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). Amazon Author Page                                          Facebook Page

Eileen Bassing set her novel “Where’s Annie?” in Ajijic, Chapala, Mexico

 1950s  No Responses »
Oct 062014
 

Where’s Annie? (Random House, 1963) is a novel entirely set in Ajijic, and based, at least in part, on characters and events witnessed by author Eileen Bassing during her residence in Ajijic, with two sons and husband Bob, from 1950 to 1954. In many ways, Where’s Annie? is timeless, touching on so many themes that have recurred and continue to recur in the lives of Ajijic residents.

bassing-where-s-annieThe book opens with a description of the tensions created between a retired American naval officer and his much younger wife, the “Annie” of the title. All the main characters are expatriates from the United States. The cast of characters includes a middle-aged female novelist (Victoria Beacon) who has moved to Mexico in search of inspiration for her next novel; a cold, success-hungry young painter; a Negro guy hoping for self-fulfillment before his impending death from a brain tumor; and a group of young men addicted to jazz and drugs. As a contemporary review so aptly describes the Ajijic expatriate community “… most of them think of themselves as artists, and about half of them are.”

Where’s Annie? looks at some of the underlying tensions between local villagers and foreign incomers in Ajijic. Some expatriate residents choose to ignore such tensions and deny their existence, but this book proves that some things really have not changed much in the past fifty years!

The differences between the villagers and foreign settlers are bridged not only by maids and gardeners but also by the local medic, Dr. Obregón, who has to provide medical advice and comfort to both sides. The doctor, however, is torn between his love for his wife and his infatuation with Victoria Beacon.

There is an exciting array of characters and, as one reviewer put it, Eileen Bassing “writes with sympathy and insight–and without sentimentality or facile sensationalism.” The atmosphere is a heady mix of drink, drugs and intrigue, laced with jazz and attempts at literature, with all the forerunners of an A-set developing among the American residents.

Any hope of equilibrium is disturbed by a powerful rich newcomer who buys up properties, evicts some impoverished renters from their homes, and reports people to the authorities, hoping to get them deported. Money lending and shady real estate deals, such as those involving the use of borrowed names “prestanombres”, complete the picture. Betrayal, mayhem and even murder–nothing is too much for this motley crew of foreigners trying to escape from past memories and deeds.  As a reviewer in Harper’s put it, Victoria Beacon eventually becomes aware of “how deeply she has been drawn into their sordid maelstrom and how destructive their whole way of life is.”

Many of the book’s characters can readily be identified as based on real people living in Ajijic at the time. For example, the woman novelist Victoria Beacon was based on Leonora Baccante, a fiction writer, and the rather unflattering portraits of Willie Chester and his wife Sam in the book are based on Willard Marsh, author of Week with No Friday (published in 1965) and his actress-turned playwright wife George. Marsh retaliated against the Bassings in his own novel by describing the wife of a minor character, Beau Blissing, as “a lady novelist with a lousy memory” (82-83).

Despite various newspaper reports that Where’s Annie was to be turned into a movie, that never happened. For instance, the 11 February 1963 edition of Daily Notes, published in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, noted that “Robert Bassing will both write and produce the screen version of Eileen Bassing’s Book of the Month Club novel, “Where’s Annie?”. Eileen is Robert’s wife. This will be Bassing’s first effort as a producer and he has formed Robert Bassing Productions for the film, which will be shot in Technicolor on location near Guadalajara.”

The following month, it was reported that “Bob Bassing is after Anne Bancroft to star in “Where’s Annie?” after she finishes “Mother Courage and Her Children” on Broadway…” (Pasadena Independent, 9 April 1963). Perhaps financing proved to be the stumbling block? Whatever transpired, the movie was never made.

Other twentieth century novels set largely, or entirely, at Lake Chapala include:

Sombrero Books welcomes comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios. Please email us or use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts.

Robert Neathery (1918-1998) retired young to become a full-time artist

 1960s, 1970s, 1980s  7 Responses »
Sep 292014
 

Artist Robert Bateman Neathery and his wife Ellie moved from California to Jocotepec in February 1965, and lived there the remainder of their lives. Bob Neathery continued to paint until about 1983 when his health began to deteriorate. He painted mainly genre scenes of Mexican village life, as well as portraits, and is especially remembered for his “voluptuous golden nudes” (see image), which often rely on a palette of brown-beige colors.

Robert Neathery: Young Bather (1968)

Robert Neathery: Young Bather (1968)

Born in Muskogee, Oklahoma, on 8 September 1918, Bob Neathery died in Guadalajara on 15 March 1998. Eleanor “Ellie” Florence Schwindt, who would be his wife and best friend for almost 60 years, was born 23 December 1919 in Larimer County, Colorado, and died in Guadalajara on 8 August 2001.

Bob’s early life was spent partly in El Paso, Texas, (where the family resided when he was 12 years of age in 1930), partly in Muskogee (where they were living in 1935) and by age 19, Bob was living in Denver, Colorado, where he attended art school at the University of Denver.

Bob supported his art by working at a series of jobs including telegraph operator for the Denver and Rio Grande Railway, a sign painter of giant ice cream cones, automobiles and ladies drinking milk, a technical illustrator for North American Aviation, a sculptor of lamps at Gumps in San Francisco, and as manager of a co-op art gallery in Redondo Beach.

Bob and Ellie married on 28 November 1939 in Denver, Colorado, but by 1946 had moved to San Diego in California.

In November of that year, an exhibit at La Jolla art center in San Diego featured two “arresting sculptures”, one the work of Bob Neathery and the other sculpted by his elder sister Paula Nethery Rohrer (aka Paula Neathery Hocks) . The pieces are mentioned in a review of the exhibition in the San Diego Union.

From the mid 1950s, Bob and Ellie Neathery lived in Redondo Beach, where Bob Neathery worked for North American Aviation Corp and gave private art classes.

In November 1958, Neathery exhibited at the second Palos Verdes Outdoor Art Show, sponsored by the South Bay Community Art Association, and at a Book and Art Fair, sponsored by the Pacific Unitarian Church of Torrance.

Robert Neathery. Self portrait (1961

Robert Neathery. Self portrait (1961). From Palos Verdes Peninsula News.

After retiring from North American Aviation Corp. in 1959, Neathery became a full-time artist. He was a founding member of the Artists Cooperative Gallery at 121 S. Pacific Ave., Redondo Beach, which opened in July 1959. Along with  Gladys Bruchez and Marco Antonio Gomez, Neathery participated in a three person show at the gallery in January 1960.

The following year, in May 1961, several members of the Artists Cooperative Gallery, including Neathery (who was by then the Gallery Manager), showed their works at the  the opening of the Peninsula Center in Palos Verdes. The Cooperative Gallery moved their gallery to the Peninsula Center later that year, to “the contemporary, handsome TKM building, designed by Carver L. Baker & Assoc., at 27715 Silver Spur Road, Rolling Hills Estates.” Interviewed by a local journalist at about that time, Neathery declared that, “In a time of tension and strife and hate, my belief must be in the good and beautiful. I paint and create beauty as an antidote for the bad forces at work in the world.”

Neathery held a two man exhibit, with Byron Rodarmel at the Artists’ Co-op Gallery in August 1962; later that month both men showed works in a group exhibit at the Western Bank office in Torrance.

