Artists and Authors associated with Lake Chapala, Mexico
Tony Burton
Tony Burton's books include “Lake Chapala: A Postcard History” (2022), “Foreign Footprints in Ajijic” (2022), “If Walls Could Talk: Chapala’s historic buildings and their former occupants” (2020), (available in translation as “Si Las Paredes Hablaran"), "Mexican Kaleidoscope” (2016), and “Lake Chapala Through the Ages” (2008).
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Distinguished American poet and painter John Brandi (born in California in 1943) and his wife Gioia lived in Jocotepec for about eighteen months, from the winter of 1968-69 to mid-1970. The couple’s youngest child, Giovanna, was born in Jocotepec.
Brandi graduated in 1965 from California State University, Northridge, with a B.A. in art and anthropology, before working as a Peace Corps volunteer with Andean farmers in Ecuador from 1966 to 1968. In Ecuador, he began to keep detailed, illustrated journals, a practice he continued while in Mexico. He was an early proponent of “do-it-yourself” self-publishing, producing hand-sewn mimeograph editions.
During his time in Jocotepec, Brandi composed illustrated “myth masses”, as well as hand-made poetry books.
In April 1969, Brandi took part in a collective exhibit that opened 18 April 1969 at La Galería, Ajijic. The announcement in Guadalajara daily Informador (20 April) lists the artists as John Kenneth Peterson, Charles Henry Blodgett (guest artist) and “El Grupo” (John Brandi, Tom Brudenell, Peter Paul Huf, his wife Eunice (Hunt) Huf, Jack Rutherford, Shaw, Cynthia Siddons and Robert Snodgrass).
In June 1969, and in a bid to challenge the artistic status quo in the Lake Chapala area, John Brandi joined with Brudenell and Shaw (all three artists were living in Jocotepec) in staging the Chula Vista “happening”. Brandi contributed drawings, milagros (folk charms) and poems to the happening, which opened, perhaps appropriately, on Friday 13 June.
Sketches by John Brandi for Chula Vista Happening
Brandi, a life-long political activist who joined protests against the American War in Vietnam, was living in the San Francisco Bay area, when he found his first publishing success, with a collection of poems entitled Desde Alla (Christopher’s Press, 1971). While he was living for a summer in a miner’s shack in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California, he met Gary Snyder, immortalized by Jack Kerouac in The Dharma Bums as Japhy Ryder. Snyder introduced him to Japanese poet-wanderer Nanao Sakaki.
In 1971, Brandi moved to New Mexico, where he built a cabin in a remote canyon, and founded Tooth of Time Books, which became a nationally-recognized poetry press.
John Brandi has had numerous collections of his poetry published, including Desde Alla (Christopher’s Press, 1971); Chimborazo: Life on the Haciendas of Ecuador (Akwesasne Notes Press, 1976); That Back Road In (Wingbow Press, 1985); Shadow Play: poems 1987-1991 (Light and Dust Books, 1992); Weeding the Cosmos (La Alameda Press, 1994); Heartbeat Geography: Selected & Uncollected Poems (White Pine Press, 1995); A Question of Journey: travel episodes India, Nepal, Thailand (Book Faith, India, 1999); Reflections in the Lizard’s Eye: High Desert Notes (Western Edge Press, 2000); Empty Moon : Belly Full, Haiku from India & Nepal (Pilgrims Publishing, India, 2000); In What Disappears (White Pine Press, 2003); One Cup and Another (Tangram Press, 2004); Water Shining Beyond the Fields (Tres Chicas Press, 2005); Staff in Hand, Wind in Pines (Tangram Press, 2008); Facing High Water (White Pine Press, 2008); Road to the Cloud’s House (with Renée Gregorio, La Alameda Press, 2009); Seeding the Cosmos: New & Selected Haiku (La Alameda Press, 2010); and The World, the World (White Pine Press, 2013).
Brandi has also undertaken translations, including parts of An Eye through the Wall: Mexican Poetry, 1970-1985 (Tooth of Time Books, 1986).
Brandi’s paintings have featured in numerous exhibitions including: San Francisco Public Library; Roswell Museum of Art, Roswell; New Mexico History Museum, Palace of the Governors, Santa Fe; Loka Cafe Gallery, Taos; Harwood Art Center, Albuquerque; Cruz Gallery, Santa Fe; Randall Davey Audubon Center, Santa Fe; Claudia Chapline Gallery, Stinson Beach, California; North Columbia Cultural Center, Nevada City, California; Woodland-Pattern Book Center, Milwaukee; Laurel Seth Gallery, Santa Fe; University of New Mexico Thompson Gallery, Albuquerque; Return Gallery, Taos; Moody Gallery, Houston, Texas.
Source
http://www.johnbrandi.com/art-oils-acrylics.html [14 May 2015]
Sombrero Books welcomes comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.
Christian Reid was the nom de plume chosen by Frances Christine Fisher (later Tiernan). As a woman writing in a man’s world, presumably she felt that her pen name would enable her to better compete with her male counterparts. Fisher was very familiar with the Lake Chapala area and must have visited it, or stayed there, in the late nineteenth century, though the precise details remain unclear. In 1890, Fisher published A Cast for Fortune: A Story of Mexican Life, which had the hacienda and village of Atequiza as its setting. (At that time, Atequiza was the railway station closest to the town of Chapala.)
Frances Christine Fisher. Credit: Archive.org
In the slightly later travel story, The Land of The Sun: On Lake Chapala (1893), the protagonists agree that Mexico’s constant sunshine makes any discussion of the weather irrelevant, unlike north of the border. They are on their way from Guadalajara to visit “Don Rafael’s hacienda.” After taking the train to Atequiza, they ride horses to Chapala. The horseback ride, about four leagues in distance, takes longer than they expected since, as one of the characters aptly comments, “Leagues in this country are very elastic.”
Once in Chapala, they comment favorably on the beauty of the surroundings, the thermal water with medicinal qualities, and the local hostelry with its equipal furniture.
Fisher (1846-1920) was born in Salisbury, North Carolina. Her father invested in mining ventures and was the president of the North Carolina Railroad. The family was left penniless in the aftermath of the Civil War, so she began writing for money at quite an early age.
Among early pieces was “Regret”, a poem written “in memory of Julian Fairfax, MA, University of Virginia”, in 1861, when Fisher was about 15 years old. Her first book was Valerie Aylmer, published in 1870, when she was 23. She was a prolific writer, especially of very popular and financially successful light romances. In all, she had almost fifty novels and travel narratives published. In several cases, the books used material that had been previously serialized in magazines. Her best-known book is The Land of the Sky (1876) set in the now homonymous western part of North Carolina. Many believe the region took its popular name from the book.
In 1887, Fisher married James M. Tiernan, a widower who had interests in silver mines in Mexico. In letters to her, Tiernan describes meeting President Díaz, and is critical of Americans who displayed prejudice against Mexicans. He also related his problems involving an embezzling official and a recalcitrant British engineer. It is unclear if the couple actually lived together in Mexico for any extended period, but she certainly must have visited frequently. The couple traveled widely, and Fisher used the knowledge she gained to write novels set not only in Mexico, but also in New York, the West Indies and Europe.
After her husband’s death in 1898, Fisher turned to the church. She continued to write, in her hometown of Salisbury, until her own death in 1920. Frances Fisher (aka Christian Reid) was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in October 2002.
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Sylvia Fein, one of America’s foremost female surrealist painters, spent several formative years in Ajijic in the 1940s.
Born in Milwaukee in November 1919, she was only 19 when she met her future husband William “Bill” Scheuber. She studied at the University of Wisconsin, and the couple married on 30 May 1942. Even at that time, a contemporary newspaper described her as “Wisconsin’s foremost woman painter.” Fein was one of a group of six painters known as the Wisconsin group who exhibited together and remained life-long friends. The others were Gertrude Abercrombie (1909-1977), Marshall Glasier (1902-1988), Dudley Huppler (1917-1988), Karl Priebe (1914-1976) and John Wilde (1919-2006).
Sylvia Fein, Ajijic, c 1944. Photo reproduced by kind permission of Sylvia Fein.
While her husband was away on military service (as an Air Force cryptographer), she moved to Mexico in 1943 to recuperate from pneumonia. Initially, she visited her mother in Mexico City, but a casual encounter with a former high school classmate, Charmin Schlossman Levy, led to her traveling to Ajijic on the shores of Lake Chapala, where she lived and painted until 1946. Interviewed by the press more than sixty years later in Mexico City, Fein said that ever since that time, “I have loved Mexico and could cry on my return because I have the dust of Mexico on my heart”.
During the years she lived in Ajijic, Fein was busy completing paintings for her first solo exhibition at the Perls Galleries in New York City in 1946. A sample of her works from this time can be seen at Work in Mexico, 1943-47, which includes images titled “Muchacha de Ajijic” (below) and “Insects that inhabit my studio in Ajijic.”
Sylvia Fein: Muchacha de Ajijic (1945). Reproduced by kind permission of the artist.
she helped rebuild the adobe house in which she had her studio, taught English to a few young people eager to go to work in Mexico City, and started an embroidered blouse industry for women who owned the two foot-pedaled sewing machines in the village. In exchange for exotic insects brought to her by the children for her own drawings, she provided paper, pencils and crayons and noted thoughtfully how spontaneously the children drew, and their meticulous observation, dexterity, humor and enjoyment.” (Elsewhere, she is said to have also worked with a local women’s cooperative and helped on a friend’s farm during her time in Ajijic.)
She knew, and worked with, Neill James (who first arrived in Ajijic in September 1943), and this quote means that Fein was already helping local children develop their artistic talents almost a decade before James began a more formal program for children’s art in 1954.
In Dust on my Heart (1946), Neill James describes how Sylvia Fein “worked out some original designs” for embroidery as her role in one of the first village enterprises that allowed local women and girls to earn some money at home during their spare time. In addition, Fein played a key role in marketing the embroidered blouses in Mexico City.
Victor Serge, a Russian exile in Mexico, visited Ajijic over the Christmas-New Year period, 1944-45, and describes Fein in his diaries as having an:
irregular face where the forehead is too big, anxious and frustrated: her husband has been a long time in the war somewhere in the islands of the Pacific. She’s afraid of bad news and is hard hit by being on her own. She has the first-rate drawing of a diligent beginner, gladly turns over the pages of old albums, knows water-color, treasures Persian miniatures. As she’s dominated by frustration and anxiety, the canvases of a very mournful young girl result, naive, delicate and falsely naive, with remarkable symbolics of cats, birds, eyes.”
After Ajijic, and when her husband returned from the war, the couple lived for a time in Mexico City before driving, with Fein’s paintings, back to the U.S.. Before leaving Mexico, Fein did some exporting of silver jewelry, seeking out fine pieces and shipping them to an uncle who had a shop in Milwaukee. Fein dealt with many of the most famous silversmiths of Taxco.
At the U.S. border crossing on their return, the customs agent asked about all the paintings. After a brief discussion, it was apparently agreed that they were “antiques” and therefore exempt from duty!
Fein’s first solo exhibition was a great success. Reviewing the show for The New Yorker, Robert M. Coates wrote that, “The Perls has a first one-man exhibition by a young Milwaukee artist named Sylvia Fein… whose work somehow manages to suggest the German Gothic and the Oriental at practically the same moment… her technique—firm, precise, and clear—is always authoritative.”
Later that year, her work was included in the 1946–47 Whitney Annual exhibition, alongside paintings by Max Ernst, Roberto Matta, and Jackson Pollock.
When WW2 ended and her husband Bill Scheuber returned from military service, they made their home in the San Francisco Bay area where Fein completed her MFA at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1951. Writing in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1962, Alfred Frankenstein extolled the virtues of Fein’s art: “Clarity, finesse, and perfection of draftsmanship are other virtues Sylvia Fein possesses. She is one of the most highly individual painters in the Bay Region and one of the most accomplished”.
After their daughter Heidi was born, Fein kept a meticulous record of her early drawings and artwork, which prompted her to write two landmark books about children’s art: Heidi’s Horse (California: Exelrod Press, 1976) and First Drawings: Genesis of Visual Thinking (Exelrod, 1992). The books have had a major influence on child development specialists interested in the creative process of young children.
Like Carrington, Kahlo and other great women artists of the past century, Fein is a solitary genius who has created a rich world on her own terms.” – Michael Duncan, Art in America, April 2008
Only late in life, did Fein finally receive the recognition long due her as one of America’s foremost surrealists. A series of major shows then placed her art alongside that of other great painters such as Leonora Carrington and Frida Kahlo, Louise Bourgeois, Lee Miller and Dorothea Tanning:
“With Friends: Six Magic Realists 1940-1965”, Chazen Museum of Art, Madison, Wisconsin (2005)
Sylvia Fein’s other major solo exhibitions include: Perls Galleries, New York (1946); Feingarten Galleries, San Francisco (1957, 1959, 1961); Sagittarius Gallery, New York (1958); Lane Galleries, Los Angeles (1958); Saint Mary’s College, Moraga, California (1960); Kunstkabinett, Frankfurt, Germany (1960); Mills College Art Gallery, Oakland, California (1962); Ruthermore Galleries, Oakland, California (1962); Maxwell Art Galleries, San Francisco (1963); Nicole Gallery, Berkeley, California (1965); Bresler Galleries, Milwaukee, Wisconsin (1966).
Sylvia Fein died in California on 1 April 2024, at the age of 104.
Acknowledgment
My sincere thanks to Sylvia Fein for her warm hospitality during a visit to her home and studio in February 2015, and for being kind enough to review a draft of this post.
Sombrero Books welcomes comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.
Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was an African American playwright, artist and author of political speeches and essays. She studied art in Ajijic at Lake Chapala in the summer of 1949, mid-way through her studies at the University of Wisconsin, where she took classes in art, literature, drama and stage design.
Hansberry was born in Chicago on 19 May 1930 and died of cancer at the age of 34 in New York City on 12 January 1965.
Lorraine Hansberry (1959)
Her father, Carl Hansberry, was a prominent Chicago realtor who, in 1938, challenged the city’s racially segregated housing laws, by moving his family into a “restricted” area near the University of Chicago. The resulting violence, in which bricks and concrete slabs were thrown through their windows, prior to them losing their legal suit challenging the legality of restrictive covenants and being evicted from that home, subsequently inspired Lorraine Hansberry to write her best-known play, A Raisin in the Sun (1959).
A Raisin in the Sun was the first play written by an African American woman to be produced on Broadway. The 29-year-old author became the youngest American playwright to receive the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play over Tennessee Williams‘s Sweet Bird of Youth. The play was translated into 35 languages. A movie version of A Raisin in the Sun was released in 1961, starring Sidney Poitier, Claudia McNeil and Ruby Dee. The movie was nominated “Best Screenplay of the Year” by the Screen Writers Guild and won a special award at Cannes Film Festival. Raisin, a musical based on the play, opened in New York in 1973.
Lorraine Hansberry was only 15 years old in 1945, when her father, “in a final desperate act to escape racial oppression in the U.S.”, moved to a suburb of Mexico City. Carl Hansberry was making arrangements to relocate his family to Mexico when he died there the following year from a cerebral hemorrhage.
In 1948-49, Lorraine was a resident of the Art Circle (a housing community for artists) on the near north side of Chicago. The poets she met there included Bob Kaufman, ruth weiss—who would herself visit Ajijic in the late 1950s—and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks, who was a particular inspiration for her. (Lorraine’s poem “Flag from a Kitchenette Window” was greatly inspired by Brooks’ “Kitchenette Building.”)
Lorraine spent the summer of 1949 in Ajijic studying art, at a University of Guadalajara extension Mexican Art Workshop in Ajijic run by Mrs. Irma Jonas. Teachers at the Mexican Art Workshop that year included Alexander Nicolas Muzenic, Ernesto Butterlin and Tobias Schneebaum.
The following summer she studied art at Roosevelt University in Chicago before moving to New York City, where she took courses in jewelry-making, photography and short story writing at the New School for Social Research. While living in New York, she became actively involved in peace and freedom movements.
Hansberry wrote several other plays, including The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, which played for 101 performances on Broadway and closed the night she died.
Hansberry’s life and achievements inspired her close friend Nina Simone to write the song “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” (lyrics by Weldon Irvine), first recorded in 1969.
At Hansberry’s funeral, a tribute message from Martin Luther King Jr. praised “her commitment of spirit” and “her profound grasp of the deep social issues confronting the world today.”
Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was posthumously inducted into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame in 1999, and the American Theatre Hall of Fame in 2013.
Reference:
Steven R. Carter. 1980. “Commitment amid Complexity: Lorraine Hansberry’s Life in Action”, in MELUS, Vol. 7, No. 3, Ethnic Women Writers I (Autumn, 1980), pp. 39-53.
Imani Perry. 2018. Looking for Lorraine: the radiant and radical life of Lorraine Hansberry. Boston: Beacon Press.
Charles Shields. 2022. Lorraine Hansberry: The Life Behind A Raisin in the Sun.
Comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios are welcomed. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.
Artist Ray Cooper, a friend of Tom Brudenell, traveled with Brudenell from Berkeley to Jocotepec in late 1967 and remained in the town for several months until April 1968. It was during the town’s annual January fiestas in 1968 that Brudenell drew a barefoot Cooper, working by candlelight at a desk, under the protection of a typical Jocotepec tiled roof:
Tom Brudenell: Ray Cooper in Jocotepec, 1968
Brudenell recalls his Berkeley friend as long-haired, usually barefoot, and absorbed in his art and his family.
