and groom, complete in wedding dress and a tuxedo, for a business in Uruapan.

“These are harder to make,” said Maria, undaunted as she began the new task.