In November 1963, Neathery held a solo show of his paintings at the Angus Paint store in the Peninsula Center. By then, Neathery was president of the South Bay Art association and was represented in Los Angeles by Village Galleries in the Crenshaw district, in Carmel by Zantman Galleries, and in Monterey by Hidden Village. He was continuing to give painting classes in oils and watercolors. The following month, Neathery exhibited in a group show, the Holiday Art Festival, held at a private home in Palos Verdes, an event held for 475 guests, and at which Donald Totten (another artist with a connection to Lake Chapala) was a fellow exhibitor.

Bob and Ellie Neathery continued to live in California (in Redondo Beach) until their decision to relocate to Jocotepec in about 1965.

Two years later, in 1967 a thief entered their lakeside home, while they were out, and stole one of Bob’s paintings: a 24 x 30″ oil painting, from the couple’s bedroom, of a mountain landscape with a woman washing in a stream; the thief ignored appliances, clothes and everything else.

Bob Neathery in his studio. Photo: John Frost. Used with permission.

Bob Neathery in his studio. Photo: John Frost. Used with permission.

Bob Neathery held a solo show of 31 drawings and paintings in Guadalajara, at La Galeria (Galeria 8 de Julio) in April 1968. Author and art critic Allyn Hunt‘s review of the show in the Guadalajara Reporter praised Neathery as, “a sensuously exploratory painter”, adding that, “When he’s good he’s immensely exciting”. Hunt felt that Neathery’s most successful works included “Blue Plant” and “Kaleidoscope”, “in which six nude figures seem to move languorously in front of and behind one another in a sensual haze of muted blues, yellows and oranges.” According to Hunt, Neathery “feels highly influenced by the country’s “pow” lighting, as he calls it, and by the different cultural aura he finds here.”

In August 1968, Neathery had his works on show at the Holiday Inn in Chula Vista, mid-way between Chapala and Ajijic.

Later that year, in November, “La Galería” in Guadalajara held another show of Neathery’s works, immediately before a showing in the same gallery of works by Neathery’s Jocotepec neighbor John Frost. Allyn Hunt is again on hand to review the latest works by an artist who “possesses an excellent drawing hand and an ingenious drafting eye”, and is “at his best when pushing these talents into new territory.” Among Hunt’s favorite works were “The Vault” and “Model Resting”. In The Vault, “we see segments of walls, stairs, vaults, dim forms that are organized in such ways as to be haunting without being menacing, shadowy without being darkly somber.”

In 1970, Neathery exhibited a selection of watercolors in a one man show at Casa Blanca in Ajijic, and in May 1971, he was among a large group of artists that exhibited at the “Fiesta of Art” held at the residence of Mr and Mrs E. D. Windham (Calle 16 de Septiembre #33, Ajijic). Other artists at this show included Daphne Aluta; Mario Aluta; Beth Avary; Charles Blodgett; Antonio Cárdenas; Alan Davoll; Alice de Boton; Robert de Boton; Tom Faloon; John Frost; Fernando García; Dorothy Goldner; Burt Hawley; Michael Heinichen; Peter Huf; Eunice (Hunt) Huf; Lona Isoard; John Maybra Kilpatrick; Gail Michael (Michel); Bert Miller; John K. Peterson; Stuart Phillips; Hudson Rose; Mary Rose; Jesús Santana; Walt Shou; Frances Showalter; ‘Sloane’; Eleanor Smart; Robert Snodgrass; and Agustín Velarde.

In 1973, Neathery was appointed “gallery director” for the Galeria del Lago de Chapala, A.C., whose president was Arthur Ganung. In September of that year, Neathery exhibited “recent oils and watercolors” at El Tejaban (Zaragoza #1, Ajijic). That display comprised 32 works including nudes, landscapes, character studies and scenes from Mexican village life.

A group exhibit, the “Nude Show”, opened in February 1976 at the Galeria del Lago in Ajijic, which included a painting by Robert Neathery, as well as works by a long list of local and Guadalajara artists, among them Jonathan Aparicio, Arevalo, Dionicio, John Frost, Guillermo Guzmán, Gail Michel, John Peterson, Georg Rauch and Synnove Schaffer (Pettersen).

In December 1976, Neathery also had work in a group show organized by Katie Goodridge Ingram for the Jalisco Department of Bellas Artes and Tourism, held at Plaza de la Hermandad (IMPI building) in Puerto Vallarta. The show ran from 4-21 December and also included works by Jean Caragonne; Conrado Contreras; Daniel de Simone; Gustel Foust; John Frost; Richard Frush; Hubert Harmon; Rocky Karns; Jim Marthai; Gail Michel; David Olaf; John K. Peterson; Georg Rauch; and Sylvia Salmi.

Bob Neathery’s work has been exhibited in Los Angeles County Museum, Downey Museum and Long Beach Museum. He won seven first and second place awards and purchase prizes in the annual North American Aviation Corp. art shows prior to retirement.

[Note: Bob Neathery’s elder sister Paula Neathery Hocks (1916-2003), a noted book artist, poet and photographer, visited him several times in Mexico, presumably staying in Jocotepec. As her obituary states, “Her artist books and photographs have been featured in shows internationally and are included in numerous collections such as the Tate Gallery and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, U.K.; the Whitney Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York; contemporary book art collections at the Getty Museum in Santa Monica California, and the Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive in Miami, Florida.; as well as special collections at the University of Iowa and the Bridwell Library at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.”]

Sources:

  • Guadalajara Reporter: 4 March 1967; 4 May 1968; 31 Aug 1968; 30 Nov 1968; 21 Nov 1970; 3 Feb 1973; 22 Sep 1973; 31 January 1976
  • Hollywood Riviera Tribune, Number 5, 13 November 1958
  • Informador: 26 Nov 1968
  • Palos Verdes Peninsula News, 30 October 1958; 16 July 1959; 31 December 1959; 5 December 1963; 12 December 1963.
  • Rolling Hills Herald, Number 71, 16 February 1961

Sombrero Books welcomes comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios. Please email us or use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts.

Tennessee Williams spent a productive summer at Lake Chapala

 1940s  No Responses »
Sep 222014
 

The great American poet and dramatist Thomas Lanier “Tennessee” Williams (26 March 1911 – 25 February 1983) had visited Mexico several times in the five or six years preceding 1945, but had never been to Lake Chapala. He spent the summer of 1945 in Cuernavaca and Chapala, and it proved to be a productive period in his writing career.

A year earlier, in 1944, his first major success – The Glass Menagerie – had catapulted Williams from obscurity to literary stardom, giving him a steady income. However, in 1945, Williams wanted to refocus on his writing and escape the publicity accompanying his success. He had also just had a cataract operation and wanted somewhere pleasant to recuperate.

While in Chapala, Tennessee Williams stayed at the home of poet Witter Bynner. Bynner’s home is now numbered as Francisco I. Madero #441. In Chapala, Williams wrote diligently for several hours every day, working not only on the new play provisionally called The Poker Night, but also on several poems and an essay entitled “A Playwright’s Statement“. In the words of Donald Spoto [1], Williams spent his time, “Strolling along the borders of Mexico’s largest inland body of water (over four hundred square miles), swimming, drinking rum-cocos with native boys….”