Cooper has vivid memories of their trip to Mexico, perhaps because it was his first trip abroad. He remembers that he did not want to be seen as a hippie, given that at that time “hippies were being deported” from Mexico. To that end, he kept his hair short, never wore shorts, and “wore long sleeve white or light blue dress shirts and clean Levi’s… We dressed to a middle class Mexican standard, avoided marijuana and were sober.”
Cooper, born in 1942, studied at the Cornish School of Allied Arts in Seattle (1962-1963) and the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland (1964-1967). Disillusioned by the direction art education was taking, and demoralized by the Vietnam War, Cooper dropped out of art school, and jumped at the chance to travel with Brudenell to Mexico.
Cooper recalls that they entered Mexico after a detour to Phoenix to collect a dark-haired, bespectacled girl named Peggy who was on her way down to San Miguel de Allende to start a photography class. He remembers that, after an adventurous trip, they left Peggy in San Miguel and returned to Lake Chapala, where they looked for a house to rent. Deciding that rents were too high in Chapala and Ajijic, they settled on a small home in Jocotepec, where both painters soon became immersed in their work.
(Coincidentally, Ray Cooper’s brother Stanley and one of his brother’s close friends, the artist Billy King, would both later live in the Lake Chapala area for many years.)
Cooper loved Mexico. He liked the people, enjoyed the food and found new artistic freedom in being there. His trip turned out to be the start of extensive travels in various parts of the world, including Costa Rica, Mauritius, France, Greece, Italy, Tunisia and Egypt.
Ray Cooper: Travelers (ca 1970). Reproduced by kind permission of the artist.
While in Mexico, Cooper discovered Huichol Indian art for the first time. He greatly admired the ceramics skills of pre-Columbian potters in Colima, renowned for their beautifully-proportioned portrayals of animals and zoomorphic figures. Spending time in Guadalajara, contemplating the striking, large-scale murals by artists such as José Clemente Orozco, also had a powerful influence on his art.
Shortly after his return to the U.S., Cooper utilized his memories of the art of Huichol Indians, Colima potters and Mexican muralists, to help him draw a stage backdrop of imaginary figures for a Halloween Ball fund-raiser for the (later controversial) Synanon rehabilitation program in San Francisco.
Cooper’s fine paintings have been featured in many exhibitions, including at the California Biennial Competitive Show, Richmond, California (1968); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1968); Geyser Peak Winery Reception Center, California (solo show, 1975); Napa Sonoma Wine Industry Competitive Exhibit, California (Prize-winning, 1975); Oregon Episcopal School Faculty Exhibitions, Portland (1979-1993); Botanical Garden, Asheville, North Carolina (solo show, 2002); Muse Salon, Haywood Park Hotel, Asheville (2003); The Casbah, Tunis, Tunisia (2004); Holy Ground, Asheville, North Carolina (solo show, 2007); Converse College, Spartanburg, South Carolina (collaborative exhibit with Tunisian artist Hamadi Ben Saad, entitled “Trans-Atlantic Voyages”, 2010); Opportunity House, Hendersonville, North Carolina (solo show and workshop, 2012); Starving Artist Art Supply and Gallery, Hendersonville, North Carolina (2012); The Arts Arena Gallery, Delray Beach, Florida (2014).
Ray Cooper: Temple (2013). Reproduced by kind permission of the artist.
Alongside his art, Cooper worked for many years in landscape design. This is especially evident in many of his later paintings which are powerfully simple depictions of the natural world.
On his website, Cooper explains that,
My work explores the mystery of life using easily read symbols that imply passage of time and evolution. The earth, sky, water, clouds, ferns, flowering trees, and fruit are essences abstracted to represent everything.”
While we cannot know how all this came to be, we must wonder. Science can only describe, it does not explain. A transcendent element in science is possible, and faith without rational thought does not necessarily rise above superstition. To know anything, both are necessary.
Questioning the nature of Nature, plus having faith in the existence of a Divine ultimate reality are equal in my attempt to understand the world. The profound mystery of life requires a leap of faith and my paintings are about that.”
Want to learn more?
Ray Cooper’s website – http://www.raycoopergallery.com/ – had numerous examples of recent work but is no longer active.
Sincere thanks to both Tom Brudenell (first interviewed at his home, 1 Feb 2015) and Ray Cooper (first interviewed by phone and email, 15 April 2015) for sharing their memories of Mexico.
Robert Penn Warren, the great American poet, novelist and literary critic, was born in Kentucky on 24 April 1905 and died in Vermont on 15 September 1989. Warren lived and wrote in Chapala for several months in the summer of 1941.
Warren entered Vanderbilt University in 1921, where he became the youngest member of a group of Southern poets known as the Fugitives. Other members included John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson and Merrill Moore. Warren’s first poems were published in The Fugitive, the magazine published by the group from 1922 to 1925.
From 1925 to 1927, Warren taught at the University of California, while earning his master’s degree. He also studied at New College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. After marrying Emma Brescia (nicknamed “Cinina”) and returning to the U.S. in 1930, he taught at Vanderbilt, Louisiana State, the University of Minnesota, and Yale University.
2005 U.S. stamp commemorating Robert Penn Warren
Warren was a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and founded the influential literary journal The Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks in 1935. He and Brooks also co-wrote a textbook Understanding Poetry (1938), which would prove to have a profound influence on the study of poetry in American colleges.
Warren, accompanied by his wife Cinina, visited Chapala in 1941, two years after the publication of his acclaimed first novel Night Rider.
Relatively little is known about their stay at Chapala, or their motivation in choosing to go there. However, Warren did have a family connection to the nearby city of Guadalajara. In Portrait of a Father, published in 1988, the year before his death, Warren wrote about the similarities between his father’s life and his own. Among the family members recalled in the book is Warren’s uncle Sam, who had worked in mining and lived in Guadalajara. Warren adds that he had often been there “during a long stay at Chapala”.
A few tantalizing snippets of information can be gleaned from the correspondence between Warren and his colleague Cleanth Brooks, published by the University of Missouri Press in 1998.
In a letter dated 17 July 1941, and signed “Red” (Warren’s nickname on account of the color of his hair), he wrote, from the Hotel Nido in Chapala, that Chapala was “a tiny town on a lake, surrounded by mountains, with a fine climate”, before providing some details of his living arrangements:
We have rented a little house, new and verminless, for which we pay six dollars a month, though getting it screened raised the rent several dollars more. A cook is a dollar a week, and food is cheap. The place beautiful, smelly and picture-postcardy. There are some Americans about, including Witter Bynner – who, in fact was about, very much about, with a palatial establishment, but he left yesterday for Colorado. But we have led a pretty isolated life here. Cinina was pretty busy for a few days getting the domestic machinery in motion, and I’ve been working and studying Spanish and swimming and going to the can more often than usual. Not that I’ve got a bug in me yet, but the complaint seems to be usual here upon first arrival…” (Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren: A Literary Correspondence, p 55)
He bemoaned his lack of access to American magazines,
We’ve seen one copy of Time, Latin America edition, but you can’t buy it here at Chapala, and we don’t go to Guadalajara, thirty miles away, but once a week…”
Chapala did offer him, though, a good space in which to think and work:
I’ve got some ideas for new poems, but haven’t done anything on them since arrival. The novel occupies most of my thoughts.”
“The novel” is presumably his second novel, At Heaven’s Gate, first published in 1943.
The following month, August 1941, he wrote that he had mailed a manuscript from Guadalajara to The Southern Review, but had to go to the city by bus because he was temporarily without his car:
We still like Chapala, but are getting awfully anxious for Baton Rouge. It seems that our car may be ready within a few days–though one can’t be too sure. I saw the body work the other day in Guadalajara, and you can’t even tell that the thing had taken a beating. But it has shore [sic] God played hell with what passes for the Warren budget.”
Warren also referred in this letter to “the unexpected arrival of the Albrizios”, friends from the U.S., whom “Cinina just happened to see”, “on the street at Chapala”. He excused his relative lack of work progress as being due to “matters of weather, stubbing toes, catching colds, having hangovers, and such…”
By coincidence, the house rented by Warren was later the home in 1952/1953 of Willard Marsh, author of the novel Week With No Friday (set at Lake Chapala), and his wife George. The owner of the house remembered “Red” as “a nice person with “red” hair who drank a lot – and gave wonderful parties!”
Warren’s marriage to Cinina ended in 1951; the following year, he married Eleanor Clark. He received numerous awards for his work, including the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for the novel All the King’s Men (1946), as well as the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in both 1958 and 1979. Warren is the only person to have won Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and poetry. He was appointed as the first poet laureate of the United States (1986 -1987).
The art group known as Grupo 68 was founded in 1967 and initially comprised Peter Huf, his wife Eunice (Hunt) Huf, Jack Rutherford, John Kenneth Peterson and Shaw (the artist Don Shaw). Jack Rutherford dropped out after about a year, but the others remained as a group until 1971.
Grupo 68 exhibited regularly (most Sunday afternoons), from early in 1968, at the Hotel Camino Real in Guadalajara, at the invitation of the hotel’s public relations manager Ray Alvorado (a singer) and also held many group shows in Ajijic, both at Laura Bateman’s Rincón del Arte gallery, as well as (later) in “La Galería”, the collective gallery they founded at Zaragoza #1, Ajijic. In addition, the group also showed in Guadalajara with José María de Servín, El Tekare, and at Ken Edwards store in Tlaquepaque.
January 1968 – 20 January 1968 – All four artists included in a group show at Ken Edwards (El Palomar), Tlaquepaque – 9 artists in total. Opened Saturday 20 January 1968. Artists: Eunice Hunt, Peter Paul Huf, Shaw, John Kenneth Peterson, Coffeen Suhl, Hector Navarro, Gustavo Aranguren, Rodolfo Lozano, Gail Michaels [“Michel” on invite].
1968 – 1971 Camino Real Hotel, Guadalajara. Grupo 68 members held weekly shows most Sundays by the hotel pool. Participation varied, but usually included works by all four artists.
July 1968 – Tekare penthouse, 16 de Septiembre #157, 10th floor, Guadalajara. All four members of Grupo 68 (Eunice Hunt, Peter Paul Huf, Shaw, John Kenneth Peterson). Opened on Tuesday 23 July 1968, and was very favorably reviewed by Allyn Hunt in “Art Probe” (Guadalajara Reporter, 27 July 1968) :
“four highly independent artists (with four very different styles) who have the discipline, while regularly showing together, not to adopt a group means in approaching pictorial problems.”
“Most immediately charming are Eunice Hunt’s acrylic and pen and ink pieces, “Fleurs du Mal”, “Ophelia” and “Aurora”.”
“Peter Huf exhibits two serigraphs of exceptional strength… these are among the show’s best works.”
“Donald Shaw is probably this group’s most exploratory imagination, the one that when working at peak thrust, dominates technique and pictorial concepts most thoroughly.”
“John Peterson displays several mosaic-like watercolors, the best of which are his ferris wheel pictures and “Butterfly”.”
September 1968 – “re-opening” of the Rincon del Arte gallery in Ajijic – Calle Hidalgo 41, 21 Sep 1968 – 10 October. Group show, including all four Grupo 68 members, opened Saturday 21 September – Eight painters, one sculptor (Joe Wedgewood, recently arrived from Santa Monica, California). Artists: Tom Brudenell, Alejandro Colunga, Coffeen Suhl, Eunice Hunt, Peter Paul Huf, John K Peterson, Jack Rutherford, Donald Shaw, Joe Wedgewood. [by then Shaw had been identified as Donald Shaw]
October 1968 – Works of Jose María de Servín and Grupo 68, at Galería del Bosque, Calle de la Noche 2677, Guadalajara; opened 24 October 1968. All four members of Grupo 68 (Shaw, John Kenneth Peterson, Eunice Hunt, Peter Paul Huf) in a joint show, as part of the Cultural Program of the International Arts Festival for the XIX Olympics.
December 1968 – “Art is Life; Life is Art” at La Galería, Ajijic. All four Grupo 68 members joined with other artists in a group show “The Group” (“El Grupo”) at the re-opening of La Galeria in Ajijic; show ran from Friday 13 December 1968 to 10 January 1969. Artists: Tom Brudenell, Alejandro Colunga, John Frost, Paul Hachten, Eunice Hunt, Peter Paul Huf, John Kenneth Peterson, Jack Rutherford, José Ma. De Servin, Shaw, Cynthia Siddons, Joe Wedgewood. A review in Guadalajara Reporter said that,
“The very entryway bristles with such attention-grabbing pictures as Paul Hachten’s etching of the map of the United States, John Frost’s delicate photoprint nude, Eunice Hunt’s haunting “Labyrinth” – in which webs of gentle orange have been deftly squeezed against a gray and black background. One of the best works in the show is hung here: Donald Shaw’s tour de force serigraph, “Spore Box”, presenting us with brilliantly-conceived chromatic ideas and imaginative forms which do not relay on optical illusionism, excessive optical vibration or three-dimensionality. This is undoubtedly the best serigraph Shaw – who has executed several series of rewarding prints – has produced.”
February 1969 – Three of the Grupo 68 exhibited at the Tekare penthouse restaurant-gallery, 16 de Septiembre #157, 10th floor, Guadalajara; opened 4 February. Artists: Eunice Hunt, Peter Paul Huf, Shaw.
April 1969 – All five members of the original Grupo 68 showed works in a collective exhibit that opened 18 April 1969 at La Galería, Ajijic. The announcement in Guadalajara daily Informador (20 April) lists the artists as John Kenneth Peterson, Charles Henry Blodgett (guest artist) and “El Grupo” (John Brandi, Tom Brudenell, Eunice Hunt, Peter Paul Huf, Jack Rutherford, Shaw, Cynthia Siddons and Robert Snodgrass).
June 1969 – Grupo 68 show at Instituto Aragon, Hidalgo 1302, Guadalajara, opened 25 June. All four Grupo 68 artists (Shaw, Eunice Hunt, Peter Paul Huf, John Kenneth Peterson) were involved (see image).
September 1969 – (3 September for a month) – Three Grupo 68 artists exhibited together at Galeria 1728 (owned by Jose María de Servin), Hidalgo 1728, Guadalajara. The show was entitled 7-7-7 (7 works each by Eunice Hunt, Peter Paul Huf and Shaw, the show’s title derived from the Olympics scoring system); opened on Wednesday 3 September.
Sources:
Peter Paul Huf and Eunice Hunt (interviewed in 2014); photos and gallery invitations in collections of Peter Paul Huf, Eunice Hunt, Tom Brudenell and others.
Sombrero Books welcomes comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.
Christian Reid was the nom de plume chosen by Frances Christine Fisher (later Tiernan). You should be automatically redirected to the current page at http://lakechapalaartists.com/?p=2257
In June 1969, three young Jocotepec-based artists – John Brandi, Tom Brudenell, and Shaw – joined forces to stage a Cocktail Party “happening” [1].
What exactly did the artists have in mind?
According to Shaw, the prime instigator of the event, the purpose of the Chula Vista happening, or “performance”, was to challenge the artistic status quo in the Lake Chapala area. It was intended to be deliberately provocative, hence the choice of venue being Chula Vista, the first retirement real estate development in the area. The idea was to target American retirees, many of whom, Shaw felt, were only there because land, building materials and labor were far cheaper than in the States. Though they chose to live there, many of them “hated the people who worked for them”: the campesinos, maids and gardeners.
Brudenell’s motives were somewhat different. He wrote at the time that all three artists had independently come to believe that observers needed to do more than simply observe, they needed to be drawn into the artists’ work. The artists’ terminology differed but shared ample common ground: Brudenell’s idea of “Hypnosis” was essentially the same as Brandi’s “Participation” and Shaw’s “Ritual”. In consequence, Brudenell (who prefers to call the event a “Myth-Mass”) says that this “ritual” event was aimed at creating an atmosphere that might stimulate the audience to venture beyond passive viewing.
All three artists intended this to be a trial run for a series of later “Myth-Mass” events targeted at diverse groups and communities, from small-town America to the Oakland chapter of the Hell’s Angels. (For a variety of reasons, these plans were never realized).
Where, when, and how?
The Chula Vista Cocktail Party happening was held in a partly-completed building alongside the Chula Vista motel, mid-way between Ajijic and Chapala, and took place, perhaps appropriately, on Friday 13th June 1969.
Whatever the precise motivation, this seems to have been Mexico’s first ever artistic happening, occurring a few years after the earliest happenings in the U.S., but at about the same time as the first to be held in Canada.
A couple of weeks prior to the event, the three artists spent three or four days in the Chula Vista area, interviewing residents, gathering ideas and taking photos of the people, workers and area. Some of this material became an integral part of the happening.
The three artists made somewhat different contributions to the overall event. John Brandi contributed drawings, milagros (folk charms) and poems. Brudenell contributed paintings and set up stations (echoing rituals of a mass) with pebbles, bowls, slides and smell-bulbs (olfactory triggers for the recall of past experiences). Shaw made prints of symbols and constructed 3-D scenes involving large transparent plastic symbol forms, stuffed with various figures (many of them dolls) which could be walked through and around.
