Lake Chapala Artists and Authors

American artist Garrett Van Vranken (1887-1961) and his wife, Tommie (Thomy) E Carruthers Van Vranken (1888-1962), lived their final years in Chapala.

George Garrett Van Vranken (sometimes Vanvranken) was born in Cadillac, Michigan, on 16 December 1887. He completed four years of high school before serving in the military during the first world war. Known for his pastels and commercial art, it is claimed by one source that Van Vranken was an alumnus of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Tommie (Thomy) E Carruthers, born in Florida 5 March 1888, died in Chapala 23 January 1962. She had completed one year of college and was living in Los Angeles when she and Garret married in about 1925. She is recorded in the 1930 US census as owning a Los Angeles advertising agency, while her husband is listed as an artist.

Garrett Van Vranken. Commercial artwork, c 1936.

Garrett Van Vranken appears to have been a founder member of the local (Los Angeles) group of members of the American Artists Congress, and combined his personal fine arts career with commercial work.

His painting “Three by the Sea” (below) was shown in the first exhibition of works by local members of the American Artists Congress at the Stanley Rose Galleries in Los Angeles in September 1936: “Garrett Van Vranken shows a good figure composition, “Three by the Sea” which links the “modern” side of the show with the various still lifes and flower pieces of academic vein.”

Garrett Van Vranken. “Three by the Sea,” c 1936.

The local group of the American Artists Congress, which later had its own gallery on Hollywood Boulevard, had been formed about eighteen months earlier.

In 1942, at least one painting by Van Vranken was included in a group show of works by “artists employed in aircraft factories,” a show held at Raymond & Raymond Galleries on Sunset Blvd. in Los Angeles. The following year, his painting “Woman on White” was shown at the Los Angeles County Museum in the Fourth Annual Exhibition of Work of Artists of Los Angeles and Vicinity.

After his retirement in the early 1950s, Van Vranken and his wife moved from Los Angeles to Mexico, apparently initially to the border town of Brownsville, Texas, and then to Lake Chapala, where they established their home at Calle Juárez #512. It remains unclear whether or not Van Vranken painted or exhibited while living in Chapala.

Garrett Van Vranken died on 13 April 1961, and his wife, Tommie, died on 23 January the following year. There was some confusion about Garrett’s date of death; his wife confirmed to US authorities when they filed the official Report of the Death of a US citizen Abroad that her husband had died on 13 April 1961, and not on 20 April, as stated in the formal registration of his death in Chapala.

To read more about the history of the Lake Chapala art community, see Foreign Footprints in Ajijic: Decades of Change in a Mexican Village.

Sources

• Edan Hughes, Artists in California, 1786-1940.
• Los Angeles Times: 20 Sep 1936, 56; 10 Jul 1938, 56.
• Los Angeles Evening Citizen News: 28 Nov 1942, 2; 20 Mar 1943, 7.

Comments, corrections and additional material welcome, whether via comments feature or email.

Talented British artists Richard and Nancy Carline never lived in Ajijic, but did visit friends in the village more than once and completed several paintings of the area.

Richard Cotton Carline (1896-1980) was born in Oxford to a family of painters. After studying in Paris, and doing some teaching, he working on developing camouflage designs for the military before serving on the Western Front and in the Middle East as an Official War Artist during the first world war. During the second world war, Carline wrote the Ministry of Aircraft Production’s official report on industrial and aircraft camouflage; his work on camouflage projects was highlighted in a 2016 exhibition at Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum. The quality of his work as war artist and camouflage expert is almost unparalleled.

Richard Carline. Carrying burdens in Mexico. Credit: Christie’s.

In the interwar period, Carline taught at the Ruskin School of Drawing in Oxford and held his first solo show at the Goupil Gallery in 1931. He was an active member of the AIA (Artists’ International Association) and, according to Mexican art critic Justino Fernández [1], spent eight months in Mexico in 1936. The more commonly repeated version is that Carline visited the USA and Mexico in 1937-1938, where he was impressed by both the value of public murals and the value of encouraging them via such programs as the Federal Art Project.

In the early 1940s, on behalf of the AIA (Artists’ International Association), Carline lobbied for the UK to have a public mural program, based on those in Mexico and the US, as a way of enabling artists to contribute to the war effort. Sadly, the AIA’s efforts met with only limited success, but did not deter Carline from establishing a National Mural Council in 1943 to promote the commissioning of murals by industry. Three years later, Carline was chosen as the first Art Counsellor of UNESCO.