In his essay, “On a Streetcar Named Success” (1947), Williams recalls that “I settled for a while at Chapala, Mexico, to work on a play called The Poker Night, which later became A Streetcar Named Desire. It is only in his work that an artist can find reality and satisfaction, for the actual world is less intense than the world of his invention, and consequently his life, without recourse to violent disorder, does not seem very substantial. The right condition for him is that in which his work is not only convenient but unavoidable….“

How long was Tennessee Williams in Chapala?

It surprised me to discover that Williams spent less than two months in Chapala. He arrived in Chapala in July 1945 and left in mid-August of the same year. This is the only time he is known to have visited the area.

Why exactly did Williams choose Lake Chapala?

As Williams explains in his essay “The Catastrophe of Success”, “For me a convenient place to work is a remote place among strangers where there is good swimming. But life should require a certain minimal effort. You should not have too many people waiting on you, you should have to do most things for yourself. Hotel service is embarrassing. Maids, waiters, bellhops, porters and so forth are the most embarrassing…”

It appears to be largely coincidental that Tennessee Williams, who was a great admirer of British author D. H. Lawrence, happened to spend the summer of 1945 in the town where Lawrence had penned The Plumed Serpent twenty years earlier.

Tennessee Williams quote on vintage postcard of Chapala

Tennessee Williams quote on vintage postcard of Chapala

Does The Poker Night have any connection to the (Old) Posada Ajijic?

There is no evidence that The Poker Night has any connection to the (Old) Posada Ajijic. In a letter written 23 March 1945 (a week before The Glass Menagerie opened in New York, and several weeks before he left for Mexico), Williams wrote that he was “about 55 or 60 pages into the first draft of a play… At the moment, it has four different titles, “The Moth”, “The Poker Night”, “The Primary Colors” and “Blanche’s Chair in the Moon”.” [2] Clearly, therefore, he had started writing The Poker Night several weeks before traveling to Chapala.

Claims that Williams was inspired to write The Poker Night on account of regular poker sessions in the Posada Ajijic are equally spurious. In the event, according to Williams himself, the idea for the play did not come from poker playing, but from an image in his mind of a woman, sitting with folded hands near a moonlit window, who was waiting in vain for the arrival of her boyfriend.

The early history of the (Old) Posada Ajijic is murky, but it appears to have first operated as an inn sometime between 1938 and 1946. However, in those early years, it was certainly not a hive of activity, and did not become the social center of Ajijic until much later. It is possible  (though I know of no supporting evidence) that Tennessee Williams may have played poker on one or more occasions in the Posada Ajijic but, even if he did, it was clearly not a formative experience in terms of his writing.

A Streetcar Named Desire

As noted above, this play had numerous working titles including “The Moth”, “The Poker Night”, “The Primary Colors” and “Blanche’s Chair in the Moon”. The eventual title was not used by Williams until some time after he had left Chapala.

According to a webpage written by Bert Cardullo of the University of Michigan, who cites Nancy M. Tischler’s book Tennessee Williams: Rebellious Puritan (New York: Citadel Press 1961), Williams “had begun writing Streetcar in Chapala, Mexico (near Guadalajara) convinced that he was dying, that this would be his last play, and that therefore he should put his all into it. (Williams thought that the agonizing abdominal pains he had been experiencing were the result of lethal stomach cancer, but in fact they were caused by a ruptured appendix.)”

Spoto wrote that Tennessee Williams’ writing, in A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), “took on a fusion of sensuality and nostalgia and violence”, with the plot eventually centering on “a contest between the crude sensibilities of working-class poker players and the delicacies of two Southern women.” [1]

A Streetcar Named Desire is often considered Williams’ finest single work. It brought him renewed renown and won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The movie version won four Oscars, including three of the four categories for acting. Oscars were won by Vivien Leigh (Best Actress), Karl Malden (Best Supporting Actor) and Kim Hunter (Best Supporting Actress). In addition, Marlon Brando was nominated (but failed to win) the award for Best Actor.

Poems written at Lake Chapala

While spending the summer of 1945 in Chapala, Tennessee Williams also wrote several poems. “Recuerdo” (Spanish for “Memory”) is a poem in memory of his recently diseased grandmother and his interned sister Rose. Williams also reworked a poem previously titled “Idillio” (1944) as “Lady, Anemone”. This was first published in New Directions 9 (1946), pages 82-83, as the last in a sequence of three poems, followed by the dateline “Lake Chapala, Jalisco, Mexico, July 1945″. [3]

Other links between Tennessee Williams and Mexico

Later in his life, Tennessee Williams turned one of his short stories into the stage play The Night of the Iguana (1948), also set in Mexico. In The Night of the Iguana, a defrocked clergyman is leading a ladies’ bus tour around Mexico. The group is forced to take temporary refuge in a hotel whose owner proves to be especially sensual. The main characters become entangled in a web of relationships. They eventually manage to move on, but not before a captured iguana has been fattened for the dinner table.

The 1964 film adaptation of The Night of the Iguana, directed by John Huston, starred Richard Burton, Ava Gardner and Deborah Kerr. The movie set was built on Mismaloya Cove, a short distance south of Puerto Vallarta. The film won the Academy Award for Best Costume Design, and was also nominated for Best Supporting Actress, Cinematography and for Art Direction.

Note: Previously inaccurate citations were corrected in August 2018.

Sources:

  • [1] Donald Spoto. 1985. The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams. Boston: Little Brown & Co., 117-118, quoted in Michael Hargraves. 1992. Lake Chapala: A Literary Survey (Los Angeles: Michael Hargraves).
  • [2] John Bak. 2013. Tennessee Williams, a Literary Life (Palgrave Macmillan).
  • [3] N Moschovakis, Tennessee Williams and David Roessel. 2007. Collected Poems Of Tennessee Williams.

Sombrero Books welcomes comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios. Please email us or use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts.

Eileen Bassing (1918-1977) wrote “Home Before Dark” in Ajijic in the early 1950s

 1950s  6 Responses »
Sep 152014
 

Eileen and her second husband Robert (Bob) Bassing, both writers of some distinction, lived in Ajijic between 1951 and 1954.

bassing-eileen-photoAccording to US Social Security records, Eileen was born 6 March 1918 (Bob says she was actually born two years earlier) in Boston, Massachusetts, and educated in New York, Ohio and California. She married young and had two sons from her first marriage, before marrying Bob in 1948. She died aged 58 (or 60) in February 1977 in Los Angeles, California.

In the early 1950s, Eileen and Bob Bassing left their Hollywood careers and moved to Ajijic with her two sons (then aged 11 and 14 respectively) to focus on their writing. The family lived in a $5 a month home in Ajijic, and supplemented their income by selling home-made fudge and operating a small shop and lending library, “Simple Pleasures,” of English-language books they had shipped from California.

Eileen Bassing, a brunette with green eyes, recalled in a 1957 newspaper interview that “It was an amazing success even though most of our books were texts on psychiatry and philosophy. We were only open three hours a day but out of our returns we supported our family, a maid, a cook, a laundress and a gardener. We rented everything—even the New York Times, section by section, at 15 centavos per section. And those who borrowed the crossword puzzle had to promise to erase it when the page was returned.” (The Marion Star, Ohio, 10 March 1957, p 18).

While in Ajijic. the Bassings started a theater group, the Lakeside Players (forerunner of the Lakeside Little Theater). The first production was the comedy You Can’t Take It With You, staged in the open patio of a small inn, La Playita, in Chapala in 1953.