Brudenell’s journal entries from the months prior to the Chula Vista event offer some fascinating insights into his thinking about how the 1969 Chula Vista event should be organized. The three key elements that Brudenell conceptualized were Setting, Symbols and Ritual.
He saw the Setting as preparatory, but essential to establish “anticipatory impulses”. The Symbols, devices for Affect, needed to “create a following,” while the elements associated with Ritual/Hypnosis/Participation [RHP) needed to grab and hold people’s attention:
“Setting must be familiar stimuli but must prepare O [Observer] for unfamiliar or unacceptable stimuli.”
“Symbols must evoke following or they will become decoration.”
“RHP must be operable in presentation of symbols and can most easily be applied using the mechanisms of the Setting.”.
For this multi-room event to succeed, Brudenell was convinced that the links between elements must be stressed:
“For example, magazine on table in Setting could be photographed on table exactly as it is. The photo would serve (in the Symbol room) as a link between the familiar object and the associated symbolism.”
[The overall purpose is] “not a matter of introducing the NEW (i.e. blowing minds). It is the matter of EXTENDING the ritual beyond the point of its freezing – that point beyond which the People do not wish (fear) to go.”
In autobiographical notes written later for the Emily Carr College Outreach program, Brudenell summarized his own contribution as searching for “universes beyond the limits of the biologist’s microscope and the astronomer’s telescope.”
The invitations (see first image, click to enlarge) said that the event was hosted by “U” (underlined several times, perhaps alluding to an I-Ching symbol, used thousands of years earlier, for opening the mind to receiving answers to fundamental questions). Shaw prepared some unique hand-printed prospectuses, priced at $30 pesos and available on request.
The artists’ plan, by Shaw, for the site was positively architectural, and it was organized so as to ritualize the event, with well-defined steps and symbols, akin to a religious Mass:
The cocktail party was the ritual. The four “ritual objects” or “symbol objects” for the event were steak, screen, check, flower-seed. These were “transition” objects “for leading the viewer deeper into underlying or new perspectives embodied in each symbol. This well-known “symbol search” method has been used in Expressive therapy and art to facilitate an individual’s “inward” awareness, to bring the unconscious into the conscious.”
It was a walk-through event, in which visitors were first offered a cocktail and then ushered along a route through various rooms to view, be exposed to, or take part, in a variety of artistic stimuli. The “manual” written by the artists set out specific requirements for how the various slides, printed images, sense-challenging objects, and so on, should be presented.
All visitors were given an “Instructions” sheet to help explain what they needed to do in order to appreciate the happening to the fullest:
The set-up plan for the first room at the entrance looked like this:
The set-up plan for Room 3 involved slides projected through filters and visitors were asked to place their pebble and read a label before the relevant slides began to be shown:
Room 5 was the show-stopper. Visitors had earlier watched a short movie and studied various still photos. Now they were confronted with sights ranging from a vintage 1910 Ford truck, complete with campesino driver sounding the vehicle’s horn every few minutes, to an indigenous woman in one corner preparing hand-made tortillas over a wood fire.
Was it a success?
Shaw recalls that the event was attended by about 150 people, 90% of whom clearly enjoyed it. He professes himself particularly delighted that the campesinos understood it, and that Mexicans loved it..
He says that the powerful ponche served at the event certainly loosened the audience’s tongues, to the point where one particular American became overly aggressive and had to be repeatedly told to quieten down by other visitors. A few weeks later, when Shaw visited a Mexican official in Guadalajara, the official told him that his office had received a phone call from someone at the U.S. consulate asking that Shaw and his fellow artists be kicked out of the country. The official then laughed and said “That will never happen!” since the event had clearly been enjoyed by everyone else, especially those Mexicans present.
On the other hand, Brudenell doubted that it had been a success. He felt that most of the audience misinterpreted the artists’ intentions, and mistakenly thought they were attending a “light-show” or a “mean-spirited [artistic] ambush”.
His notes, made immediately after the 1969 Chula Vista Myth-Mass, suggest how future events could be improved:
“Person-to-person relationship was neglected. Apparent feeling that the “machine” would do it all was primary cause of failure. Unprepared hostesses did not provide guidance for the audience.”
“ORIENTATION is MOST important. Without knowing the ritual beforehand the audience cannot be expected to focus attention on the content of the ritual.”
“Some people felt the rite to be an unsophisticated light-show. The mere use of electricity gives hints of “mind blowing light-show.” Need to avoid being categorized as “light show” – must eliminate electricity in every possible way. Need to emphasize tactile ritual setting – primitiveness.”
What is the event’s significance?
As both Shaw and Brudenell stressed to me, the Chula Vista “Myth-Mass” needs to be viewed against the backdrop of the 1960s. The happening took place at a time when the U.S. had become extremely divided, on account of events such as the Vietnam War, the War on Drugs, and the Civil Rights Movement. It also took place only a year after the killing of up to 300 students in the Tlatelolco massacre in Mexico City. In their various ways, all three artists were caught up in the “Art imitates life” revolution of the 1960s.
Soon after the Chula Vista event, the trio staged two more happenings, both in Guadalajara, but they abandoned plans for similar events in the U.S. Within a year, Brudenell and Brandi had both left Jocotepec and headed north, though Shaw remained in Jocotepec for several more years.
The event also holds significance because it was, almost certainly, Mexico’s first ever artistic happening. It certainly challenged the local community to engage more with local artists.
The entire approach was clearly meant to be provocative, and might almost be considered presumptuous. This particular happening was almost guaranteed to alienate many of those witnessing it! Fortunately for the artists who would follow, it had no obvious adverse impact on the region’s art community.
Lake Chapala had a flourishing artistic and literary community during the 1960s and early 1970s. The area had attracted a good number of talented young artists and writers from Europe and the U.S. This 1969 Chula Vista event was held right in the middle of this particularly fecund period of artistic experimentation and exploration. By the mid-1970s, many of the artists had moved on, taking their experiences from Mexico to look for new challenges and inspiration elsewhere. As we have seen in this series, many would soon became well-recognized artists in their new homes.
The artistic vacuum they left behind at Lake Chapala took some time to fill. It created opportunities for other artists to achieve some degree of commercial success. This was especially true for those who focused on producing art that matched the tastes of the growing tide of incomers moving into the many new residential developments springing up along the lakeshore.
– – –
[1] Footnote: While a “happening” has no precise definition, Wikipedia calls it “a performance, event or situation meant to be considered art, usually as performance art. Happenings occur anywhere and are often multi-disciplinary, with a nonlinear narrative and the active participation of the audience. Key elements of happenings are planned but artists sometimes retain room for improvisation.” –
My sincere thanks to both Don Shaw and Tom Brudenell for commenting on an early draft of this piece, for discussing their memories of this event with me, and for allowing me access to many documents and artworks from their private collections. Unfortunately, my attempts to contact John Brandi, the third artist, for his perspectives, have so far been unsuccessful.
Comments, corrections or additional material welcome. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.
Tom Brudenell (Thomas James Brudenell), a painter, muralist and qualified art therapist who now resides in Canada, was born 18 July 1937 in Kansas City, and lived in the Lake Chapala region for several years in the late 1960s.
When he was a child, Brudenell’s family moved frequently, living for extended periods in Chicago, Sheboygan (Wisconsin) and Kansas City (Missouri). His father was a mechanical engineer, whose own education was cut short by the second world war when he was sent to Caterpillar to help design tank engines.
Brudenell was an active and mischievous child, with great curiosity for the world around him. He excelled in athletics, drawing, desert lore, and all branches of science.
The earliest transformative experience he remembers came when he was seven years old and first saw the Rocky Mountains. Coming from the Great Plains, in the family Plymouth en route to California along Rte. 66, he was awestruck, initially thinking that the mountains were cloud formations.
Brudenell left high school on a full scholarship to study chemical engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), a private research university located in Troy, New York. Coming to the realization that he wanted more than a pure science education, he transferred to the University of California at Berkeley.
At Berkeley, he roomed with archaeology student Len Foote, beginning a lifelong friendship. Brudenell took courses in psychology, the history of art and architecture (given by Walter Horn), literature, and studio art courses taught by Glenn Anthony Wessels (1895-1982), then close to retirement.
After completing his bachelor’s degree in psychology in 1961, Brudenell was drafted into the U.S. Navy, was made an officer, but resigned his commission in 1962 at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. He returned to Berkeley and spent the next several years there.
In mid-1965, Brudenell was one of several volunteers who joined Foote, now a qualified archaeologist, on a summer dig in Tizapán el Alto, on the southern shore of Lake Chapala. Brudenell’s job was to live on an isolated rancho, sift earth for pot shards, and explore some caves in the nearby hills.
In September 1965, Brudenell started work as a research assistant in psychology for Dr. Gordon Paul at the University of Illinois. He still found plenty of time to paint, and held a two-person show, with Eva Wei, in 1966, before cutting his research short. By a strange coincidence, four years later he met one of his Illinois professors unexpectedly at the Chula Vista Myth-Mass. Paul asked what he was doing in Mexico, and Brudenell replied that he was painting, writing and experimenting with sensory stimulants – smell bulbs – as olfactory triggers for the recall of past experiences; in fact, he was doing precisely what he had not been able to do in the graduate psychology program at the University of Illinois.
After Illinois, and prior to Mexico, Brudenell spent most of 1967 working in Pueblo Pintado, under the auspices of VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America), with the Navajo Nation, New Mexico.
Move to Mexico
Brudenell moved to Mexico in late 1967. The truck he was driving broke down on the south side of lake, just beyond Jocotepec. He sold it on the spot to a local mechanic for $150, and rented a house in the village. He remained in Jocotepec until mid-1970, painting and filling a series of sketch books and journals.
Even a severe bout of hepatitis served as fuel for his thoughts; it resulted in an extraordinarily intense series of journal entries, “hepatitis dreams”, musings and ideas. Brudenell credits his recovery from hepatitis to the conscientious nursing of Beverly Johnson, a free-spirited young woman with a brood of children, who was also Ajijic’s unofficial village photographer.
Brudenell credits fellow Jocotepec-based artist Donald Shaw, a “vigorous, larger-than-life” painter and sculptor, with convincing him to meet other artists and display his work. Brudenell recalls how Shaw remarked, in a very early conversation, and on account of Brudenell not reciprocating visits or offers of friendship, that he had never previously met anyone who had no ego.
In March 1968, works by Brudenell were included in the inaugural show, entitled “10 Jalisco artists”, at Galeria Ajijic Bellas Artes A.C., organized by Hudson and Mary Rose. That gallery was at Marcos Castellanos #15 in Ajijic, at the intersection with Calle Constitución.
Tom Brudenell: Passage of the patient tortoise (1968). Reproduced by kind permission of the artist
Later that year (31 May-21 June), Brudenell was given his first solo exhibition at the same gallery. His artwork was enthusiastically reviewed by Allyn Hunt for Guadalajara’s Colony Reporter. Hunt urged readers in Guadalajara to take a trip out to the lake: “The most impressive work in this show is the recently-produced “Passage of the Patient Tortoise” which is stunning for its daring compositional structure, its brilliant color use, and its lucid and intelligently-styled forms. This single piece is more than worth the trip to the lake.” Brudenell was familiar with tortoises from his time in the desert south-west and, indeed, shared his Jocotepec home with one.
A few months later, in September 1968, Brudenell was one of 8 painters and a sculptor displayed at the “re-opening” of Laura Bateman’s Rincon del Arte gallery at Calle Hidalgo #41 in Ajijic. The single sculptor was Joe Wedgewood, recently arrived from Santa Monica, California. The other artists were Alejandro Colunga, Coffeen Suhl, Peter Paul Huf, Eunice (Hunt) Huf, John K Peterson, Jack Rutherford and (Donald) Shaw. (Shaw preferred to be known only by his surname.)
Friday 13 Dec 1968 saw the “grand opening” of La Galería, Zaragoza #1, Ajijic, a gallery run by a co-operative of local artists, including Peter Paul Huf and Eunice Hunt. The opening show entitled “Art is Life; Life is Art”, ran through to 10 January 1969 and featured works by Tom Brudenell, Alejandro Colunga, John Frost, Paul Hachten, Peter Paul Huf, Eunice Hunt, John K Peterson, Jack Rutherford, José Ma. de Servin, Shaw, Cynthia Siddons and sculptor Joe Wedgwood.
Brudenell’s works were also shown in Guadalajara, at the Galeria 8 de Julio. At the opening of one show in that city, a brawl erupted when a friend of Brudenell’s, visiting from Oakland, took offense at what he considered a discourteous act towards his girlfriend. The provocateur, who had no invitation to the opening, was a local street-gang leader, and the two men quickly squared off. Things turned nasty when the other members of the street gang turned up. A fist fight broke out, and rocks were thrown. When the gallery guests, and members of the musical band, pulled his friend inside, and barricaded the windows and doors, Brudenell was left behind in the street, where he explained to the street youths why he was sad, not angry, that the people inside the gallery, who painted and collected Mexican-inspired works, were so disconnected from most Mexicans. That was the night when the seed of Brudenell’s “People’s Murals” was planted, a seed that would germinate and flourish in the next few years.
North of the border, Brudenell’s work has been shown in galleries in San Francisco (Puma Gallery), Los Angeles (Ankrum), Victoria, B.C. (Beau Xi) and Friday Harbor, Washington (The Cannery Gallery) and the San Diego Art Museum. Brudenell generally declined to attend openings, preferring to simply send his works from whichever remote studio-home he happened to be in at the time.
Examples of pen and ink drawings from Brudenell’s time in Jocotepec
Tom Brudenell: Blue Heron (1975), serigraphed print
The image to the left shows one of a series (1974-1984) of pen-and-ink drawings by Brudenell, meant to appeal to a broader range of tastes and more decorative and salable than his meditative, more personal works.
The drawings were used for serigraphed prints and lithographed cards in the period 1974-1984. Most of them were sold in the Royal British Columbia Museum, Victoria.
By the early 1970s, Brudenell, who had never signed his name on the front of a painting, stopped signing them at all, preferring to use a circumpunct (a dot enclosed by a circle) which came to signify the state of observing without the observer.
The original drawing for Cows (below) dates to the late 1960s, though the print is dated 1970.
Tom Brudenell: Along the Road (1970), reproduced by kind permission of the artist
The Re-Creation of Adam (serigraphed print from original ink drawing of 1969) was “also somewhat commercial, but for a more reflective audience, this was the product of doodling and just letting forms appear without direction. Notice the tortoise or turtle coming into the picture!”
Tom Brudenell: Re-Creation of Adam (1969), reproduced by kind permission of the artist
By the time he left Mexico, Brudenell’s canvas painting was exploring “the edge”, where matter and energy meet. His “Hepatitis Dreams” writing and his “Micro-macro edge” paintings date from this period.
The Chula Vista Myth-Mass
On 13 June 1969, Brudenell joined with Shaw snd John Brandi (all three artists were living in Jocotepec) in staging a Cocktail Party Myth-Mass or “happening”, in a building alongside the Chula Vista motel, mid-way between Ajijic and Chapala.
In autobiographical notes written later for the Emily Carr College Outreach program, Brudenell summarizes the event as follows:
“Worked with poet John Brandi and painter Donald Shaw to create early forms of “audience participation” shows such as the highly ritualized light-show “Myth-Mass” (Ajijic, Mexico, 1969) where Mr. Brudenell’s brush searched for universes beyond the limits of the biologist’s microscope and the astronomer’s telescope.”
Quick trip back to Berkeley in summer 1969
Shortly after the Chula Vista event, Brudenell made a trip north to Berkeley to complete his mixed-media “book objects” for a San Diego Art Museum Show. A private showing, sponsored by Gene and Lee Novak, was held at the Berkeley residence of Mr. William Turner. The Novaks, who apparently published various off-beat works and poetry, subsequently issued limited edition versions of two of Brudenell’s “visual books”: Thaw and Mim.
It was on this trip that Brudenell met and fell in love with Suzie. Suzie later visited Brudenell in Jocotepec and the couple traveled in her VW Bug through several parts of Mexico, from the Gulf coast to the Baja California Peninsula. Brudenell painted “Artist” on the side of the Bug, which never failed to attract great interest from passers-by. (Similar to the experience of Mary Fuller McChesney years earlier.)
Besides Shaw and John Brandi, Brudenell became acquainted in Jocotepec with several other local artists including photographer John Frost, and the bearded, khaki-loving John Thompson. Ray Cooper, a painter Brudenell had known in Berkeley, visited and spent some time with him one winter.
Two other artists then living in Jocotepec, painter Bruce Sherratt and his wife sculptor Lesley Jervis Maddock, both from the U.K., apparently kept themselves so much to themselves that Brudenell, reclusive by nature, never met them.
Tom Brudenell: Detail of mural at La Primavera, painted 1970, photographed 1979; reproduced by kind permission of the artist.
Brudenell’s first mural
In 1970, during his third and final year living in Jocotepec, Brudenell painted his first ever murals, at the Rio Caliente hotel-spa in the Primavera Forest, just west of Guadalajara, at the invitation of the spa’s owner, Dr. B. Lytton Bernard. Brudenell may not have had any previous experience of murals, but he did have considerable experience of house painting and wall preparation.