Richard Carline. 1975. Ajijic after rain. Credit: Canterbury Auctions

Carline was an aficionado of picture postcards and wrote Pictures in the Post: Story of the Picture Postcard and Its Place in the History of Popular Art, first published in 1959. He also wrote The Arts of West Africa (1935), Draw they Must (1968) and Stanley Spencer at War (1978).

• See Richard Carline’s Wikipedia entry for a more complete biography.

Richard and Nancy Carline married in 1950 and had two children, one of whom (Herminone) is also a professional artist.

Nancy Mona Carline (née Higgins) (1909-2004) trained at the Slade School of Fine Art in London and then worked at the Sadlers Wells Ballet, where she met Vladimir Polunin, who encouraged her to return to the Slade and take the course he was teaching in stage design.

• See Nancy Carline’s Wikipedia entry for a more complete biography:

Nancy Carline was an ardent advocate of art education and exhibited regularly, including in shows arranged by the Royal Academy, the London Group, the New English Art Club, the Artists’ International Association, and the Wildenstein Gallery. A retrospective of her life’s work was held at the Camden Arts Centre in 1980.

Nancy Carline. Ajijic. Credit: Canterbury Auctions

Though the details of Richard Carline’s first trips to Mexico remain unclear, his later visits, accompanied by wife Nancy, were to visit Laura and Jack Bateman and their children in Ajijic. Laura Bateman ran an art gallery in Ajijic for many years. How the two couples first met each other is unclear, but they became firm friends. Based on the dates of paintings of Lake Chapala completed by the Carlines, they visited Mexico in 1967 and 1975, and perhaps on other occasions as well. Shortly after their 1975 trip, Richard Carline wrote to German artist Dr. Frederick Solomon (1899-1980) in New Hampshire explaining that he had returned to Lake Chapala because he “found it so fruitful for painting.” But, because they had bought a reduced fare ticket, “we did not have very long in Mexico – but by going to paint we can deduct this as an expense of artists from income tax.”

Nancy Carline. 1975. Mexico (Ajijic). Credit: Canterbury Auctions

Paintings by both artists were sold by the Canterbury Auction Galleries in the UK in 2020. Richard’s “After Rain Ajijic Mexico 1967” had a pencil inscription stating it had been exhibited at the London Group in 1968/9. Two Lake Chapala-related paintings by Nancy were in the same auction: “Ajijic Mexico Lake Chapala”, and “Mexico” (which had “Ajijic” and “1975″ written on the back).

The Carlines’ close friendship with the Bateman family had another very significant link to the Lake Chapala art world. The Bateman’s eldest daughter, Alice, after attending a village school in Ajijic, studied art for a year at the University of Guadalajara in 1963. The following year Alice lived with the Carlines in London, when she moved to the UK to study at the Byam Shaw School of Art (now Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design). Alice Bateman, who later also studied sculpting in Italy, lives in Texas and has enjoyed a stellar career as a sculptor.

Several chapters of Foreign Footprints in Ajijic: Decades of Change in a Mexican Village offer more details about the history of the artistic community in Ajijic.

Reference

• [1] Justino Fernández. 1969. Catálogo de las Exposiciones de Arte en el año 1968. Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Mexico.

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.

Robert Clutton (1932-2016) lived in Ajijic from about 1959 to 1961. His time in Mexico introduced him to the pantheon of ancient Aztec and Maya gods which so strongly influenced much of his later art. He revisited Ajijic several times after this initial extended stay in the village.

“Bob” Clutton, “Roberto” to his Mexican friends, was born in England on 5 June 1932, brought up in Wales, and passed away in San Francisco on 15 August 2016 at the age of 84.

He left Wales in 1949 to cross the Atlantic on the Mauretania. (Until late in life he much preferred ocean liners to aircraft.) He settled in Baltimore where he became the Art Director for Black & Decker. In October 1955, he was one of numerous artists exhibiting in the The Artists’ Union of Baltimore annual show.

By 1959 Clutton was living and working in Ajijic on Lake Chapala. Several of his paintings from this time can be seen on this Facebook page of the San Francisco Senior Center. This painting of the Posada Ajijic in 1959 (below) is a fine example of Clutton’s style during his first months at Lake Chapala.

Robert Clutton. 1959. Untitled painting of Posada Ajijic. Reproduced by kind permission of the artist’s family

Former Ajijic gallery owner Katie Goodridge Ingram remembers Bob Clutton as a lovely man, who was well-liked by everyone in the community. During his time in Mexico, Clutton became increasingly fascinated by the “gods of ancient Mexico” and images of these gods became a frequent theme in his later paintings.