Home Before Dark

bassing-home-before-dark-movie

Movie poster for Home Before Dark

Eileen Bassing’s first novel, Home Before Dark (New York: Random House, 1957), was originally written in California and then rewritten in Ajijic. It was later made into a Warner Brothers movie (1958) based on a screenplay written by Eileen and her husband, and directed by Mervyn Le Roy.

Home Before Dark is the story of a young woman (Charlotte Bronn) suffering from bi-polar disorder who has been confined to a mental hospital. She leaves the Maraneck State Hospital after a year to resume her life at home with her emotionally repressed professor husband. Making her life even more difficult, they share their home with Charlotte’s attractive step-sister Joan and Joan’s mother, as well as a Jewish philosophy professor boarder and a servant.

With her marriage floundering, and suspecting her husband of being overly interested in Joan, Charlotte looks to be headed for another breakdown when she attends a faculty dinner dressed and made up to look like Joan. Her husband finally reveals his true feelings. Summarized as a study of “a mind and marriage at a crisis point”, both book and movie were generally well received and are still very readable today. The book was translated into French as Retour avant la nuit (1958) and into Italian.

Where’s Annie?

Eileen Bassing’s second novel, Where’s Annie? (Random House, New York, 1963) is set entirely in Ajijic at Lake Chapala. It grew out of a series of unpublished short stories written in Ajijic, and was completed after the couple’s return to California in 1954. It was chosen for the Book-of-the-Month Club; a French translation by France-Marie Watkins and Spanish translation appeared in 1964. This very interesting novel is looked at in more detail in this post. A screenplay for this novel was written by Eileen and Bob Bassing, but plans to realize the movie never worked out.

The dust jacket of Where’s Annie refers to a third novel “in progress” in Malibu at the time of publication of Where’s Annie, but this was apparently never published.

It may have met the same fate as some of her earlier unpublished works. An in-depth newspaper interview published in the 14 April 1963 edition of The Bridgeport Post in Connecticut, quotes Eileen Bassing as saying that, “My working habits are deplorable… I am not an organized writer. I work all the time, and I work very hard. It is impossible to measure the time I spend at the typewriter. There may be two days or so when I just stare and think. And those are the days when I really work.” The article goes on to say that “Several years ago. Mrs. Bassing did what some would consider a rash thing. She burned considerable unpublished work—short stories, three novels, including the first draft of “Home Before Dark,” and poetry written over a two-year period. “I wanted to have done with them so I wouldn’t go back and lean on them. I wanted to start anew.”

Excerpts of the first two chapters of Where’s Annie? appeared in The Saturday Evening Post in 1963. Bassing also had other short stories published, including “Our Strange Stay at Miss Pickering’s” in the 14 May 1955 issue of Maclean’s.

Children’s Books

Before embarking on her novels, Eileen Bassing had written four “Jamie” books for children, under the name Eileen Johnston: Jamie and The Fire Engine (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1940); Jamie and The Dump Truck (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1943) with pictures by Ora Brian Edwards; Jamie and The Tired Train (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1946), illustrated by Ora Brian Edwards; and Jamie and The Little Rubber Boat (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951) with illustrations by Lys Cassal.

Acknowledgment

My sincere thanks to Bob Bassing for clarifying, correcting and expanding on the original version of this profile, first published 15 September 2014.

Sources:

  • Jack Gaver. 1963. “Eileen Bassing a “Bleeding” Type”, in The Bridgeport Post, Connecticut, 14 April 1963, p 44
  • “It Paid Them To Get Away From It All”, Cedar Rapids Gazette, Tuesday, March 19, 1957
  • “Couple Leaves Movie Capital and Finds Success in Mexico”, The Marion Star, Ohio, 10 March 1957, p 18
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Several chapters of Foreign Footprints in Ajijic: Decades of Change in a Mexican Village offer more details about the history of the literary and artistic community in Ajijic.

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.

Writer and poet Robert Jere Black died in Ajijic in 1953

 1950s  No Responses »
Sep 012014
 

The son of a physician, writer and poet R. Jere Black Jr. was born 27 June 1892 at McKeesport, Pennsylvania. He would also live at different times in Chautauqua, New York; Washington, D.C.; Long Beach and Santa Monica, California; and Byron Center in Michigan, as well as in Mexico.

R Jere Black's passport photo, 1922

R Jere Black’s passport photo, 1922

During World War I, Black served as a machine gunner with the American Expeditionary Force in France from May 1918 to May 1919. He was gassed by the Germans, which left him in ill health for the remainder of his life, with numerous spells in hospital. He married Josephine Elizabeth Best (1894-1976) in 1920. By 1937, the couple had divorced and his former wife had remarried.

It is unclear when he first visited Lake Chapala, but R. Jere Black died of a heart attack at the home of Paul “Pablo” Heuer, in the village of Ajijic, on 7 September 1953, and was buried in the Ajijic Municipal Cemetery the following day.

Black made his living from writing stories and short pieces for a number of popular magazines, both “slicks” and “pulps”, including The Smart Set, Life, The Saturday Evening Post, Breezy Stories, Battle Stories, Sweetheart Stories and College Life. His brother described him as “a brilliant, fascinating person.”

His most productive period in terms of published writings was the period 1928 to 1934. This period included three poems published in Weird Tales: “Lyonesse” (December 1928), “Masquerade” (March 1930) and “The Pirate” (August 1930), a non-fiction piece, “The Pseudo-Scientific Field,” for Author and Journalist (May 1930) which took a look at “science fiction” (a term still in its infancy at the time), and a novel, The Killing of the Golden Goose: A Christopher King Mystery Story (New York: Loring & Mussey, 1934).

Black’s wife, born as Josephine Elizabeth Best but better known as E. Best Black, was also a writer of genre fiction. Born in 1894 in Meadville, Pennsylvania, she and Jere Black married there in 1920, before traveling widely. Mrs Black wrote a story with the title “Flaming Ruth” (a pun) for Young’s Realistic Stories Magazine in February 1928 and also published two hardback novels featuring detective Peter Strangley: The Ravenelle Riddle (New York: Loring & Mussey, 1933) and The Crime of the Chromium Bowl (London: George Newnes, 1937). By 1937, however, she had divorced R. Jere Black and become the wife of Theron Lowden Kelley (1899-1967). Josephine Elizabeth Best Kelley died in 1976 in Monterey, California.

Source:

Comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios are welcome. Please email or use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts.

Kenneth Millar (1915-1983) aka Ross MacDonald

 1950s  1 Response »
Aug 182014
 

Writing under the pseudonym Ross MacDonald, Kenneth Millar (1915-1983) wrote The Zebra-Striped Hearse (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1962). The Zebra-Striped Hearse is a mystery novel, with several chapters (chapters 9 to 12) set in the village of Ajijic on Lake Chapala. The easy-to-read novel, with its largely accurate depiction of the Old Posada Ajijic, followed Millar’s visit with fellow author John Mersereau in the late 1950s, or very early 1960s. The novel won the Mystery Writers of America’s  Edgar Award for Best Novel in 1963.

macdonald-ross-zebra-striped-hearseKenneth Millar was born in Los Gatos, San Francisco on 13 December 1915, but was raised in Vancouver, Canada, where he met and, in 1938, married Margaret Sturm, also a writer. His wife achieved her own success writing as Margaret Millar.