Sadly, in spite of the paint chemist of Sherwin-Williams in Guadalajara giving Brudenell PVC emulsion, these particular murals, on an exterior wall, lasted less than a decade, due to spalling of the walls’ concrete substrate and the spa’s sulfurous moisture. They were decorative murals and, given the Mexican sun and geothermal steam, were never likely to remain pristine for long.
The Rio Caliente murals may have been Brudenell’s first, but they were certainly not his last.
Leaves Jocotepec to return north
By mid-1970, Brudenell and Suzie had left Mexico, and were traveling up the coast of Oregon, for Washington State and British Columbia, Canada. Brudenell painted murals in exchange for rent, food and beer money, while Suzie worked as a cocktail waitress. A fishermen’s tavern in Astoria, Oregon, was the site of Brudenell’s first “People’s Mural” in the U.S., and was painted in exchange for all the beer he could drink and $20 on completion.
Over the next few years, he conducted the painting of more than 80 school and community murals, mostly for the Washington State Arts Commission. Brudenell supplied the wall preparation and the organization; the students supplied the ideas and art.
He also painted several murals in the early 1970s in the city of Portland, and two 30 foot x 40 foot murals on the 8-story Belmont Building in Victoria, B.C. (1973), which can still be admired today, forty years later.
In 1978, Brudenell emigrated from Shaw Island, Washington State, to British Columbia, complete with his pick-up truck and donkey! While building a pole-frame cabin, he lived in a tent during an unusually snowy winter on Hornby Island.
Shortly after meeting Dianne (later to become his wife), the couple built a home on ten acres of raw forest land on nearby Denman Island, where they lived during the 1980s as homesteaders. Brudenell spent several months each year conducting his collaborative murals in remote areas of Washington State.
Tom Brudenell: Microedge. Reproduced by kind permission of the artist
Throughout his career, Brudenell has alternated between painting large-scale works such as murals, followed by a period of smaller, more intricate, highly detailed paintings of subjects such as an individual rock or a single clump of moss.
Tom Brudenell. Kuakumé (1974). Reproduced by kind permission of the artist
Brudenell’s three years painting in Jocotepec at the western end of Lake Chapala were creative and formative years. Much of his later work, especially his paintings, are evidence of a lasting Mexican influence on his composition and use of color. In Brudenell’s words,
“Color-vibrations are seen everywhere in Mexican and Indian designs. The natural flora exudes purples in sharp contrast with lime greens, reds flashing next to blues. Intense sunlight can dominate flat surfaces and color-vibrations, strong forms and colors shout back so that they find a happy balance.”
In the words of one reviewer, “All of Tom’s murals show a strong Mexican influence with earth colors…”
Brudenell himself treasures the words of Allyn Hunt, Editor of the Guadalajara Colony Reporter, who, after studying one of his early works, The Passage of the Patient Tortoise, informed his readers that Brudenell’s work, “for all of its simplification is much too sophisticated for a few seconds’ attention.”
This post was updated in October 2015.
Sources:
Tom Brudenell, first interviewed at his home on Vancouver Island in February 2015.
Allyn Hunt. Review of group show “10 Jalisco artists”, in “Art Probe”, Colony Reporter, 27 April 1968.
Sombrero Books welcomes comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.
Georg Rauch was born in Salzburg, Austria, on 14 February 1924, and lived thirty years in Jocotepec, on the mountainside overlooking Lake Chapala, prior to his death on 3 November 2006.
Rauch had an adventurous early life. His memoirs (translated from their original German by his wife, Phyllis), described his wartime experiences. They were first published, as The Jew with the Iron Cross: A Record of Survival in WWII Russia, only a few months before his death. The self-published book was reissued in February 2015 by mainstream publisher Farrar Straus Giroux, with the new title of Unlikely Warrior: A Jewish Soldier in Hitler’s Army. The memoirs are based on 80 letters sent home from the Russian trenches telling how Rauch, despite being officially classified as one-quarter Jewish, was drafted into Hitler’s army at age 19 in 1943 and sent to the Russian front. He was captured and spent 18 months in a Russian POW camp, where he contracted bone tuberculosis. After the war, Rauch spent two years recovering in Stolzalpe, an alpine sanatorium.
Rauch studied architecture for two years and life drawing with Professor Bőckl at the Akademie der bildenden Kűnste in Vienna, and was encouraged by his mother to pursue a career as an artist. He was awarded travel scholarships by the Austrian government. He exhibited and became a member of the prestigious artists’ association, Wiener Secession, and soon was showing his paintings in Vienna, Paris, London, Germany and Scandinavia.
In 1966 Rauch married his soul mate Phyllis Porter in Ohio. The couple, who had met in Vienna, lived briefly in New York before returning to Vienna in the winter of 1966/67, because Georg had been commissioned to produce the main sculpture for the Austrian Pavilion at the upcoming Montreal World Expo (1967).
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In summer 1967, the Rauchs, together with fellow artists Fritz Riedl and his girlfriend (later wife) Eva, spent two months driving through Mexico, as far south as Tehuantepec. On their return trip north, the group stopped off in Guadalajara to visit the Austrian consul. The consul, an architect, purchased several watercolors completed during the trip, as well as 4 or 5 oil paintings that Rauch had with him. In the fall of 1967, the Rauchs returned to Guadalajara when the consul commissioned a sculpture for a shopping center being built in the city. The Rauchs remained in Guadalajara until 1970.
George Rauch. Red Trees. 2002.
In 1968, Rauch was invited to do a series of posters for the Guadalajara Committee of the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. (Mexico City had commissioned its own Olympics posters, but Rauch was responsible for all the posters produced in Guadalajara). One of these Olympics posters is mentioned in Al Young’s novel Who is Angelina?, during a description of a living room in Ajijic. Another Rauch poster (not of the Olympics) would later feature in the movie 10 (1979) starring Bo Derek and Dudley Moore, shot on location at the Las Hadas resort in Manzanillo. And yet another Rauch poster was once shown in an episode of the TV series Ironside.
It was during their stay in Guadalajara, that Rauch first met artist and photographer John Frost, who had a studio in Jocotepec and would later introduce Rauch to some of the finer points of silk-screening.
Georg Rauch. The Dream House. 2003.
The Rauchs spent most of the next six years (1970-1976) in Laguna Beach, California, where Phyllis headed the San Clemente Public Library and Georg participated in the city’s famous Pageant of the Masters. Georg made several yearly visits to Puerto Vallarta, where his work was regularly shown in Galeria Lepe, the resort town’s only art gallery at the time. (This is where Rauch drew portraits of both Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, as well as Liz’s son Christopher Wilding.)
In 1974, the Rauchs purchased property in Jocotepec and began to build their future home and studio. They moved into their (as yet unfinished) home, designed by Georg, in October 1976. Rauch had finally found a place he could call home, and he would remain here for thirty years, painting a succession of expressionist oils, watercolors and silk screens, as well as building several extraordinary kinetic sculptures. Rauch was a prolific artist (completing more than 2000 oils in his lifetime), driven to paint, and to paint “only that which he needed and wanted to express.”
He also exhibited in a 1981 group show at Marchand Galeria de Arte, Guadalajara, where his paintings were shown alongside works by Tomas Coffeen, Victoria Corona, Penelope Downes, Paul Fontaine, and Gustavo Sendis.
His clown-faced self-portraits bored deep into his soul. The influence of Lake Chapala was clear in many of his haunting and sensuous Mexican landscapes. On the other hand, his watercolors revealed his particularly keen sense of observation and his delicate touch. (Of course, I’m biased because I chose a Georg Rauch watercolor of Ajijic as the cover art for my Western Mexico, A Traveler’s Treasury, first published by Editorial Agata in 1993).
Georg Rauch was a consummate professional artist, one who was sufficiently successful throughout his career to live by his art alone. In conversation, he would sometimes interject a truly outrageous statement, but his wry sense of humor masked a considerable political perspicuity and an intense desire to interrogate the world around him.
In the 1980s, Georg and Phyllis Rauch expanded their home and opened the Los Dos Bed & Breakfast Villas, where Phyllis continued to welcome visitors, especially those with an interest in her husband’s art.
Georg Rauch’s work can be found in the collections of many major international museums. His numerous exhibitions include:
1952 Konzerthaus in Vienna (first solo exhibition); and the Kűnstlerclub, Vienna.
1953 to 1968 : London; París; Stuttgart; Vienna; Dusseldorf.
1968 New York (Gallery York)
1968, 1970 Galería Lepe, Puerto Vallarta
1973 Toronto; Los Angeles
1975 Guadalajara: Galería Pere Tanguy
1977 Ajijic (Galeria del Lago)
1979 Mexico D.F. (Alianza Francesa)
1980, 1989 Puerto Vallarta (Galeria Uno)
1982 Tucson, Arizona (Davis Gallery); Acapulco Convention Center
1983 Guanajuato (University of Guanajuato)
1984 Mexico City (Galeria Ultra)
1986 Aarau, Switzerland
1987 San Miguel de Allende
1988 Guadalajara (major retrospective at Instituto Cultural Cabañas)
1990 Munich (2)
2000 Guadalajara (Ex-Convento del Carmen)
???? Guadalajara (Galería Vertice) year-long traveling show, called Austrian Artists in Mexico, including works by Rauch, Fritz Riedl, Ginny Riedl and others.
2007 Chapala (Centro Cultural Gonzalez Gallo)
2014-2015 Guadalajara (Palacio del Gobierno del Estado); Chapala (Centro Cultural Gonzalez Gallo)
David and Helen Morris were well-known potters who lived for several years in Guadalajara and Ajijic in the late 1940s and early 1950s, before moving to the San Francisco Bay area of California.
David Morris was born in 1911 in Washington D.C., where his father was a doctor at Walter Reed Army Hospital. Morris graduated from Georgetown University and was then employed in the city to head the arts section of the Work Projects Administration, a New Deal program, in the 1930s. This is when he first met Helen, a dance student. The couple married in 1937, and spent their honeymoon in Mexico.
During the second world war, Morris served in the U.S. armed forces in Europe and the Pacific. After the war, they returned to the Washington D.C. area for a short time where David Morris studied at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, presumably on G.I. Bill funds. He transferred his G.I. Bill tuition for a Masters degree in Fine Arts to the University of Guadalajara and the couple moved to Mexico in the late 1940s. (Their son Nicolas was born in about 1949).
David Morris had several works – one tempera, one watercolor, one monotype, and four ceramic pieces – included in the end-of-academic-year exhibition at the Fine Arts school of the University of Guadalajara in June 1951.
David Morris: Railroad Station at Lake Chapala. 1950.
The family subsequently settled in Ajijic (they were definitely living there by mid-1951), where they became active members of the area’s growing artistic colony of the early 1950s. At this time, David was better known as a painter, though the couple were beginning to develop their extraordinary skills as potters. Among his Mexican paintings is an oil on board, entitled “Railroad Station at Lake Chapala”, dated to 1950, which was sold at auction in California in 2009.
While in Ajijic, the couple were good friends of black American painter Ernest Alexander (“Alex”), who ran the Bar Alacrán (Scorpion Bar) in Ajijic. Alex, his common-law wife Dolly and their son Mark, moved to the San Francisco Bay area at about the same time as David and Helen Morris did.
The couple returned to California in 1953, where they became political activists and began to work together as potters. Living and working initially at 701, Humboldt Street, David and Helen Morris began to produce exquisite ceramic pieces that quickly gained national attention.
David Morris was active on the committee behind the Sausalito Art Festival, held in November 1956, on the Casa Madroño grounds, and even performed as a singer at that festival. He continued to be actively involved in organizing several other Sausalito Art Festivals, including those held in May 1957, October 1957 (which drew record crowds of almost 20,000 over three days) and June 1958.
In June 1957, Morris was the spokesperson for a group of 60 freelance artists who objected to the regulations imposed for exhibitors by the organizers of the annual Marin Art and Garden Show, which, despite receiving public monies was open only to paid-up members of the Marin Society bf Artists. The freelance artists argued that entry should be open to all regardless of whether or not they were members; their petition was upheld by the Marin County Board of Supervisors.
They were riding the crest of success when, in 1960, their first joint studio, in a former boatyard in Sausalito, California, was totally destroyed by fire. According to the last verse of a song written shortly afterwards by Malvina Reynolds, the blaze was not without its silver lining:
In the midst of smoke and ruin, old David Morris stands,
A look of wonder on his face, a pot shard in his hands,
It has a wond’rous color never seen on hill or plain,
And they’ll have to burn the boatyard down to get that glaze again.
(From “Sausalito Fire” by Malvina Reynolds, 1960. The song was published in her Little Boxes and Other Handmade Songs)
Undeterred for long, David and Helen Morris soon built a new studio in Larkspur, where they would go on to craft more than 10,000 pieces of stoneware and porcelain, some of which found their way into the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Institution, the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York, and other museums.
The couple worked closely together and shared a single wheel in their studio. A contemporary account says that while David worked on the larger pieces, Helen crafted the smaller, more delicate forms. According to art critic Tom Albright, David Morris was particularly adept at creating “rich, lush glazes”, based on ancient Chinese techniques.
David and Helen Morris and their work were regularly featured in ceramics-related magazines of the 1950s and 1960s. For example the April 1960 issue of Ceramics Monthly had a photograph of the couple at work in their studio on its cover, and an illustrated 3-page feature article about them and the “crystalline” stoneware glazes they had developed.
Despite their aversion to taking part in juried shows, their stoneware won numerous awards, including a first prize in the Berkeley Art Show in July 1957. In April 1958, David Morris was invited by the Artist League of Vallejo to highlight the official opening of their new building in Vallejo.
Helen Morris (born 24 February 1917) died on 6 December 1992, aged 75 years; David Morris died on 26 January 1999, his 88th birthday.
Sources:
Design Quarterly. 1958. “Eighty-Two American Ceramists and Their Work” in Design Quarterly 42-43.
Malvina Reynolds. 1960. Little Boxes and Other Handmade Songs.
Sausalito News: 28 September 1956; 2 November 1956; 9 February 1957; 22 June 1957; 29 June 1957; 6 July 1957; 24 August 1957; 26 October 1957; 18 January 1958; 5 April 1958.
Stephen Schwartz. 1999. Obituary “David Morris“. 25 February 1999.
Yoshiko Uchida. 1957. Helen and David Morris: Pottery is Their Business, in Craft Horizons, December 1957 (Vol 17 #6)
Oppi Untracht. 1960. “David and Helen Morris”, in Ceramics Monthly, April 1960, (Vol 8 #4)
Sombrero Books welcomes comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.
Synnove (Shaffer) Pettersen (born in Norway in 1944) is a much sought-after portrait painter who lived in the Lake Chapala area from early 1973 to August 1976.
In 1956, while Pettersen was still a young girl, her family moved to Canada, to Victoria, B.C.. Four years later, they moved on to Los Angeles, though Pettersen remained in Victoria, where she was crowned Miss Victoria in 1962, and graduated from high school in 1963. She has fond memories of her high school art teacher, Mrs Francis Cameron, saying, “She was the best. I’ve since talked with fellow art students and we all agree what a treasure she was and how we really had a college type art program.”
Pettersen then won a scholarship to the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. She remains unconvinced by the education she received there, because it stressed the abstract movements, rather than the realism that she has made her specialty.
In 1973, her then husband took early retirement and decided to move south of the border. They had heard about Ajijic, “the largest retirement community outside the U.S.”, the year before while visiting Puerto Angel on the coast of Oaxaca. At Lake Chapala, the couple lived for a short time in Jocotepec before moving to Ajijic when they met, by chance, in the Ajijic post office, a couple about to relinquish their lease on a home in the village.
Pettersen’s Facebook page includes three videos of her work in Ajijic:
Her artistic talents, and the promise of her later success, are clearly evident in the charcoal drawings and paintings she completed during her three years in Mexico (see short videos).
Guadalajara: American Society of Jalisco, 21 February 1976
Pettersen says that the Clique Ajijic group, “never painted together as a group, just had shows.” She added that one additional benefit of the drawing sessions she had at her house, where she able to persuade neighboring ladies to pose for her, was that they helped her learn Spanish.
In April 1976, Synnove (Shaffer) had a solo exhibit of works done in Mexico – oils, pastels and drawings – in the Villa Montecarlo in Chapala. The show opened on 25 April.
Synnove Pettersen with one of her paintings, ca 1975 (Photo by John Frost)
In this early stage of her artistic career, Pettersen was greatly encouraged by fellow Clique Ajijic member Sidney (“Sid”) Schwartzman, and by artist-photographer John Frost, who was not a member of the Clique Ajijic but took their publicity photos. In an email, she wrote that, “John Frost was a big inspiration. So willing to share his knowledge. When I returned to L.A., I did several silkscreen (serigraph) pieces. He had refreshed my interest with his enthusiasm for a photo/sun process but I was not successful with that technique, so returned to the touche and glue method.”
Synnove Pettersen is now based in Shelton, Washington state, where she continues to undertake portrait commissions. Her Facebook page, with numerous examples of her powerful, evocative portraits, is Synnove Fine Art. Prints and originals can be purchased direct from the artist’s website.
Acknowledgment
Sincere thanks to Synnove Pettersen for her willingness to share memories, knowledge and mementos from her time in Mexico.
Sombrero Books welcomes comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.
Norah Oliver Kennedy was born 30 May 1917 in Whittier, California, and died at age 96 on 15 January 2014, in Santa Rosa, California. Norah Kennedy spent several months in Chapala, Mexico, in 1941. She traveled there with her brother David. In Mexico, they were joined by David’s girlfriend Sarah. David and Sarah married in Ajijic in early October 1941 and Norah shared a house with the newly weds for a month before they all returned to the U.S.
While in Chapala, Norah wrote about her experiences in Lanikai, Honolulu, and Molakai the previous year. (Reardon, p 134). Mary Frances (her eldest sister) visited the threesome and “advised Norah about marketing the stories she was writing in Mexico. In a letter written on October 14, she told her sister that she had arranged at least five of the stories into what she considered an appropriate sequence, and airmailed them to Mary Leonard Pritchett for submission to The New Yorker.” (Reardon, p 138-139) It is unclear if or when these stories were ever published.
Norah later worked as a psychiatric social worker for the Army during World War II, and for many years in the Berkeley school system. In 1993, the year after her sister’s death, Norah wrote the foreword for a book continuing the journals of Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher, entitled Foreword to Stay Me, Oh Comfort Me: journals and stories, 1933–1941, M. F. K. Fisher.
Sources:
Joan Reardon, 2005. Poet of the Appetites: The Lives And Loves of M.F.K. Fisher (North Point Press)
M. F. K. Fisher, 1943. The Gastronomical Me (Duell, Sloan and Pearce, New York), reprinted in The Art of Eating (Macmillan 1979).
Sombrero Books welcomes comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.
Jaime López Bermúdez (Mexico City 1916-) is a Mexican artist and architect who lived and worked for at least several months in Ajijic in the mid-1940s. He exhibited some of his painting in a group show in 1944 at the Villa Montecarlo in Chapala, alongside paintings by Betty Binkley, Ernesto Butterlin (“Lin”), Otto Butterlin, Ann Medalie, Sylvia Fein and others.
His stay at Lake Chapala is briefly described in an article published in 1945 by American author Neill James, who had moved to Ajijic a couple of years earlier. Jaime López Bermúdez, “a surrealist from the Capital, occupied a huertita overlooking the lake and worked for several months with his charming wife, Virginia, and a Mexican cat for company.”
In reality, Virginia was a long-time girlfriend, and López Bermúdez’s status was correctly listed as “single” on the certificate of his marriage to American-born Josephine Blanche Cohen Sokolski in Mexico City in December 1949. Unfortunately the marriage did not last very long. After living in Jaime’s experimental house (see next paragraph) for about a year, the couple moved to the U.S., but split up shortly after their son Jon Dario (now Cody Sokolski) was born in Manhattan on 1 December 1951. Jaime returned to Mexico.
Portrait of Jaime López Bermúdez, ca 1951, by Elizabeth Timberman.
In the early 1950s, López Bermúdez gained reputation as an architect. He was considered one of Mexico’s more important “modernist” architects, and was featured in a special August 1951 issue of Arts and Architecture devoted to Mexican architecture. That issue included photos of a one-room home designed and built by López Bermúdez (for himself) in the Santa Fe district close to Mexico City. The design was a modernist, steel-framed one-room house, with garage underneath, which could be completed for under 1500 dollars. According to the accompanying text, “Jaime López Bermúdez is a painter as well architect, this duel role being a commonplace among young and old of his profession in Mexico. The mural on the front of the house is his.”
At a later stage of his life, though the precise dates are unclear, López Bermúdez opened and ran an art gallery, Galeria Coyote Flaco, in upscale Coyoacán, in the southern part of Mexico City, for several years. In the early 1960s, López Bermúdez was the first to recognize the artistic talent of British-American photographer Jon Naar. He persuaded Naar to exhibit his photographs of Mexico City street scenes in the Galeria Coyote Flaco in 1963. The exhibit, entitled “El Ojo de un extrañjero” (“The eye of an outsider”) launched Naar into a hugely successful career as an artist-photographer.
Sombrero Books welcomes comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.
Esther Tapia Ruíz de Castellanos was born in Morelia, Michoacán, on 9 May 1842, and died in Guadalajara on 8 January 1897. She married Ignacio Castellanos and wrote what is believed to be the earliest poem of any substance specifically about the lake.
The Castellanos family was one of wealthiest land-owning families on the north side of the lake, and probably the richest family in Ocotlán. Their estates included much of the shore between Ocotlán and Jamay, an area known as the Rivera Castellanos in the latter part of the 19th century. Ignacio Castellanos inherited the family property on the death of his father, Pedro Castellanos, sometime in the middle of the 19th century.
The family seat, complete with stables, was a mansion located opposite the old parish cemetery, extending to the bank of the River Santiago. Castellanos added a mirador, almost as high as the church tower, atop the family home, from where a spectacular view could be enjoyed, encompassing parts of his extensive land holdings, the River Zula, and the “Castellanos” bridge, used by everyone entering and leaving Ocotlán from the east.
After Castellanos married Esther Tapia Ruíz , the couple divided their time between their country home in Ocotlán and a city residence in Guadalajara.
Postcard showing Lake Chapala shore near El Fuerte de Ocotlan and the Hotel Ribera
Esther Tapia de Castellanos’s very long Lake Chapala poem, inspired by her husband’s absence on business, was entitled, “A orillas del lago de Chapala” (“On the shores of Lake Chapala”), and was finished on January 22, 1869. Shortly afterwards, the poem was sent by Mr. Vaca, a family friend from Zamora, to Siglo XIX in Mexico City. It is not known whether it was accepted at that time for publication but, a century later, both the poem and an accompanying letter were published in the January 1969 issue of La Civilización.
The letter describes Mrs. Tapia de Castellanos as living in Ocotlán, a “village located between two powerful rivers and comprised of a small number of homes”. The hacienda occupied by Mr. Castellanos and his wife, has “a mirador on top, from where the view dominates Lake Chapala, home of aquatic birds and humble boats,” and the cultivated fields of the San Andrés hacienda.
Tapia de Castellanos wrote several volumes of poetry, including Flores silvestres (Wild flowers), published in 1871, Cántico de los niños (Song of the children), and Obras poéticas (Poetic works), as well as several plays. In 1886, she was one of the co-founders of La República Literaria, a magazine of science, art and literature, published in Guadalajara, which rapidly became one of the best known publications in the country. The other co-founders were José López Portillo y Rojas and Manuel Álvarez del Castillo, one of whose relatives founded the El Informador daily in Guadalajara.
In the following fragements of “A orillas del lago de Chapala”, Tapia de Castellanos describes the scenery, flora and fauna from a very romantic, idyllic point of view.
On a tranquil afternoon
The sun advances to the west
leaving, as it departs, the clouds
tinted with gold and mother-of-pearl.
Its last rays gild
the clear water of the lake,
which seems, when it moves,
to be flecked with diamonds.
The light, sonorous waves
are teased into gentle undulations
making a tender murmur
that is only understood by the soul.
…
The willow bends its branches
As the warm waves kiss
and a perfumed breeze
jealously removes them.
(Esther Tapia de Castellanos, 1869 “A orillas del lago de Chapala”. Translation by Tony Burton.)
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Born 9 November 1906 in Richmond, Indiana, Charles Frederick Surendorf was an artist and printmaker, whose intricate linoleum block prints have been favorably compared in quality to the much-acclaimed work of Thomas Hart Benton.
Surendorf studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League in New York, as well as two semesters at Ohio State University in the Fine Arts program, before moving to California in 1929, arriving in Los Angeles “seated on an orange crate strapped to a Model T Ford chassis.”
He moved to San Francisco in 1935, where he studied at Mills College, was active in the local art scene, and was director of the first San Francisco Art Festival. By 1937 he had made his first painting excursion to Columbia, an evocative ghost town in the Sierra foothills of California, which appealed to his social realist leanings. He would eventually settle in this town with his second wife, Barbara Stoner, whom he married in May 1949.
Charles Frederick Surendorf: Ajijic (linocut)
During the 1940s, Surendorf traveled throughout the South Pacific, painting numerous watercolors and making woodcut views of places such as Bora Bora and Moorea. He traveled widely (including trips to New Zealand, Tahiti, New Orleans, Arizona and Mexico) and used sketches made during his travels to produce linocuts on his return home.
After the family settled in Columbia, California, Surendorf made his living as an artist and lived in the town for the remaining thirty years of his life.
Between 1934 and 1971, Surendorf produced more than 250 woodblock prints and linocuts. While best-known for his linocut images of Northern California, Surendorf also produced oils, watercolors, pastels and sculpture, in a variety of styles, ranging from naturalistic scenes to abstracts, surrealism and fantasy.
In 1956, Surendorf served as director of the short-lived Mother Lode Art School. In 1959, Art Digest called him one of the top twenty-five woodblock artists in the world.
Surendorf’s first visit to Mexico was in 1963 when he took the entire family—his wife, Barbara, and their four children, Charles Jr, Tamara Karla, Stephanie, and Cindy—on a 6000-mile month-long trip to “make a survey of the most paintable spots in Mexico for longer work in the future.” Surendorf quickly decided that Mexico offered a treasure trove of subject matter for painters, and saw innumerable painting opportunities: “Some of the most interesting painting spots are the ghost towns of the early Mexican mining days.” During that first trip to Mexico, Surendorf completed 35 watercolors from which he planned a series of linoleum-block prints.
He definitely visited Lake Chapala on this trip, as shown by this account of an attempted shake-down, reported shortly after returning home: “While painting a fishing boat on the shores of Lake Chapala, two Mexicans tried to extract a fee from me for allowing their boat to be used in the painting. While we argued in vain, the owner of the boat came up and paddled away.”
His daughter Cindy recalls a family trip to Mexico in 1968, when she was ten years old. During their time in Ajijic, Surendorf made the preliminary block print sketches needed to carve his printing blocks back in California.
Surendorf has been described as “a rugged and opinionated character”, who “was known to have torn down his art exhibitions in the middle of previews (in one case at the prestigious Maxwell Gallery in San Francisco.)” He alienated many critics which may explain why his work was under-appreciated during his lifetime.
His work was exhibited in many locations, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1936); the 1940 Golden Gate International Exposition (1940); San Francisco Museum of Art (1936-46); the De Young Museum in San Francisco (1946); the Art Institute of Chicago, and the National Academy of Design, New York.
His work is in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Monterey Museum of Art, California; Oakland Museum; Mills College Art Museum (Oakland); Frederick R Weisman Art Museum (The University of Minnesota); Print Club of Albany (Albany, New York); Richmond Art Museum (Richmond, Indiana); The Saint Louis Art Museum (Missouri); University of Michigan Museum of Art; Wichita Art Museum.
Charles Frederick Surendorf died in California 0n 28 May 1979.
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Acknowledgment
My sincere thanks to Cindy Surendorf for sharing details of her father’s art and their 1968 trip to Mexico.
Source
Stockton Daily Evening Record, 8 August 1963.
Comments, corrections and additional material welcome, whether via comments feature or email.
American sculptor and art historian Mary Fuller (McChesney) and her husband Robert Pearson McChesney, also an artist, spent 1951-1952 in Mexico, living in Ajijic and San Miguel de Allende. Shortly afterwards, Mary Fuller wrote three detective novels, one of which was set in the Guadalajara art scene, using the pseudonym “Joe Rayter”.
She also wrote many short stories, poems, and articles, published in various prominent arts magazines including Art Digest, Artforum, Art in America, Craft Horizons, and American Craft. She was, at one time or another, a staff writer at Currant, a researcher for the Archives of American Art, a Ford Foundation Fellow and the recipient of the 1975 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Art Critic’s Grant. Another of her books, A Period of Exploration (Oakland Museum 1973), was written to accompany an exhibition of ab-ex (abstract expressionism) works from the San Francisco art scene from 1945-50.
In the 1950s, McChesney wrote several detective novels, three of which were published, using the pseudonym “Joe Rayter”.
These included The Victim Was Important (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1954) and Asking for Trouble (M. S. Mill / William Morrow, 1955), both of which featured Private Investigator Johnny Powers, and Stab in the Dark (M. S. Mill / William Morrow, 1955), a murder mystery set in Guadalajara, Mexico.
Stab in the Dark is about murder, infidelity, and dope-peddling among a group of oddball expatriate artists in Guadalajara. The Kirkus Review of the book describes how “An excess of loose libido-tossing, alcohol, sex and art accompanies the death of Mike Cowper, about to become a cocaine pusher, in Guadalajara. The Mexican Inspector is not slow; young Madelene has to track down her husband and escape attack; Payne, a painter, and his wife get free of their little daughter’s death; and Madelene looses the marriage bonds for another heart interest. An AWFUL lot of running around.”
While Stab in the Dark is hardly a masterpiece, it is a fun read even today. The characters seem two-dimensional and their actions are somewhat predictable, but the book describes several expatriate artists working in Guadalajara at the time, and makes various mentions of the 1950s art scene in Guadalajara, including the “Galeria Moderna”, as well as the famed restaurant La Copa de Leche. The book also has a few scenes set in the coastal resort of “Puerto Ortega”.
McChesney also wrote several erotic books using Melissa Franklin as her nom de plume, including Courier of Desire and Murder In Her Thighs, both published by Greenleaf Books of San Diego in 1969. Coincidentally, Earl Kemp who ran Greenleaf Books at the time was then living in Ajijic, having been forced to leave the US for his activities. For more details, see chapter 29 of Foreign Footprints in Ajijic: Decades of Change in a Mexican Village
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Comments, corrections or additional material are welcome, whether via comments or email.
Lysander Kemp (1920-1992) was a writer, poet, professor and translator. He was head editor of the University of Texas Press from 1966 to 1975, during which time he collaborated with numerous great Mexican and Latin American writers to publish superb translations of their work.
Kemp lived for several years in Jocotepec, at the western end of Lake Chapala, from about 1953, and published a travel piece in House and Garden (1957) that described his life in the lakeside town, and from which these extracts are taken:
“I sit here in paradise in the shade of the verandah, gazing out into the brilliant noonday of Mexico. On my left hand, beyond the tile roofs of the village, the steep rough flank of El Moreno. the nearest mountain, is ochre and russet in the sunlight. On my right land, beyond the wide fields, the smooth flank of Las Majadas and the gashed cone of García are the smoke-blue of distance”
“Before me, beyond the fields and the guamúchil trees (I hope you like scenery), the great lake of Chalala shines between its borders of blue mountains. In a few minutes I will drink a small glass of tequila, the liquor distilled from the big blue-green sword-bladed magueyes which I can see in tilted rows on the lower slope of El Moreno. A little later Lola will serve me my dinner. After dinner, of course, I will take a siesta.”
“The house is brick and tile, six rooms in a line behind the long verandah, and the rent is 100 pesos a month, or exactly $8 in US currency. The Aguilar family — Cornelia, Lola and their three small daughters — lives in the two north rooms. I pay Lola 10 pesos, or 80 cents, a day, for which she keeps the house immaculate and serves me my three meals. By “serves” I mean that she buys all the food out of that 80c, as well as cooking it and bringing it to the table. I have other expenses, of course: my electricity bill is over a dollar a month, American-style cigarettes cost me almost a nickel a pack, and my weekly laundry bill with Chabela Flores has run as high as 40 cents.”
“The population of Jocotepec (pronounced Ho-ko-teh-PEH) is about 8,000, but there are only six automobiles in the village. Four are taxis, usually sound asleep in the shade of the plaza trees. There are also perhaps a dozen trucks and half a dozen buses. The life of the village moves in slow, ancient rhythms, marked out by the seasons — the time to plough, to sow, to harvest — and the calendar of fiestas. During three years in Jocotepec I remember only one day when the sun failed to shine for at least a few hours, and that was when a typhoon hit the Pacific coast, a hundred miles away, and it rained here for twenty-four hours. Otherwise the days are sun drenched all year round, but at this altitude, 5,000 feet, never sweltering. Modern life is hurry and worry, I hear, but in Jocotepec hurry means doing it tomorrow, or next week, or the hell with it, while worry means — well, I suppose it must mean something.”
Of course, not everything is perfect…
“I am not a gourmet, but I agree with Dr. Johnson that “he who does not mind his belly will hardly mind anything else.” Take even such a familiar and simple pleasure as ice-cream, In the States you take it for granted, but in Jocotepec I would take it only with terramycin, because the local milk is not pasteurized. To think of a hot fudge sundae is to drool. And then take all the other dishes not available here: roast leg of lamb, or fresh spinach, or country sausages, or broiled swordfish, or . . .”
And, life in Jocotepec in the mid 1950s was not all plain-sailing…
“A few nights ago I was drinking a beer in the plaza, at Ména Durán’s refreshment stand, when Gollo Bizarro came by to show off his new pistol. He handed it to Ména, and she said “I am Pancho Villa” and pointed it at my head, at a range of about a foot and a half. I ducked as she pulled the trigger, the pistol clicked, and Ména laughed gaily at my fright. Gollo took the pistol from her and inspected it with a frown. “Strange,” he said. “It misfired.”
“Misfired?” I asked. “You mean it was loaded?”
“Yes.” He still scowled. “A new pistol ought not to misfire.”
I could only nod. Perhaps I was agreeing. Perhaps I was practicing ducking.”
Extracts are taken from Lysander Kemp, 1957: “The Perils of Paradise.” House and Garden vol. 111 (April 1957) pp 172-4, 177.