Kenneth Millar had begun post-graduate work at the University of Michigan (where he had completed his undergraduate degree) and published his first novel, The Dark Tunnel, before serving his country as a naval communications officer from 1944 to 1946, Following the war, he returned to Michigan to complete his doctorate.

Millar went on to write numerous novels, with Ross MacDonald being only one of several pseudonyms he used during his distinguished writing career. Later in life, he was later elected President of the Mystery Writers of America, and given their Grand Master Award. He also won the Silver Dagger Award given by Mystery Writers of Great Britain. He is best known for his popular series of novels, set in southern California, featuring private detective Lew Archer.

Millar passed away in Santa Barbara, California, on 11 July 1983.

Other twentieth century novels set largely, or entirely, at Lake Chapala include:

Sombrero Books welcomes comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios. Please email us or use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts.

Eunice and Peter Huf

 1970s  No Responses »
Aug 112014
 

Eunice and Peter Huf are artists who met in Mexico in the 1960s and lived in Ajijic on Lake Chapala for several years, before relocating to Europe with their two sons in the early 1970s.

In Ajijic, the Hufs were sufficiently successful that they were able to live off their art.

Huf+Nottonson-CoverPeter and Eunice Huf were founder members of a small group of artists, known as Grupo 68, that exhibited regularly at the Camino Real hotel in Guadalajara and at various galleries.

Grupo 68 initially had 5 members: Peter Huf, Eunice Huf, Jack Rutherford, John Peterson and (Don) Shaw (who was known only by his surname). Jack Rutherford dropped out of the group after a few months, but the remaining four stayed together until 1971.

In 1969, the Hufs co-founded a co-operative art gallery “La Galería”, located on Calle Zaragoza at its intersection with Juarez.

Both artists had solo show during their time in Mexico. For example, Eunice Huf held a solo show in 1968, sponsored by the Mexican Olympic program at Galeria 8 de Julio in Guadalajara. Her show was followed by a solo show of works by Georg Rauch also under the patronage of Señora Holt and the Olympics.

They also took part in many group shows, including the “Fiesta de Arte”, held at a private home in Ajijic in May 1971. Others in that show included Daphne Aluta; Mario Aluta; Beth Avary; Charles Blodgett; Antonio Cárdenas; Alan Davoll; Alice de Boton; Robert de Boton; Tom Faloon; John Frost; Fernando García; Dorothy Goldner; Burt Hawley; Michael Heinichen; Lona Isoard; John Maybra Kilpatrick; Gail Michael (Michel); Bert Miller; Robert Neathery; John K. Peterson; Stuart Phillips; Hudson Rose; Mary Rose; Jesús Santana; Walt Shou; Frances Showalter; ‘Sloane’; Eleanor Smart; Robert Snodgrass; and Agustín Velarde.

Before leaving Mexico (with every intention of returning), they illustrated a short 32-page booklet entitled Mexico My Home. Primitive Art and Modern Poetry With 50 easy to learn Spanish words and phrases. For all children from 8 to 80, published in Guadalajara by Boutique d’Artes Graficas in 1972. The poems in the booklet were written by Ira N. Nottonson, who was also living in Ajijic at the time. The illustrations in the book are Mexican naif in style, whereas their own art tended to be far more abstract or surrealist.

The couple left Mexico in June 1972, and lived for a couple of years in southern Spain before moving to Germany. Despite their earlier intentions, they never did return to Mexico.

Acknowledgment:

Grateful thanks to Eunice and Peter Huf for their warm hospitality during a visit to their home and studio in October 2014. Their archive of photos and press clippings from their time in Mexico proved invaluable, as did their memories of people and events of the time.

If you wish to add to or correct anything in this brief biography, then please use the comments feature or email us.

Charles Bernard Nordhoff (1887-1947)

 1920s and earlier  No Responses »
Aug 042014
 

Charles Bernard Nordhoff (1887-1947), best known as co-author of Mutiny on the Bounty, has several connections to Mexico, having spent his childhood, and learned to hunt, sail and fish, on  his family’s ranch near Todos Santos in Baja California. Having gained an undergraduate degree, he returned to Mexico, to work as a supervisor on a sugar plantation in Veracruz and fell in love with the plantation owner’s beautiful daughter. He visited the Chapala area in November 1909, writing up his bird-watching notes more than a decade later for Condor Magazine:

“The fresh water marshes of Lake Chapala, in the state of Jalisco, Mexico, form another haven for waterfowl. At one end of the lake there is a great area of flooded land cut by a veritable labyrinth of sluggish channels, 400 square miles, I should say. The far interior of this swampy paradise, reached after three days’ travel in a native canoe, is a vast sanctuary for wildfowl, a region of gently rolling damp prairies, set with small ponds, and traversed by a network of navigable channels leading to the great lake. I saw as many geese, White-fronted (Anser albifrons) and Snow (Chen hyperboreus), as I have ever seen in the Sacramento Valley, and the number of ducks was past belief, with some interesting species like the Masked and Florida Black or Dusky, to lend variety.”

Nordhoff was born in London, England, to well-to-do American parents.The family moved to Berlin, where his mother wrote in the family diary that, “Charlie undoubtedly began his study of water fowl, as his daily outing in a small pram or push cart led him first to the bakeries for a supply of stale buns and back to the lake to feed the ducks.” Following several years living on the ranch near Todos Santos, the family moved to California. Following in the footsteps of his grandfather, a journalist and author, Nordhoff wrote his first article, for publication in an ornithological journal, at age fifteen.

MutinyOnTheBountyHe studied briefly at Stanford University, but left in the aftermath of the serious earthquake and fire of 1906. After completing a B.A. at Harvard University in 1909, he returned to Mexico, to work on a sugar plantation in Veracruz. Unable to win the heart of the plantation owner’s beautiful daughter, with whom he had fallen in love, and with the Mexican Revolution breaking out around him, Nordhoff left Mexico in 1911, and never returned.

In 1917, Nordhoff joined the French Foreign Legion as a pilot, eventually winning the Croix de Guerre for his efforts. After the war, he wrote a history of the Lafayette Flying Corps. with James Norman Hall (who later updated the long-established and classic traveler’s guide to Mexico  Terry’s Guide to Mexico). The two men later moved to Tahiti to write travel articles for Harper’s, where Nordhoff married a Polynesian woman, Pepe Teara; they had six children.

In the 1920s Nordhoff wrote three novels. Picarò (1924) was based on his flying experience and life in Paris; The Pearl Lagoon (1924) and The Derelict (1928) were both semi-autobiographical. However, Nordhoff is best known for his collaboration with Hall on the Mutiny on the Bounty trilogy about the famous 1789 mutiny in the South Seas. The novel was the basis for three movie versions, the first of which, released in 1935, won an Oscar for Best Picture.

Nordhoff and Hall published six more co-authored novels, several of which were made into movies, but none came close to emulating the success of Mutiny on the Bounty. Tragically, following severe depression and heavy drinking, Nordhoff took his own life on April 10, 1947.

Lake Chapala Artists & Authors is reader-supported. Purchases made via links on our site may, at no cost to you, earn us an affiliate commission. Learn more.

This is a lightly edited extract from my Lake Chapala Through the Ages, an Anthology of Travelers’ Tales (Sombrero Books, 2008)

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.