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Robert Pearson McChesney (1913-2008) was a noted California abstract artist, a pioneer of the abstract expressionism (ab-ex) movement, and one of the leading figures of American Modernism.
Robert “Mac” McChesney and his second wife, sculptor and author Mary Fuller McChesney, moved to Mexico in 1951 as a direct result of losing their jobs during the McCarthy era. They drove south in their Model A Ford mail truck and lived in Mexico for about a year, first in Ajijic and later in San Miguel de Allende. Shortly after their return to California, McChesney exhibited, alongside Ernest Alexander (former owner of the Scorpion Bar in Ajijic), Lenore Cetone and others, in the Annual Spring exhibit of Sausalito Art Center, held from 29 March to 12 April 1953.
Robert McChesney silkscreen : Yermo Noche #1
McChesney was born in Marshall, Missouri, on 16 January 1913. He attended Washington University in St. Louis (1931-34) and the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles (1936).
In 1937, he married one of his models, Frances, and they moved to San Francisco, where he was employed on the Federal Art Project. Together with 25 other artists, McChesney helped paint huge murals for the Golden Gate International Exposition (1939).
During the 1940s he assisted Anton Refregier with murals in San Francisco’s Rincon Annex Post Office. During the second world war, McChesney worked as a merchant marine seaman, painting aboard ship in the South Pacific.
After the war, he taught silk-screening (serigraphy) at the California School of Fine Arts (1949-51) and at Santa Rosa Junior College (from 1947 to 1958, with a year’s break in Mexico). He also taught at California State University, Hayward, from 1958 to 1962.
McChesney married Mary Fuller in December 1949 and the couple lived in Ajijic and San Miguel de Allende in Mexico for a year, 1951-1952. Mary Fuller McChesney, best known as a sculptor, also wrote short stories, poems, art history articles and several detective novels using the pen name “Joe Rayter”, including Stab in the Dark, set in the 1950s Guadalajara art scene.
On their return to California, they began to build their own home near the top of Sonoma Mountain in Petaluma, where they were still living at the time of Robert McChesney’s death on 10 May 2008.
Robert McChesney held more than forty solo exhibitions during his long artistic career, including many in galleries and museums in San Francisco, as well as at the Art Institute of Chicago, Whitney Museum in New York, Sao Paulo in Brazil (1955), Oakland Museum, the Nevada Museum of Art (1994), and California State University, Fresno (1999). In 2009, a major retrospective of the work of both artists (Mac and his wife) was held at the Petaluma Arts Center.
His work can be viewed in numerous museum collections such as the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, Oakland Art Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, Muskegon Museum of Art in Michigan, and Washington State Art Commission.
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Journalist and novelist Bart Spicer was born Albert Samuel Spicer on 13 April 1918 in Richmond, Virginia. He legally changed his name to Bart in 1964. He was married to Betty Coe, and died 15 February 1978 in Tucson, Arizona.
While the precise dates are unclear, Spicer certainly visited Ajijic several times, mainly in the early 1950s, and usually staying at the (old) Posada Ajijic. An author profile in a 1953 issue of Library Journal reported that Spicer was “holed up down in Mexico writing full-time.”
Spicer incorporates scenes set in Chapala, Guadalajara and Mexico City into his 1955 spy novel The Day of the Dead.
Bart Spicer spent his early childhood “in various parts of the British Empire”, and would later claim to have lived in England, India, Africa, France, Spain, Mexico and many parts of the United States. He was a journalist and radio news writer, prior to enlisting in the US Army during World War II. After the war he worked for three years in public relations for Universal Military Training and a year for the World Affairs Council. His first book, The Dark Light, was published in 1949, at which point he became a full-time novelist.
By the late 1950s, the Spicers were living in New York City where Bart was a member of the Players Club (jazz). In the mid-1960s, they moved to Spain, where they lived in Torremolinos and Malaga. In 1977, medical reasons forced them to return to the U.S. They settled in Tucson, where Bart died the following year.
The cover design of the Dell imprint of The Day of the Dead
The striking cover design (left) of the 1956 Dell imprint of The Day of the Dead is attributed to Arthur Sussman (1927-2008). Sussman was born in Brooklyn, New York, and after completing a BFA at Syracuse University, worked in New York from 1951 to 1960 as a designer and illustrator. He spent the winter of 1960-1961 in Taxco, Mexico. After 1960, he devoted himself more to his fine art, and held numerous solo exhibitions in Mexico and the U.S. between 1961 and 1991.
Arthur Sussman settled with his family in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1965, and taught at the University of Albuquerque and the University of New Mexico Community College. He was also a regular commentator on art and film for local radio and television stations. Several of Sussman’s paintings and prints are in the permanent collections of museums, including the New Mexico Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe and the Albuquerque Museum of Fine Arts.
Bart Spicer, ca 1949
Most of the early action in Spicer’s first spy novel The Day of the Dead (1955) is set in Guadalajara. The city’s Country Club, University, Parque Revolución, the U.S. Consulate, Hotel del Parque and fictional “Mercado Mexico” all feature in the novel.
The book is a tale of international intrigue and betrayed friendships. A retired spy and war-wounded Colonel Peregrine White (“Blanco”), who walks with a cane, is called back into service by a dour FBI agent Castle, to thwart a suspected Communist takeover of the Mexican government. Castle believes that one of the ringleaders is White’s best friend Paco Morado, a teacher at the university.
As the plot thickens, White attends a lively party at an expat-owned house on the lakeshore in Chapala, where the lake is fully “200 yards from its former shoreline”. (The lake was at its lowest ever level in 1954/55). One of the party-goers is looking for investors in a plan to “buy the old railway station, put in a pool and a nine-hole golf course and start a club.” (p 71). (In 1955, the old railway station became the clubhouse of the Chapala Country Club, with its nine-hole golf course in the adjacent grounds; the club was later relocated further east near San Nicolas de Ibarra. The former railway station is now a museum and cultural center.)
Most of the later scenes in the book play out in Mexico City. The language of The Day of the Dead now seems stilted at times, and the plot is dated, but the book was well received at the time, and still worth a read.
Bart Spicer also wrote: The Dark Light (1949); Blues for the Prince (1950); The Golden Door (1951); Black Sheep, Run (1951); Shadow of Fear (1953) aka The Long Green ; The Wild Ohio (1953); The Taming of Carney Wilde (1954); The Tall Captains (1957); Brother to the Enemy (1958]; Exit, Running (1959); The Day Before Thunder (1960); Act of Anger (1962); The Burned Man (1966); Kellog Junction (1969); Festival (1970); and The Adversary (1973).
In addition, he has also co-authored four books with his wife Betty Coe Spicer under the joint pseudonym “Jay Barbette”: Final Copy (1952); Dear Dead Days (1953); Deadly Doll (1958); Look Behind You (1960).
His books were widely translated and several of his books were adopted for television.
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American sculptor and art historian Mary Fuller (McChesney) and her husband Robert Pearson McChesney, also an artist, spent 1951-1952 in Mexico, living in Ajijic and San Miguel de Allende. They moved to Mexico as a direct result of losing their jobs during the McCarthy era.
Mary Fuller McChesney was born 20 October 1922 in Wichita, Kansas. The family moved to California when she was an infant and she grew up in Stockton, California. Largely self-taught as an artist, she studied with Paul Marhenke at the University of California at Berkeley. During the second world war, she was a welder in the Richmond, California shipyard. She later apprenticed in ceramics pottery at the California Faience Company in Berkeley. She began to exhibit in 1947, and won first prize for sculpture at both the 6th and 8th Annual Pacific Coast Ceramic Shows (1947 and 1949).
Mary Fuller Sculpture of Frog and Owl (Photo credit: Kurt Rogers, SFGate)
She married fellow artist Robert Pearson McChesney (1913-2008), in December 1949 and the couple lived initially in the North Bay subregion of San Francisco.
After deciding to head for Mexico in 1951, they sold Mary Fuller’s house, bought a Model A Ford mail truck, and headed south complete with all their belongings. Safely across the border, they decided to write “artistas” on the side of their vehicle. Robert McChesney later told a reporter that, “People on the side of the road would wave at us. Kids would come running out of their house to see us. It wasn’t until later that we learned that Mexicans used the word artista to mean ‘movie actor’.” (SFGate, 2002)
In a 1994 interview for the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, Mary Fuller McChesney recalled that the artists’ hangout in Ajijic at the time they were there was the Scorpion Club, run by Ernest Alexander, a black American painter from Chicago. Some of the artists “were going to the University of Guadalajara on the G.I. Bill. So– And some of them lived in Ajijic and they would go into Guadalajara once a week to pick up their checks and go in to school and that was about it.” The Scorpion Club was the popular watering-hole for “a bunch of writers, too. Some of them from New York. Some people who ran a bookstore. And they were published writers. And there was a mystery writer down there.”(Oral history interview with Mary Fuller McChesney, 1994 Sept. 28, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution)
Best known as a sculptor, Mary Fuller McChesney was also a writer. Besides numerous short stories, poems and art history articles, she wrote several detective novels, including Stab in the Dark, set in the 1950s’ Guadalajara art scene.
On their return from Mexico in 1952, Mary Fuller and her husband began building their home on an acre of land near the top of the Sonoma Mountain in Petaluma. Largely self-taught as an artist, Mary Fuller McChesney had started to sculpt in the 1940s. She created many of her best-known projects in the grounds of their home on Sonoma Mountain. Many of her sculptures are made from a special mixture of vermiculite, sand, cement and water, which is then carved directly using a knife and rasp.
Much of her work is “reminiscent of pre-Columbian sculpture and African art, which profoundly influence her aesthetic and artistic guides.”
Her unique sculptures of enchanting animals and mythological women have been exhibited at numerous museums and galleries throughout the USA, and in Mexico.Her solo shows include Artists’ Guild Gallery, San Francisco (1947); Lucien Labaudt Gallery, San Francisco (1950); John Bolles Gallery, San Francisco (1961); Ota Gallery, San Francisco (1972); and Santa Rosa City Hall, California (1974).
In addition her work has featured in numerous group shows in San Francisco and elsewhere, including Syracuse Museum, New York (1948); the University of St. Thomas, Houston, Texas (1976); and “Artrium 1976” in Santa Rosa (1976).
Her work can be seen in many public spaces, as well as in museums and private collections. Her public sculpture commissions in California include works for the Petaluma Library, the San Francisco Zoo, the San Francisco General Hospital, Portsmouth Square in San Francisco, Salinas Community Center, Andrew Hill High School in San Jose, Department of Motor Vehicles in Yuba City, and Squaw Valley.
Both Fuller and her friend Blanche Phillips Howard were among the ten sculptors commissioned to produce pieces for the San Francisco General Hospital when the building was under construction in the 1970s. Fuller’s “Dos Leones”, a cast stone aggregate sculpture dating from 1976 was installed in a courtyard at the hospital.
Mary Fuller McChesney died in Petaluma on 4 May 2022 at the age of 99.
The San Francisco Examiner (San Francisco, California). 1974. “City picks artists for hospital.” 20 Jun 1974, 28.
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Arthur H. Lewis was born in Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania, on 27 September 1906, and died in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 25 January 1995.
He spent about five weeks in Mexico, in Ajijic on Lake Chapala, in the spring of 1964, working on his book Lament for the Molly Maguires, published later that year. His wife Juliet Blum accompanied him. On that occasion he stated that he wished to return to Mexico to work on a novel, but it is unclear if he ever actually did so.
Lament for the Molly Maguires tells the true story of the violence wrought by a secret society of Pennsylvania Irish coal miners and how they were eventually brought to justice by an undercover detective of the Pinkerton Detective Agency. The book was nominated in 1965 for an “Edgar” award by the Mystery Writers of America, and was made into a 1970 movie starring Sean Connery and Richard Harris.
Fellow journalist Andy Wallace described him as, “tall and slender, with close-cropped white hair, a shaggy mustache and bushy white eyebrows. Deep furrows crossed his forehead, slid down between his eyes, and dropped from beside his ample nose to the ends of his mouth. He wore glasses. His fingers were long and graceful and carefully manicured.”
Lewis, who disliked being called an author and preferred to be known as a journalist, attended Franklin and Marshall College, and Columbia University, from 1924-26, but never completed a degree. He left university to work as a reporter with The Philadelphia Inquirer, a position he held, with gaps, until 1938.
From 1939 to 1952 he was the press representative for four Pennsylvania governors: Arthur James, James Duff, Edward Martin and John S. Fine.
He also taught journalism at the University of Pittsburgh in 1950, and at Harcum Junior College, in Bryn Mawr, and had a weekly radio show in Pittsburgh.
In the early 1950s, he became a free-lance writer. He was a highly self-disciplined writer, beginning work every day at 5:30 am. He specialized in researching and writing non-fiction books based on people and events in Pennsylvania. Lewis, himself, in a 1980 interview admitted that, “Most of my people are eccentrics. Why? I think eccentrics are the only people who accomplish anything…. They’re the most fascinating.”
His first book, The Aaronsburg Story (1956) told the history of an inter-faith, inter-race program in a small Pennsylvania town. The Worlds of Chippy Patterson (1960) was the biography of a Philadelphia socialite and recovering alcoholic who was one of the city’s best-known criminal lawyers.
He also wrote Bill Scranton of Scranton, Pennsylvania (1962); The Day They Shook the Plum Tree (1963), about Hetty Green, reputed to be the richest and one of the most detested women in America; La Belle Otero (1967), the biography of a courtesan whose clients included the world’s wealthiest men; Hex (1969), a tale of witchcraft; Carnival (1970) which described life on the carnival circuit; Copper Beeches (1971), a mystery story involving The Philadelphia Sherlock Holmes Society; Childrens Party (1972), a suspense mystery; It Was Fun While It Lasted: A Lament for the Hollywood that Was (1973); Murder by contract: the people v. “Tough Tony” Boyle (1975); and Those Philadelphia Kellys: With a Touch of Grace (1977), the biography of the family of Princess Grace.
Lewis’ research materials, newspaper and magazine clippings, correspondence, photographs, notes and cassette recordings of interviews, are now held in a special collection at Temple University in Philadelphia.
Main source:
“Arthur H. Lewis, 89, Author Of Philadelphia Stories” By Andy Wallace, The Philadelphia Inquirer, 27 January 1995
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Alfredo Santos spent some time painting, and dealing in art, in Ajijic (and elsewhere in Mexico) in the early 1960s. However, before we look at that period of his life in more detail, it is worth considering his extraordinary backstory.
Alfredo Santos was born in San Diego in 1927, the third of five children. He spent his early childhood in Tijuana, where his father was a union activist. The family moved back to the U.S. when Santos was 8. His early education came to an abrupt halt when he was expelled from high school for hitting a school official.
An infection that left him with fragile bones prevented him from enlisting in the U.S. military. Santos then had a series of scrapes with the law, including a prison term for helping smuggle illegal immigrants from Mexico cross the border. (Santos later said, “To me, I didn’t see anything immoral. I was sort of a Robin Hood, I thought.”)
He turned from people-smuggling to drug dealing, but was arrested again, and, in 1951, at age 24, began a four-year stint in San Quentin prison in California that would transform his life. Santos acknowledges that “San Quentin is where I became an artist.” (see this link)
His bone infection meant that he spent his entire time in prison in the hospital cells, where he read voraciously and even had his own small art studio. He drew caricatures of his fellow inmates in exchange for cigarettes.
Santos’ “Big Break” came when the prison doctor encouraged him in 1953 to enter a contest to paint some murals on the dining room walls. His quickly-sketched proposal (for a single wall), showing the transformation of California between the 1850s and the start of the second world war, was a clear winner, and he was given all three double-sided walls to work with. Because the dining room was in constant use during the day, painting was done almost entirely at night. The six murals – each about 12 feet high and 95 feet long – took two years to complete, with Santos absolutely determined to finish them before his parole date.
Alfredo Santos: detail from murals in San Quentin Prison
The murals, done in browns and blacks, show a kaleidoscope of Californian history, ranging from a cable car (that follows viewers across the room) to a wartime airplane and whimsical images of a sombrero-clad immigrant crossing the border and a soldier looking through a telescope at a woman undressing in a high-rise window further along the wall. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake is depicted, as is the golden age of Hollywood.
Alfredo Santos: detail from murals in San Quentin Prison
When he left San Quentin in 1955 Santos took with him some 50 paintings completed during his incarceration. He worked as a caricaturist at Disneyland for two years, saving enough money to return to San Diego in 1957 and open his own art studio and gallery. By 1960 the gallery “had become a mainstay of that city’s nascent arts scene.” (Russell) However, in 1961 the law caught up with him once again. He was arrested, and admitted to, one count of marijuana possession (a felony at the time). The night before he was due to appear in court for sentencing, Santos decided to go on the run. He married his 19-year-old girlfriend and they eloped to Mexico.