Francisco Ochoa (1946-2006)

 1980s, 1990s onwards  No Responses »
Jul 282014
 

Francisco Ochoa was born in Jamay, Jalisco, mid-way between Ocotlán and La Barca, on 4 Sep 1943 (some sources say 1946). The family moved to Mexico City when he was 5 years old. He subsequently became an accountant.

Francisco Ochoa. 1982. El canto de las sirenas.

Francisco Ochoa. 1982. El canto de las sirenas.

He was about 36 years old when he enrolled in the  Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado “La Esmeralda”. While studying there, he became the accountant for the Galería Estela Shapiro. Recognizing his talent, Shapiro offered him space in her gallery for a one-man show, which was well received by the art-loving public. Ochoa abandoned accountancy to focus full-time on his painting. Numerous individual exhibitions followed, in locations such as the Instituto Francés de América Latina, the Casa de la Cultura Jesús Reyes Heroles, the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana, the Museo Universitario del Chopo, the Centro Cultural Arte Contemporáneo, and in the Galería OMR. His works have also been exhibited in Guadalajara (including the Cabañas Cultural Institute), and in California and San Antonio, Texas.

After the death of his mother, Ochoa returned to Guadalajara, from where he continued to supply Galeria OMR with his work. Unfortunately, shortly after moving to Guadalajara, he was diagnosed with oral cancer; he died on 29 March 2006.

Ochoa was primarily an oil painter, but also left many sketches and drawings. His works are included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of New York, the Regional Museum of Guadalajara and the José Luis Cuevas museum in Mexico City.

His paintings shows great ingenuity, and are somewhat naif in style, using color and a sense of fun to offer a fresh view, replete with social criticism, often poking fun at the idiosyncrasies of Mexico and the absurdities of everyday life. This has led to him being described as a “satirical costumbrista.”

It is unclear whether Ochoa ever painted Lake Chapala, though his 1982 work “El Canto de las Sirenas” (“Song of the Sirens”) (image) could easily be interpreted as having been influenced by his familiarity with the lake.

In his will, he left numerous drawing and two oil paintings to the Casa de la Cultura in Jamay, which has now been renamed after him. Since 2012, one room in the building shows works by Ochoa and a second room is used for temporary exhibitions.

For more images of Francisco Ochoa’s art, see Museoblaisten.com

Ramón Martínez Ocaranza (1915-1982)

 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s  No Responses »
Jun 082014
 

Ramón Martínez Ocaranza was born in Jiquilpan, Michoacán, 15 April, 1915, and died in Morelia 21 September 1982.

He was a poet, essayist, social fighter and teacher, who used to joke that only a wall had stopped him from becoming President of Mexico–this was because Lázaro Cárdenas (President of Mexico 1934-1940) had been born in the house next door!

ocaranza-ramonMartínez christened his native city of Jiquilpan as the “city of jacarandas”, a name that is still widely used today on account of the city’s many blue-flowering jacaranda trees.

He published numerous volumes of poetry, including:

Al pan, pan y al vino, vino, 1943; Ávido Amor, 1944; Preludio de la muerte enemiga, 1946; Muros de soledad, first part 1952, second part 1992; De la vida encantada, 1952; Río de llanto, 1955; Alegoría de México, 1959; Otoño encarcelado, 1968; Elegía de los triángulos, 1974; Elegías en la Muerte de Pablo Neruda, 1977; Patología del Ser, 1981.  Works published after his death include the poetry volumes La Edad del tiempo, 1985; and Vocación de Job, 1992, which formed part of El libro de los días (1997).

He also wrote an autobiography, finally published twenty years after his death in 2002. He studied (and later taught) at Colegio de San Nicolás de Hidalgo (Morelia) and studied at UNAM. His poems contain many pre-Columbian element and he researched and wrote about Tarascan literature.

Sadly, a campaign in 2010-2011 to turn his former house (Río Mayo #367, colonia Ventura Puente, Morelia)  into a small museum and exhibition space has apparently failed, owing to lack of funds.

Sombrero Books welcomes comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios. Please email us or use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts.

Bernardo de Balbuena’s “El Bernardo” is earliest known poetic reference to Lake Chapala

 1920s and earlier  No Responses »
May 162014
 

The earliest known reference to Lake Chapala in a poem must surely be that made by Bernardo de Balbuena (1562-1627) in El Bernardo, written between 1592 and 1602, published in Madrid in 1624. The poem took a decade to write because of its extraordinary length—some 40,000 octavo reales (Royal eighths) in size!

Balbuena was born in Valdepeñas, Spain, in 1562. In 1584, at age 22, he crossed the Atlantic to join his father, who owned properties in New Spain. This was only 63 years after the conquest, but already various cities had been founded and were beginning to prosper.

Balbuena was already a prizewinning poet by the time he was named Chaplain of the Audiencia of Guadalajara in 1592. He later lived for several years in the small isolated village of San Pedro Lagunillas near Compostela, close to Tepic. In 1593, he wrote Grandeza mexicana, a poem which appeared in book form in 1604, and was dedicated to Doña Isabel de Tobar y Guzmán, with whom he was in love.

Balbuena returned to Spain in 1606 and was never to set foot again in New Spain, despite having fallen in love with the country and having become a “Mexican” poet. In 1608, he published Siglo de Oro en las selvas de Erífile, a pastoral novel. In 1626, he became Bishop of Puerto Rico, dying there the following year.

In El Bernardo, the author begins by describing France and Spain. By Book XIII, he is describing Asia. Then (Book XV), he overflies Europe. The descriptions of imagined aerial trips are supposedly the best passages of the entire work, with the highlight being Book XVIII which sees the magician Malgesí flying over America, from Patagonia in the south to the northern edge of New Spain.

Numerous places are mentioned, including the Andes, Brazil and Chiapas, as well as Zacatecas, Guadalajara and the erupting volcano of Jala, before Chapala gets its moment of fame:

Come, between the fresh Pánuco and Gualulco
to Tlaxcala, and the Mexican kingdom,
to Michoacán, Colima and Acapulco
the town closest to the southern sea,
the villages of Quiseo and Tlajomulco,
and in their environs and flower-filled plain
the abundant lagoon of Chapala,
which equals the Ocean in depth and breadth.

Spanish-Mexican philosopher Ramón Xirau describes Balbuena as a “splendid poet who should be remembered and, above all, re-read.” However, reading (or re-reading) 40,000 octavo reales might well be more than most people have time for!

Lake Chapala Artists & Authors is reader-supported. Purchases made via links on our site may, at no cost to you, earn us an affiliate commission. Learn more.

[Extract from “Lake Chapala—as large as an ocean?”, chapter 7 of Lake Chapala Through the Ages: an anthology of travellers’ tales]

Village In The Sun by Dane Chandos (reprint by Tlayacapan Press, 1998)

 Other  No Responses »
Jan 042014
 

In the early 1940s, an Englishman Dane Chandos (the pen name for a two-man writing team) decided to settle in a small village on Lake Chapala. This is a most welcome reprint of the much sought-after, highly entertaining account of his adventures during his first year in Mexico. As he builds his home, Chandos absorbs local customs while bonding with a colorful cast of characters. A delightful book!