They appear to have first lived in Guadalajara, where a press release for the opening of his gallery in the city in 1961 proclaimed that the artist had come to Mexico to “have more freedom to express himself artistically.” At least one newspaper article [SFWeekly, 23 July 2003] includes a photo of him in his Guadalajara studio in 1961. In 1962, an exhibition of paintings by Tink Strother and other artists was held at the Alfredo Santos gallery in Guadalajara. That same year (1962), Santos exhibited his own work at the 1st Annual Exhibition of Paintings and Sculptures on Ajijic Beach, organized by Laura Bateman’s Rincón del Arte gallery. Other artists in this juried show with prizes, held in front of Posada Ajijic, included Antonio Cárdenas, Mary Cardwell, Juan Gutiérrez, Dick Keltner, “Linares” (Ernesto Butterlin), Carlos López Ruíz, Betty Mans, Gail Michels, John Minor, Eugenio Olmedo, Florentino Padilla, Gustavo Sendis, Tink Strother, Digur Weber, Doug Weber, Rhoda Williamson, Sid Williamson, Javier Zaragoza and Paul Zars.
Santos’ marriage did not last long. His homesick bride returned to California after eight months, where the marriage was annulled. Santos, though, remained in Mexico and his art flourished.
Among those highly impressed by Santos’ wood sculpting and abstract paintings was Joan Woodbury, an ex-actress turned Palm Springs art critic. In one of her regular newspaper columns, she described Santos as “one of Mexico’s foremost impressionists”. She helped arrange a month-long showing of his work at a Palm Springs gallery.
Alfredo Santos. 1961. Mural in Cafe Madrid, Guadalajara
During his time in Guadalajara, Santos, who liked to listen to jazz as he painted, became friends with the owner of the Café Madrid, a downtown restaurant on Av. Juárez that became, and remains, a Guadalajara institution, much loved by the literary and artistic crowd. At the owner’s insistence, one night Santos painted a picturesque mural, known as “Ciudad de mujeres” (“City of women”) in the restaurant. It depicts imagined daily life in the Spanish capital Madrid, full of beautiful women. Santos is said to have completed this mural in a single, liquor-fueled, fun-filled night. According to one version, the women in the mural were originally portrayed in the nude, but the wife of the café’s owner wife insisted that clothes be added. The mural is still there, and both restaurant and mural are well worth visiting.
After Guadalajara, it seems that Santos moved to Ajijic, though the precise circumstances and timing remain unclear. By 1963/64, Santos, accompanied by a young lady, had taken up residence in Ajijic’s Hotel Anita, then the social center of the village. Katharine Couto, whose parents owned the hotel from 1963/64, recalls that, “He was always quite charming and nice, but I was only 13 years old. Now I read he was “on the lam” which would explain why he and his beautiful girlfriend always stayed secluded in their suite.” She also recalls that Santos paid her parents, in part, with two paintings, one of which she later donated to the Latino Center in Omaha, Nebraska.
Another Ajijic resident of the time, Randi Atchison, recalls how, in the early 1960s, their family “spent time at his gallery in Guadalajara, watched him paint and enjoyed his colorful character.” Atchison has several paintings by Santos, on one of which “Alfredo wrote a personal note to my mother on the back… in her lipstick, that remains legible 44 years later.” Atchison notes that, “Alfredo also came to our house in Ajijic one day and painted a large Mariachi band mural on the living room wall.” it is unclear if this mural still exists.
In 1964, Santos decided to try his luck in Mexico City. He opened a studio-gallery on Calle Niza, in the city’s trendy Zona Rosa district. The following year, he married Mary Ann Summers; the couple (who divorced in 1977) had two sons, the elder of whom (Chris Santos) is now a professional artist in New York. Summers has described Santos’ studio-gallery at this time: “Alfredo had this fantastic gallery above a Chinese restaurant with four huge rooms downstairs and a big sunny studio loft above it… Between the two levels, sort of hidden away, was his bedroom, the walls of which were completely covered with photographs and paintings of nudes.”
This 5-minute Youtube video, Broken Mold: the Life and Art of Alfredo Santos, shows him at work:
In 1966, Santos moved his gallery to Acapulco for a year, before deciding to return to the U.S. In 1967, Santos settled into a rented apartment in New York, with his wife and infant son. He undertook commissions for various New York clients who had discovered his work in Mexico. One of them convinced Santos to relocate to the village of Fleischmanns, in the Catskills and close to Woodstock. Santos’ studio-gallery in Fleischmanns became “a magnet for every hip person for miles around,” according to one of his longtime friends and patrons.
In the 1980s, following his divorce from Summers and a heart attack, Santos moved back to San Diego. In 2011, the Zoom Gallery in Fleischmanns, held a retrospective of the works of Alfredo Santos, “The People’s Artist”.
In 2003, arrangements were finally made for Alfredo Santos to revisit San Quentin, this time as a distinguished guest rather than as an inmate, and see his murals again for the first time in almost fifty years. Only then, did the full extraordinary story of these amazing prison murals make the mainstream press.
Alfredo Santos died on 15 March 2015.
Sources:
Hidden Treasure by Ron Russell, Wednesday, Jul 23 2003
Hidden Beauty(with images of the San Quentin Prison Murals) August 17, 2007
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The American poet Jack Gilbert was born 18 February 1925, and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He graduated from the University of Pittsburgh, and then spent some time in Paris and several years in Italy. From 1956 to the mid-1960s, Gilbert made his home in the San Francisco Bay area. during which time he worked with photographer Ansel Adams and took Jack Spicer’s Poetry as Magic workshop at San Francisco State College.
In the late 1950s or very early in the 1960s, Gilbert rented a house in Ajijic, Mexico, while working on Views of Jeopardy (published in 1962). Views of Jeopardy won the 1962 Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition and was nominated for that year’s Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
After Gilbert won the Yale prize, Gordon Lish, the editor of the literary journal Genesis West devoted an entire issue of the journal to him.
Gilbert is sometimes considered as one of the Beat poets, a loose group also including Allen Ginsberg, Kenneth Rexroth and ruth weiss. However, in this 1962 interview with Lish, Gilbert makes it abundantly clear that he was not:
– Lish: But you’re not part of the Beat Movement?
– Gilbert: God, no! And I don’t go in for freakish behavior nor esoteric knowledge.
It remains unclear precisely when Gilbert was in Ajijic working on Views of Jeopardy, and whether or not he was accompanied by his then partner, poet Laura Ulewicz (1930–2007), to whom the book is dedicated. (“To Laura Ulewicz, a kind of dragon”). Her Wikipedia biography records her as living in Europe from 1960-65, so if the two were together in Ajijic, then this was presumably in the late 1950s rather than the early 1960s.
Gilbert at first enjoyed his fame, but, “After about six months, I found it boring. There were so many things to do, to live. I didn’t want to be praised all the time.” He accepted a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1964 and spent much of the next two decades living and traveling in Europe.
Jack Gilbert in the early 1950s
While Gilbert’s work often reflects places he lived or visited (Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Mexico, Greece, Denmark, Paris), none of his published poems can definitely be linked to Ajijic.
However, he did compose at least two poems related, via their titles and subject matter, to the nearby city of Guadalajara. For example a seven-line poem entitled “Elephant Hunt in Guadalajara” appeared in Monolithos: Poems 1962 and 1982, his second book of poetry published in 1984. That poem describes a floor show in a nightclub called El Serape where, when the lights went off, “strong girls came like tin moths” to dance with the patrons. Monolithos won the Stanley Kunitz Prize and an award from the American Poetry Review.
In 2009, Gilbert’s poetry collection The Dance Most of All: poems included “Searching for it in a Guadalajara Dance Hall”, in which Gilbert describes how in “an empty, concrete one-room building”, men and women sit in straight lines of chairs on the opposite sides of the room. The dancing is not a prelude to anything romantic:
Nothing is sexual.
There are proprieties.
No rubbing against anyone. No touching
at all. When the music starts, the men
go stiffly over to the women…
From 1964-1970 or thereabouts, Gilbert was living in Greece with his former student and fellow poet Linda Gregg; the two remained close until his death. During that period, he co-authored with Jean Maclean, under the joint pseudonym Tor Kung, two erotic novels: My Mother Taught Me (1964) and Forever Ecstasy (1968).
In the 1970s, Gilbert lived in Japan with another former student, the sculptor Michiko Nogami. She died in 1982, the same year his second book of poetry was published.
Gilbert went on to publish several more poetry books including The Great Fires: Poems 1982-1992 (1994); Refusing Heaven (2005); Tough Heaven: Poems of Pittsburgh (2006); Transgressions: Selected Poems (2006); The Dance Most of All (2009); and Collected Poems (2012). He was also a regular contributor to The American Poetry Review, Genesis West, The Quarterly, Poetry, Ironwood, The Kenyon Review, and The New Yorker.
The great American poet Jack Gilbert, who early in his career lived for a time in Ajijic, died in Berkeley, California, 13 November 2012.
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Charles Pollock (1902-1988), the oldest brother of Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), who became an icon of the American abstract art movement in the late 1940s and early 1950s, was a fine artist in his own right.
In terms of longevity, Charles Pollock’s artistic career eclipsed Jackson’s. Charles’ work has been significantly reevaluated in recent years, thanks in part to the determined efforts of his second wife Sylvia, and their daughter Francesca.
Charles spent a year in Ajijic on the shores of Lake Chapala in 1955-56, returning to the U.S. only weeks before Jackson was killed in a car accident at age 44.
Charles Pollock: Chapala Series 1 (1956)
Charles Pollock: Chapala Series 4 (1956)
While in Ajijic, Charles produced numerous paintings and drawings, collectively known as the Chapala Series. The series was first exhibited more than fifty years later, in 2007, at the Jason McCoy Gallery in New York.
According to the exhibition blurb,
From 1955 to 1956, Charles Pollock, the older brother of Jackson, lived in Ajijic, a small village in Mexico. About ten years earlier he had abandoned his Social Realist style, inspired by his former teacher Thomas Hart Benton, searching for a new form of artistic expression. While teaching design, printmaking, calligraphy and typography at Michigan State University (1942-1967), he became increasingly focused on pure form and color relationships. It was in the quietude of Mexico’s Lake Chapala, when surrounded by ancient Mayan land, that he produced a body of work that would lay the groundwork for the art Pollock made from then on.”
“The Chapala series consists of thirty large drawings and fifteen paintings. All of these works are abstract and overtly inspired by calligraphy. They are immediately striking in their unique handling of light and form, which are employed to create distinct moods of atmospheric merit. In the paintings, both subtle color nuances and stark contrasts initiate a vibrancy that easily brings the Mexican mountain landscape to mind. Burnt sienna, earth brown, and translucent blues, for example, are fused into a harmonious mélange, while shapes reminiscent of simplified hieroglyphic fragments create a mysteriously codified language.”
While “ancient Mayan land” is something of a misnomer for the Chapala region of western Mexico, the peaceful surroundings of Lake Chapala certainly proved to be the ideal destination for Charles’ first, and artistically-fruitful, sabbatical year. In the words of art critic Stephanie Buhmann:
… the Chapala works unmistakably reveal the true quality and caliber of Charles Pollock. They document a mature understanding of materials and visual vocabulary that in its consistency is as impressive as it is authentic. Charles Pollock succeeded in formulating a unique sensibility that at once can draw us in and remains inclusive no matter how abstract and mysterious its poetry.”
Born on Christmas Day in 1902 in Denver, Colorado, Charles Cecil Pollock was the eldest of five boys (Jackson was the youngest). The family moved frequently and Charles spent his early years in Colorado, Wyoming, Arizona and California.
At age 20, he moved to Los Angeles where he worked as a copyboy for The Los Angeles Times while attending classes at the Otis Art Institute. In California, he developed an interest in Mexican art, particularly in the murals of José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera. These, and other Mexican artists, would have a lasting impact on Pollock’s own art.
Charles and Jackson Pollock in New York, 1930
Pollock moved to New York in 1926 and studied at the Art Students’ League under Thomas Hart Benton, who became a life-long friend. In 1930, he helped persuade Jackson to move to New York and also study with Benton. In 1931, Charles married Elizabeth Feinberg (1902-1997); they had one daughter named Jeremy Capille.
In 1934, during the Great Depression, Charles and Jackson drive across the country to see what is happening for themselves:
Six weeks later, Charles and Jackson buy a Model T Ford for fifteen dollars and set out to visit their mother for the first time since their father’s death. (On returning to New York they would sell it for twice the cost.) Like so many other Americans they were taking to the road, not looking for work but to see how their fellow citizens were faring. Their elaborate itinerary, which took them through scenes of intense labor conflict such as Harlan County, Kentucky, and steel towns near Pittsburgh and Birmingham, indicates how politically engaged Charles had become. The ten letters he wrote to his first wife, Elizabeth, are really reports from the field to a keenly intelligent woman even more of an activist than he was. In the dry, hot landscape of Texas he is appalled by the grim condition of poverty-stricken blacks and Mexicans. “Even though this is beautiful country for these people [it] is indescribably barren and harsh.” (Source: All in the Family – Jackson Pollock)
In 1935, he moved to Washington DC to work with the Resettlement Administration and two years later he became a political cartoonist for the United Automobile Workers’ newspaper in Detroit, Michigan.
Between 1938 and 1942 Pollock was Supervisor of Mural Painting and Graphic Arts for the Federal Arts Project (WPA) in Michigan. After completing murals in the foyer of Fairchild Auditorium of Michigan State College (later Michigan State University) in 1942, the artist joined the faculty in the Art Department, where he taught design, printmaking, calligraphy and typography for over two decades. He created a department of fine printing, working with a Washington Hand Press, and was book designer to the Michigan State College Press from 1942 to 1959.
In 1945 he spent three months drawing and painting in the desert of Arizona. This experience marked a turning point in his career as he abandoned social realism and began experimenting with abstraction. To escape the artistic shadow of his younger brother, he exhibited work in 1952s in the Circle Gallery, Detroit, under the name Charles Pima.
Later in his academic career, Charles was an artist in residence at the University of Pennsylvania in 1965 and 1967, the recipient of a Guggenheim Grant in 1967-68 and a National Foundation of Arts Grant in 1967.
Charles Pollock: Chapala Series, Drawing 3 (1956)
His visit to Ajijic was the first of two sabbatical years from his university positions; the other one was in Rome, 1962-63.
Charles married Sylvia Winter in 1957. Their daughter Francesca McCoy was born in Michigan ten years later. After Charles retired from teaching in 1967, the family lived in New York. In 1970 Sylvia was offered a job in Paris. The following year, the family moved to Europe, and never returned. Charles Pollock died in Paris on 8 May 1988.
In his latter years, while living in Paris, Charles Pollock had major shows in France, England and Belgium. His work is found in numerous collections, including those of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the National Gallery of Art.
Charles Pollock’s solo shows include: Ferargil Gallery, New York (1934); Circle Gallery, Detroit, Michigan (1952); Galeria Pogliani, Rome, Italy (1963); Kresge Art Center, Michigan State University (1964); Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Michigan (1964); Henri Gallery, Washington, DC (1966); Gertrude Kasle Gallery, Detroit, Michigan (1967, 1968, 1969); Acme Gallery, London, GB (1979); Art Center, Paris, France (1981); Jason McCoy Gallery, New York (1984, 1987, 1989, 2007 (The Chapala Series), 2008, 2009); Ball State University Museum, Muncie, Indiana (2003); American Contemporary Art Gallery, Munich, Germany (2008) (The Chapala Series); Espace d’Art Contemporain Fernet-Branca, Alsace (2009).
Charles Pollock was a fine artist in his own right, but also deserves recognition for his considerable influence on the artistic career of his famous younger brother Jackson. Charles’ influence over Jackson is evident from the correspondence among family members that forms the subject matter of American Letters: 1927-1947: Jackson Pollock and Family (edited by Charles’ second wife Sylvia Winter Pollock). In his introduction to this volume, Michael Leja writes of Charles that,
His guidance helped Jackson early on, and the extent of his influence over his youngest brother is obvious from their exchange of letters in October 1929, the month of the stock-market crash. Charles told Jackson to forget the religion and theosophy he was learning from his high-school art teacher and accept the challenge of contributing to the progress of modern life and culture. He recommended looking up the art of Benton and the Mexican muralists in magazines such as The Arts and Creative Art and delving into psychology and sociology. Jackson took Charles’s advice very seriously: “I have read and re-read your letter with clearer understanding each time.” He “dropped religion for the present,” subscribed to the art magazines Charles mentioned, and fantasized about moving to Mexico City…”
Biography of Charles Pollock for Jason McCoy Gallery (pdf file) – was at http://www.jasonmccoyinc.com/CP_Biography.pdf [29 Jan 2015]
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Luis Gonzaga Urbina (1864-1934) was born in Mexico City 8 February 1864. In his lifetime, he was one of Mexico’s best-known poets, straddling the boundary between romanticism and modernism.
Urbina studied at the National Preparatory School and worked, for a time, as the personal secretary of the Education Secretary Justo Sierra. Urbina taught literature and was a reviewer of theater and music for publications such as El Mundo Ilustrado,La Revista de Revistas and El Imparcial.
His early poems include “En Chapala: Tríptico crepúscular,” published in a beautifully illustrated format in El Mundo Ilustrado in 1904.
Luis Urbina. “En Chapala: Tríptico crepúscular.” El Mundo Ilustrado, 1904.
In 1909 he was chosen to lead the compilation of a literary anthology, Antología del Centenario, to commemorate the 1910 centenary of Independence. Urbina’s lengthy introduction provided an insightful overview of the history of Mexican literature.
The following year (1910), Urbina published a collection of poetry Puestas de sol. This is often regarded as Urbina’s finest work. It includes “El poema del lago” (“The Lake Poem”), a lengthy poem inspired by a visit to Chapala. “El poema del lago” builds on an earlier prose piece, “Frente al Chapala” (1905).
“El poema del lago” (link is to full text in Spanish) consists of 18 sonnets, each with its own particular direction and strength. It combines science and poetry and sometimes draws attention to environmental issues. For example, the opening lines describe the suffering of a single tree, scarred by axes and wildfires:
¿Qué dice tu nervioso gesto de selva oscura
árbol vetusto y seco sin una verde rama?
Con cicatriz de hachazos y quemazón de llama,
como un espectro tiendes tu sombra en la llanura.
What is this sombre dark jungle gesture:
ancient tree, withered, a memory of green?
Where your burned out bark and hatchet marks seem
to ghostly, cast shadows on the plain and fester.]
During the early part of the Mexican Revolution (which began in 1910), Urbina was Director of Mexico’s National Library (1913-1915). When revolutionary forces took Mexico City in August 1915, and Álvaro Obregón became president, Urbina left the country for exile in Cuba, where he taught and continued his career as a journalist.
In 1916, El Heraldo de la Habana sent Urbina to Spain to be its Madrid correspondent. At the time, due to the Mexican Revolution, many illustrious Mexicans were living, studying or exiled in Spain; they included Alfonso Reyes, Martín Luis Guzmán, Diego Rivera and Ángel Zárraga.
Urbina spent much of 1917 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and from 1918-1920, was appointed the First Secretary of the Mexican Embassy in Spain.
A man of many parts, but best remembered for his original, emotive and elegant poetry, Urbina died in Madrid, Spain, on 18 November 1934; his remains were returned to Mexico and interred in the Rotonda de las Personas Ilustres in Mexico City.
His academic publications include Antología del centenario (1910, in collaboration with Pedro Henríquez Ureña and Nicolás Rangel); La literatura mexicana (1913); El teatro nacional (1914); La literatura mexicana durante la guerra de la Independencia (1917); La vida literaria de México (1917); Antología romántica 1887-1917 (1917).
His collections of poetry include: Versos (1890); Ingenuas (1910); Puestas de sol (1910); Lámparas en agonía (1914); El poema de Mariel (1915); Glosario de la vida vulgar (1916); El corazón juglar (1920); Cancionero de la noche serena (1941).
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Artist, portraitist and illustrator Charles Lewis Wrenn was born 18 Sep 1880 in Cincinnati, Ohio, and died 28 Oct 1952 in Norwalk, Fairfield, Connecticut.
He painted several watercolors at Lake Chapala, including some in Ajijic in 1943, though the precise dates of his visit or visits to the area are currently unknown. This watercolor of fishermen tending their nets is typical of his work; it is almost identical to another watercolor dated 1943, presumably painted at the same time:
Charles L. Wrenn. c 1943. Lake Chapala. (Davis Brothers Auction, 2022)
Wrenn’s choice of subject matter at Lake Chapala included some relatively rarely painted scenes, such as this lovely painting of a ruined building on historic Mezcala Island:
Charles L. Wrenn. c 1943. “Old Prison at Lake Chapala.” (Reproduced by kind permission of Allen Bourne)
This gloomier watercolor, entitled “Water Carrier, Lake Chapala” was for sale on eBay in November 2015:
Charles L. Wrenn. Water Carrier, Lake Chapala. Date unknown (eBay, 2015)
And this charming Ajijic watercolor, dated 1943, with its obvious illustrator influence, was for sale on eBay in 2024:
Charles L. Wrenn. 1943. Ajijic, Mexico. (eBay, March 2024)
In about 1900 (when he was about 20 years old) Wrenn moved to New York City and lived in Manhattan. After graduating from Princeton in the class of 1903, he immersed himself in art, studying at The Art Students League, and with the impressionist painter William Merritt Chase (1849-1916). On 5 October 1907 he married Helen Gibbs Bourne of New Jersey, and they moved to 364 West 23rd Street; his art studio was at 9 East 10th Street. The couple later moved to Wilson Point, Norwalk, where Charles (“Charlie”) had his studio in the loft of his red barn.
Cover art by Charles L. Wrenn
In 1914, Wrenn wrote that, “My ten years since graduation have been devoted to ART. After a year at the Art Students’ League and The New York Art School, I took up the illustrating branch and have been following it ever since.” From 1911 to 1917 he drew illustrations for stories in The Red Book Magazine, People’s Home Journal, and The Housewife. He also painted cover illustrations for the pulp magazine Breezy Stories.
Wrenn illustrated numerous books, including: Molly Brown’s Sophomore Days by Nell Speed (1912); The Boy Scouts at the Panama Canal (1913) and Boy Scouts under Sealed Orders (1916), both by Howard Payson; Uncle Noah’s Christmas Inspiration (1914) by Leona Dalrymple; Guns of Europe (1915), Tree of Appomattox (1916), Hosts of the Air (1915), The Great Sioux Trail (1918), The Sun of Quebec: A Story of a Great Crisis (1919), all by Joseph A. Altsheler; Polly’s Senior Year at Boarding School (1917) by Dorothy Whitehill; Boy Scouts Afloat (1917) by Walter Walden; and For the Freedom of the Seas (1918) by Ralph Henry Barbour.
In 1918, at age thirty-eight, he was not accepted for military service in WWI, so he applied for a passport and went to France for one year as a citizen volunteer for the Red Cross, working as a stretcher bearer. His passport describes him as 5′ 10½”, blue eyes, grey hair, thin face, with a Roman nose and a scar on his right thumb. He listed his occupation as “artist”.
Cover art by Charles L. Wrenn
After the Great War ended in 1919 he traveled to study art in Morocco, Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, Gibraltar, Tunis, Egypt, and Great Britain. He returned to the U.S. in September of 1920. He returned to Europe in 1922, this time accompanied by his wife and his mother. They returned from Palermo, Italy aboard the “Providence”.
In 1929, he visited Haiti and in 1931 Bermuda.
From 1920 to 1936 he sold freelance pulp magazine covers to The Danger Trail, People’s Magazine, Ranch Romances, Three Star Magazine, and War Stories. He also drew interior story illustrations for Clues.
In 1936 he moved to Wilson Point, South Norwalk, in Fairfield, Connecticut, where he painted portraits and landscapes for the remainder of his life. Wrenn was a member of The Society of Illustrators and specialized in painting portraits and landscapes. He painted in many parts of the U.S. including the Catskill Mountains, California, and Walpi Mesa in Arizona.
After spending time in Mexico in the early 1940s, Wrenn held “a small exhibition of his Mexican water colors” at Loring Andrews gallery in Cincinnati in June 1946. According to the Cincinnati Enquirer, besides paintings of Pátzcuaro and elsewhere, “His subject matter varies from the paintings of the strange narrow streets to the old houses of the natives of Lake Chapala.”
Wrenn and his wife visited Europe in 1952, returning only four months before his death.
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Indian yogi and guru Paramahansa Yogananda (1893-1952) introduced millions of westerners to the teachings of meditation and Kriya Yoga through his Self-Realization movement and his book, Autobiography of a Yogi (1946). The book was an inspiration for many people. For example, Steve Jobs (1955–2011), the co-founder of Apple, who first read the book as a teenager, re-read it during a trip to India, and then every year thereafter. The Self-Realization movement remains widely popular today.
Paramahansa Yogananda at Lake Chapala, 1929
Paramahansa Yogananda visited Chapala in the summer of 1929. This striking image of him standing on a sail canoe at Lake Chapala has been regularly used since in the publicity materials of the Self-Realization Fellowship.
Background
Mukunda Lal Ghoshin (Paramahansa Yogananda’s birth name) was born in Uttar Pradesh, India on 5 January 1893. He was educated at Serampore College, a constituent college of the University of Calcutta and in 1915, took formal vows into the monastic Swami Order and became ‘Swami Yogananda Giri’. He died shortly after giving a speech at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles on 7 March 1952.
In 1920, he traveled to the U.S. aboard the ship City of Sparta, as India’s delegate to an International Congress of Religious Liberals convening in Boston. Later that year he founded the Self-Realization Fellowship (SRF), with the aim of more widely disseminating his teachings on India’s ancient practices and philosophy of Yoga and its tradition of meditation. In 1924 he gave speeches all across the U.S. and the following year established an international center (later the international headquarters) of SRF in Los Angeles, California. The Los Angeles center was run by Yogananda’s old school friend and co-worker, Swami Dhirananda.
In 1929, Paramahansa Yogananda and Swami Dhirananda had a serious falling out. According to one version, in the spring of 1929, Dhirananda suspected that his guru Paramahansa Yogananda, in New York, was “living with a woman” (in contravention of his vow of celibacy). Dhirananda resigned from his position at Mt Washington, and asked Paramahansa Yogananda for a share of the proceeds from sales of books and other activities. Their dispute over money led to an acrimonious lawsuit.
Trip to Mexico
Following the resignation of Dhirananda, Paramahansa Yogananda, stricken with remorse, needed a break, and on 23 May 1929, left the USA for a three month visit to Mexico. During the trip, he met Emilio Portes Gil, the Mexican president, gave lectures and wrote the chant: “Devotees may come, devotees may go, but I will be Thine always…” Paramahansa Yogananda, also visited Xochimilco, which he thought was one of the most beautiful spots he had ever seen: “As entries in a scenic beauty contest, I offer for first prize either the gorgeous view of Xochimilco in Mexico, where mountains, skies, and poplars reflect themselves in myriad lanes of water amidst the playful fish, or the jewel-like lakes of Kashmir.”
The trip to Mexico is described in the Nov-Dec 1929 (Vol 4 #3) issue of East-West Magazine:
On May 23rd, 1929, Swami [Paramahansa] Yogananda sailed from New York on a visit to Mexico. While there he met the President of Mexico, and also opened a Yogoda Center in charge of General Caly Mayor, a staunch Yogoda student of Mexico City whom the Swami was very happy to meet.
On July 15th Swami Yogananda was presented by Mr. G. O. Forbes, First Secretary of the British Legation, to Mr. Portes Gil, the President of Mexico. During the interview, which lasted about one-half hour, the President mentioned his ambition to lift the Mexican people to a great spiritual ideal. Swami Yogananda, speaking of the President’s recent success in settling the religious situation in Mexico, pointed out that it was spiritual understanding and culture alone that could unite all nations and creeds into one helpful band of brothers, all traveling toward the same goal of perfection. At the conclusion of the very enjoyable talk, the Swami and President Gil were photographed by newspaper and motion picture photographers in front of the palace, and pictures and news stories appeared in several of the leading Mexican papers on the following days.
Two of the palace guards showed the Swami about the palace and its beautiful grounds. It is situated on a high hill overlooking the surrounding country. An atmosphere of Oriental grandeur, due to marble walls and gilded ceilings, mingles with a brisk democratic atmosphere which reminds one of America’s presidential White House.
The Swami greatly enjoyed the magnificent and varied scenery of Mexico, the beautiful Lake Chapala inspiring him to compose a poem in its honor. He made many friends in Mexico and took many moving pictures of the interesting people and places he saw, many of which reminded him of India and her sun-tanned sons and daughters. Immense interest in Yogoda was manifested. “The Mexican people are spiritually inclined,” Swami reported. “There is a great field here for Yogoda and the message of India.”
Poem about Lake Chapala
The poem composed by Paramahansa Yogananda during his visit to the lake is “Ode to Lake Chapala”:
Ode to Lake Chapala — by Paramahansa Yogananda
O Chapala!
Like the flickering flame of Indo-skies,
Thy moods of limpid waters
Boisterously play with fitful gleaming storm,
Or rest on thy shining forehead
without a ripply wrinkle!
‘This then thy silver, shining mind,
Free of ruffling causes,
A transparent mirror—
Reflects just noble images
Of the green-dressed young and old hills,
Like tableaux of drilling soldiers
Standing hand in hand, with dwarf and tall heads,
Crowned with sliver skies or fleecy clouds.
I beheld the starry damsels
Beautifying their twinkling faces
In the mirror of thy waters.
How I watched in the flickering hall of lightning
Thy furious fight with the gunning clouds.
Showering torrential bullets of spattering rain,
O! what wild cloud-churned skies
and bounding winds,
Rolling thunder peals,
bursting vapour embankments,
Have flooded thy territory of waters
And have lashed thy spirit
to rouse thy resting soldier-waves
To leap to furious fightings!
Then again, when truce is signed with storm gods
And warring fury of the skies,
I find a stray white sail
Charged with a vital breeze,
Racing to thy horizon’s hidden unknown shores.
Thy nocturnal silence,
Oft rocked to sleep
By the lullaby of thy gentle breakers,
Is rudely roused at dawn
By those busy silence-shattering, droning sounds
Of man-made, horrid watery ploughs
Which encroach upon
Thy private fields of silence,
O! Changing Chapala
—The gleaming lightning of my feeling’s skies!
I love thee as never before!
Here’s hill-ramparted lake—
Which can allay
The scenic-beauty thirst of yearning minds.
When comes such another? Where?
Alas, Chapala!
Thy beauty will be snatched
From my adoring skies
By cruel duties of exacting life,—
But they will fail to take away
Thy beauty enthroned in me as joy for e’er.
The stony arms of the palace by thy banks
Enclosed a tract of thy loved waters,
And ‘neath the lone, shady tree,
Standing on the spot ‘tween two sheets of water,
Oft I sat with those unforgettable hours—
When I beheld the Infinite
Emerge from pale unanswering walls of blue—
And unite my soul with thee,
Mounts, skies, and me!
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Rafael López (1873-1943) wrote a poem entitled “To Lake Chapala” (1927). The poem is a homage to, and parody of, the famous poem “La suave patria”, composed by Ramón López Velarde (1888-1921). (Ramón López Velarde is often considered Mexico’s national poet.)
Rafael López, whose formal name was José Barbarín Rafael de la Concepción López Castañón (!) was a distinguished modern poet, very popular in his time. His work has been favorably re-evaluated in recent years.
Born 4 December 1873 in the city of Guanajuato, he loved poetry as a child and discovered Amado Nervo at an early age. He wrote to him in verse, thus beginning a long friendship. Nervo helped him publish his first poem, “De invierno”, in a national paper, El Mundo Ilustrado, in January 1899. Other poets in their circle included José Juan Tablada, Jesús E. Valenzuela and Rubén M. Campos. Rafael López was also a close friend of Luis G. Urbina.
López moved to Mexico City in 1901 and was a founding member in 1909 of the Ateneo de la Juventud (“Atheneum of Youth“). a grouping of young intellectuals, primarily writers and philosophers. In 1910, López was appointed as instructor in literature at the National Teachers’ College.
Among many other accomplishments, in 1910 Rafael López wrote the lyrics to Mexico’s national anthem, “Canto a la Bandera”, the music to which was composed by fellow Ateneo de la Juventud member Julián Carrillo, inventor of Sonido 13.
López published only two books of poetry – Con los ojos abiertos (1912) and Poemas (1941) during his lifetime, as well as a collection of prose Prosas transeúntes (1925).
Rafael López’s poem “To Lake Chapala” is dedicated to the lake, the then fashionable place to vacation during Holy Week. Here are the original words, with my loose translation into English:
Del gran libro en que Dios puso el secreto del mar, eres el lírico folleto; cuna infantil de su flujo y reflujo, de un soplo, una pompa de jabón y el pulso de su errante corazón. El domingo de Pascua, placentera y fina, en tu recámara playera, proporcionas al ocio ciudadano tu ‘agua florida’ y tu ‘espejo de mano’. Tu alma de moaré bien se acomoda al capricho del viento y de la moda; te envuelve el lujo en seda casquivana y la niebla filosófica, en lana. Pérfida en ocasiones, no te pierdes de ser crüel con tus enamorados, que –naturalmente– han muerto ahogados en la caricia de tus brazos verdes.
From the great book in which God placed the secret of the sea, you are the lyric booklet; infant cradle of her ebb and flow of a breath, a soap bubble and the pulse of her wandering heart. On Easter Sunday, pleasant and fine, in your bedroom by the beach, you provide for civic leisure your ‘flowery water’ and your ‘hand mirror’. Your rippled soul adjusts itself well to the whim of wind and of fashion; it envelops luxury in frivolous silk and philosophical fog, in wool. Sometimes perfidious, you do not miss being cruel with your lovers, who-naturally-have died from drowning in the caress of your green arms.
.
Rafael López’s work appeared in numerous poetry collections of the era, as well as in numerous newspapers, magazines and journals, including El Mundo, El Mundo ilustrado, Revista Moderna, Revista Moderna de México, Savia Moderna, La Patria, Arte, Arte y Letras, El Entreacto, Diario del hogar, El Imparcial, El Demócrata mexicano, Novedades, La Nación, Argos, Crónica, La Semana Ilustrada, Revista de Revistas, Nosotros, El Pueblo, Mefistófeles, El Independiente and El Universal.
López published some poems under the anagram “Lázaro P. Feel” (used for a few years during the Mexican Revolution), and pen names such as “José Córdova”, “Tris tris” and “Prevostito”. He maintained his somewhat rebellious attitude to the status quo throughout his life, and remained close to the up-and-coming youthful poets and at the forefront of what was then happening in poetry circles in Mexico. He served as director of the National Archives from 1920 until his death in 1943.
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