Village In The Sun by Dane Chandos (reprint by Tlayacapan Press, 1998)
Softcover, 259 pages. Dimensions (in inches): 8.3 x 5.45 x 0.6 Price: US$15.00 [plus shipping – contact us for details]

Written in the early 1940s, Village In The Sun is still considered to be one of the most endearing books written about Mexico to this day. Set in the area of Ajijic, Jalisco, it gives a delightful view of the Mexicans and their culture without criticism and judgment. The story is a most entertaining month-by-month account of an Englishman weathering his first year in Ajijic. It is written in a time when the road from Chapala to Jocotepec was a muddy trail and steam bed washouts were part of life during the rainy season. Ice was delivered by bus from Guadalajara, dropped off by the side of the road and left in the sun. In the process of building his house, the author gradually absorbs local customs while bonding with a colorful cast of characters.

Related books:

All three books “House in the Sun”, “Village in the Sun” and “Candelaria’s Cookbook” are delightful and essential reading for anyone who cares about the spirit of Mexico and its people. The sale of these books helps fund an educational program for young people living in the village of San Antonio Tlayacapan, where the books are set.

Artist-environmentalist Rysiek Ledwon lived in Jocotepec in the mid-1980s

 1980s  3 Responses »
Mar 222012
 

Artist and environmentalist Ra(w) Rysiek (formerly known as Richard “Rick”) Ledwon lived in Jocotepec several times for short periods from the early 1980s on.

Born in about 1958 in Saskatchewan, Canada, to a musical couple from Poland, Ledwon studied Fine Arts at University of Alberta, but apparently became disillusioned by professors who told him he’d never make it in his chosen field. He traveled to Europe. On his return to Canada, he studied graphic design at Grant MacEwan Art College (Edmonton, Alberta) and at Fredericton College.

Rick Ledwon. Lago de Chapala. ca 1988. Reproduced by kind permission of Dale and Wayne Palfrey

Rick Ledwon. Lago de Chapala. Lithograph, ca 1985. Reproduced by kind permission of Dale Palfrey.

Ledwon then worked for Air Canada (Latin America and Caribbean) and as a freelance graphic artist. He visited Jocotepec in the early 1980s to meet artist-photographer John Frost (on the recommendation of a mutual friend), and then worked with both John Frost, and also with Georg Rauch, another Jocotepec-based artist, for almost two years. During this time, he developed silk screen and other techniques. After returning to Canada, he worked as a picture framer at an art gallery, but returned to Jocotepec later that year to work on silkscreens and paintings, primarily of flowers and architecture.

In 1985, his silkscreens (example above) were regularly exhibited in the Posada Ajijic and sold well. While Ledwon’s early silkscreens were somewhat derivative of the designs of his mentor Georg Rauch, his later work, especially when depicting women in Michoacán, was more original.

Ledwon participated in a joint exhibition in Mexico City in 1988 titled “Help Save Lake Chapala,” alongside Daphne Aluta, Nancy Bollembach, Luisa Julian, Conrado Contreras, Georg Rauch, Eleanor Smart, Enrique Velázquez and Laura Goeglin.

envirobusWhen he returned permanently to Canada, in his early thirties, and was living in Ottawa, Ledwon decorated the ‘Envirobus’ (see image), which was used to promote local environmental groups and environmentally oriented businesses, such as organic farmers and recycling companies. The bus itself was a moving mural, painted to represent Ledwon’s impression of forests from all over the Americas.

In more recent years, Ledwon has resided in the Slocan Valley in B.C., Canada, built (and taught how to build) unique strawbale houses in several countries, tended organic gardens, and taught about the raw food diet, while practicing Qigong.

Note

This is an updated version of a post first published 22 March 2012.

Sources

  • Anon. 1987. Portrait of the Artist, in El Ojo del Lago, January 1987.
  • Ottawa Citizen: 8 August 1991, 13.
  • Rysiek Ledwon. 2003. Building with Strawbales. Issues Magazine, June/July 2003.

Comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios are welcome. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.

John Frost (1923-2015), artist and photographer

 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s onwards  2 Responses »
Mar 222012
 

Artist and photographer John Frost was born 21 May 1923 in Pasadena, California. John and his wife Joan Frost, an author, lived for more than forty years in Jocotepec, before returning to California in 2012.

John is the son of John and Priscilla (Morgrage) Frost and grandson of the famous American illustrator A. B. Frost. [1]

John became interested in photography and the magic of the darkroom at age 14. He attended Midland School, a small boarding school near Los Olivos, California. After military service in the Pacific during the second world war, Frost studied art at Occidental College under Kurt Baer (1946) and at Jepson Art Institute under Francis de Erdely and Rico Lebrun (1947-1949), gaining  a degree in Graphic Art. In the mid-1950s, he settled into artistic and commercial photography.

John’s first solo exhibition, of mixed media pieces, in which drawings were photographed, enlarged and chemically treated to transform colors, was at Bobinart Gallery in Los Angeles in the early 1960s. This exhibition moved to Purdue University in 1966, shortly after Frost had relocated to Jocotepec with his wife. At Purdue, the opening of the exhibit was accompanied by a lecture about the “beat generation”. At the time, Purdue was embroiled in a bitter city versus university battle, on account of the Police Chief having ordered the university library to withdraw from circulation all books by Henry Miller, the American author then living in France.

John Frost (then 41 years old) married Joan Van Every (35) on 26 September 1964 in San Bernadino, California. In 1966, the couple relocated to Mexico, living for a short time in Uruapan in Michoacán before establishing their permanent home and photographic studio in Jocotepec.

In 1968, an exhibition of his silkscreens at La Galería in Guadalajara prior to the 1968 Olympics attracted the attention of TV broadcasters. Frost declined to give them permission to film his silkscreens since they asked him for $200 towards the production costs!

In May 1971, Frost was among the large group of artists exhibiting at “Fiesta de Arte” at a private home in Ajijic. Other artists showing there included Daphne Aluta; Mario Aluta; Beth Avary; Charles Blodgett; Antonio Cárdenas; Alan Davoll; Alice de Boton; Robert de Boton; Tom Faloon; Fernando García; Dorothy Goldner; Burt Hawley; Michael Heinichen; Peter Huf; Eunice (Hunt) Huf; Lona Isoard; John Maybra Kilpatrick; Gail Michael (Michel); Bert Miller; Robert Neathery; John K. Peterson; Stuart Phillips; Hudson Rose; Mary Rose; Jesús Santana; Walt Shou; Frances Showalter; ‘Sloane’; Eleanor Smart; Robert Snodgrass; and Agustín Velarde..

John Frost: Nude with flower

John Frost: Nude with flower

For several years, John Frost focused on his paintings and silkscreens. He worked closely, and shared his silkscreen techniques, with several other Jocotepec-based artists, including (Don) Shaw, Georg Rauch and Ra Rysiek Ledwon. Georg Rauch went on to experiment with his own silkscreen techniques using non-toxic materials, producing his own masterful silkscreens for many years. John also had a profound influence on the young painter Synnove Pettersen (1944-), who attributes her decision to return to doing silkscreen (serigraph) pieces at that stage in her career to his enthusiasm and encouragement.

In December 1976, Frost also had work in a group show organized by Katie Goodridge Ingram for the Jalisco Department of Bellas Artes and Tourism, held at Plaza de la Hermandad (IMPI building) in Puerto Vallarta. The show ran from 4-21 December and also included works by Jean Caragonne; Conrado Contreras; Daniel de Simone; Gustel Foust; Richard Frush; Hubert Harmon; Rocky Karns; Jim Marthai; Gail Michel; Bob Neathery; David Olaf; John K. Peterson; Georg Rauch; and Sylvia Salmi.

Starting in 1979, John Frost became the premier aerial photographer in western Mexico, amassing an impressive collection of images (now housed in the University of Colima), especially of the Lake Chapala region, the volcanoes of Colima and the rapidly developing mid-Pacific coast of Colima and Jalisco, including the area around Manzanillo.

His aerial photographs have featured in several exhibitions, including four solo exhibitions in the state of Colima, three in the state capital and one on the university campus in Manzanillo. John Frost’s photos can be found in the collections of several Colima and Jalisco state agencies. A selection of his photographs graced the Guadalajara airport at the time of the 1986 World Cup, and his photos were exhibited in one of the lateral galleries of the Cabañas Cultural Institute in Guadalajara. This may have been the first time any Lakeside artist had ever been invited to exhibit in the Institute, arguably Jalisco’s single most important exhibition space. (Several years later, the Institute would invite fellow Jocotepec artist Georg Rauch to hold a retrospective of his work there, occupying the main galleries).

Once, when chatting with me, John Frost remarked that “I never quite met my family’s expectations”. If that is really true, then I can only conclude that his family’s expectations were utterly impossible to meet, since John’s superb photographs and silkscreens, as well as his quiet encouragement of many other artists and photographers, speak for themselves.

– – –

[1] Arthur Burdett Frost (1851-1928) (ABF), was an early American illustrator, graphic artist, and comics writer. He was also well known as a painter. ABF’s work is well known for its dynamic representation of motion and sequence. ABF is considered one of the great illustrators in the “Golden Age of American Illustration”. ABF illustrated over 90 books, and produced hundreds of paintings; in addition to his work in illustrations, he is renowned for realistic hunting and shooting prints.

Sombrero Books welcomes comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios. Please email us or use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts.

Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859)

 1920s and earlier  2 Responses »
Jan 312010
 

It is impossible to do justice in these few lines to the brilliance of Friedrich Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt, aptly described by Charles Darwin as “the greatest scientific traveler who ever lived”. He was born in Berlin, Prussia, in 1769 to a very well-connected family.

He studied political economy before turning to science at the University of Göttingen in 1789. One of his friends there, George Forster, had been scientific illustrator on Captain James Cook’s second voyage. This friendship undoubtedly reinforced Humboldt’s determination to undertake his own long distance travels. Humboldt systematically prepared himself for a life as a scientific explorer, first studying commerce and foreign languages at Hamburg, then geology and mining at Freiberg, followed by anatomy at Jena, as well as astronomy and the use of scientific instruments.

Humboldt spent five years in the New World, from 1799 to 1804. His visit to Mexico began in Acapulco on March 22, 1803, and lasted until he set sail from Veracruz for the United States on March 7, 1804. In the intervening months, Humboldt measured, recorded, observed and wrote about anything and everything, with remarkable industry and accuracy. He climbed mountains, burned his boots on active volcanoes, descended into mines, recorded geographical coordinates, and collected specimens and antiquities. He also drew a large number of maps, drawings and sketches. Humboldt’s Political essay on the kingdom of New Spain was the first systematic scientific description of the New World. It appeared in 1811, and marked the birth of modern geography in Mexico. His figures and ideas were used and quoted by writers for many many years.

On his return to Europe, he spent more than twenty years, mainly in Paris, writing and publishing his results. The crowning glory of Humboldt’s career was his five-volume Cosmos. Begun at age 76, it turned out to be a masterpiece, proposing conceptual generalizations, supported by the observations of the physical world he had made decades earlier.

Humboldt’s work was the foundation for the subsequent development of physical geography and meteorology. Developing the concept of isotherms allowed climatic comparisons to be made. He recognized that altitudinal differences in climate echoed latitudinal differences. His essay on the geography of plants related the distribution of plant forms to varying physical conditions. Finding that volcanoes fell naturally into linear groups, Humboldt argued that these presumably corresponded with vast subterranean fissures. In addition, he demonstrated the igneous origin of volcanic rocks for the first time.

Humboldt’s work awakened considerable European interest in the Americas and caused many later artists to travel to Mexico to draw and paint.

Humboldt died, at the age of 89, on May 6, 1859. His travels, experiments, and knowledge had transformed western science in the 19th century. Humanist, naturalist, botanist, geographer, geologist: Humboldt was all of these, and more.

Lake Chapala Artists & Authors is reader-supported. Purchases made via links on our site may, at no cost to you, earn us an affiliate commission. Learn more.

A brief excerpt from Humboldt’s “Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain” is included in Tony Burton’s “Lake Chapala Through the Ages, an anthology of travelers’ tales” (Sombrero Books 2008).  This book has excerpts from more than 50 original sources covering the period 1530–1910, together with short biographies of the writers, and an informative commentary setting the extracts in their historical context.

Charles Embree and “A Dream of a Throne” (1900), the earliest English-language novel about Lake Chapala

 1920s and earlier  No Responses »
Jan 032010
 

Charles Fleming Embree was born in Princeton, Indiana, October 1, 1874, the son of lawyer David Franklin Embree, member of a prominent pioneer family, and Mary Fleming Embree. Charles was still an infant when his father died in 1877. To this day, one of the main streets in Princeton is N. Embree Street, and the Fire Department Chief at the fire hall (on Embree and W. Brumfield) has the surname Embree.

embree-portrait-2Charles Embree was educated in Princeton public schools and entered Wabash College in the fall of 1892. After three years he left college without graduating to devote himself to writing, and achieved immediate success. For the Love of Tonita, and other tales of the Mesas was his first book, published in 1897. The success of his first book led to two more novels.

On January 18, 1898, he married Virginia Broadwell. The young couple moved to Mexico, and lived in Chapala for eight months in 1898, before moving to Oaxaca. The precise motives behind Embree’s decision to spend two years in Mexico remain frustratingly unclear.

Embree’s second book, dedicated to his wife, is set in the Lake Chapala region, but was written while they were in Oaxaca. A Dream of a Throne, the Story of a Mexican Revolt (1900), is illustrated with five black and white drawings by Henry Sandham (1842-1910), a very well-known Canadian illustrator of the time. From Oaxaca, Embree also penned a short newspaper piece about anthropologist Frederick Starr, who was conducting fieldwork there.

Embree’s third book, illustrated by Dan Smith, was A Heart of Flame: the Story of a Master Passion (1901). Embree also had several short stories published in McClure’s Magazine, from 1902 to (posthumously) 1906. In recognition of the distinguished place he had already achieved among American novelists, Embree was awarded an honorary Master of Arts degree by Wabash College in 1903.

Embree and his wife moved to Santa Ana, California. Sadly, the couple had not long celebrated the birth of their only daughter Elinor in 1905 when Embree was taken seriously ill. He died on July 3, not yet 31 years old.

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A short extract from Embree’s A Dream of a Throne is included in my “Lake Chapala Through the Ages, an anthology of travellers’ tales” (Sombrero Books 2008). This book has extracts from more than 50 original sources covering the period 1530-1910, together with short biographies of the writers, and an informative commentary setting the extracts in their historical context.

Other twentieth century novels set largely, or entirely, at Lake Chapala include:

Comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios are welcome. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.

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