When he decided to leave Ajijic in 1961, he chose to move to San Francisco because that was where “all the interesting people he met in Mexico” were from. He continued to make his living as a professional artist in that city for more than fifty years. He retained some close ties to Mexican friends in Ajijic, and revisited the village several times.

Robert Clutton. 1959. Bullfight, Ajijic. (Image from San Francisco Senior Center page)

A newspaper feature in 1968, entitled “Art by the Foot” described how Clutton, “a bronzed, bearded, no-nonsense British artist” was making “made-to-measure bas-reliefs” in his Divisadero Street studio. The bas-reliefs, “designed to be decorative indoors and architectural assets outdoors”, used Aztec symbols and colors, and relied on the interplay of sun and shade to emphasize the materials, relief and texture.

Clutton was still producing “formal paintings” which also showed the influence of Mexico, and was represented by the Vorpal Gallery in San Francisco. A solo show of his oils and acrylics at that gallery in 1969 brought a wider audience for his work. Shortly after Clutton petitioned for US citizenship in 1971, the Vorpal Gallery also included examples of his work in its 1971 Christmas Show, which also featured paintings by John Denning, Muldoon Elder, Roy Glover, Stephen Haines Hall, Bruce Sherratt (who had previously lived for several years at Lake Chapala) and Gary Smith.

Clutton also exhibited in Los Angeles and in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where a show of his oil paintings opened at Galeria Uno (Morelos 561) in Puerto Vallarta on 23 March 1993.

Robert Clutton. ca 1969. Tezcatlipoca in front of his smoking mirror seeing himself as Huitzilapochtli. (Vorpal Gallery)

In 1988, Clutton designed the poster for the 1988 Haight Ashbury Street Fair. He enjoyed social events, garden parties and dinners and surrounded himself with creative people, making for lively and entertaining discussions. In his final years, Clutton was active as an artist at the San Francisco Senior Center.

This is an updated version of a profile first published 1 December 2016.

Several chapters of Foreign Footprints in Ajijic: Decades of Change in a Mexican Village offer more details about the history of the artistic community in Ajijic, as well as the history of the Posada Ajijic.

Acknowledgment

• My sincere thanks to Jane Clutton for sharing memories of her husband, and for graciously permitting me to share images of paintings belonging to his family.

Sources

• Jane Clutton; personal communication, October 2016.
• Peninsula Times Tribune, 1 Jan 1972, 42.
• San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle, California Living, Week of March 31, 1968: “Art by the Foot” [copy supplied by Jane Clutton]
• San Francisco Chronicle. 2016. Robert Clutton – obituary, San Francisco Chronicle from Oct. 2 to Oct. 7, 2016.
• Vorpal Galleries. Robert Clutton. 1969. San Francisco: Vorpal Galleries.

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 and international art educator Bruce Robert Sherratt and his first wife, Lesley Jervis, a British sculptor, lived in Jocotepec at the western end of Lake Chapala from 1968 to 1970. Prior to their arrival in Mexico, they had lived and traveled for some time in the USA.

Bruce Robert Sherratt was born in Biddulph, Derbyshire on 31 May 1944. Both Sherratt and his wife studied at the Newcastle School of Art in Newcastle under Lyme, Staffordshire, before moving to London where they married in 1963, and where Sherratt gained his degree in drawing and painting from the Camberwell College of Arts. Many years later, as a mature student, he also completed a degree in Art Education from the University of Wales in Cardiff, U.K.

Sherratt has written of fulfilling a youthful ambition by traveling (with his wife) to Mexico, where he gradually established his own identity as a surrealist painter, “hypnotized by the Aztec, Mayan and Toltec mythology” and “drawn to the giants of Mexican revolutionary muralism such as Orozco, Rivera, Tamayo and Siquieros.”

After reaching Jocotepec, the young couple rented a huge house called “El Kiosko”, “with spectacular views of the entire lake”, set up their studio, and got to work. Sherratt describes them as “hermits”, obsessed by their work: “We were very serious, determined to develop our work and we were very ambitious.” They had relatively little connection to the Lakeside art scene of the time, though they did frequent Ramón’s bar on the plaza and got to know Jocotepec artists (Don) Shaw and John Frost.

During his time in Mexico, Sherratt held several exhibitions of his work , including a solo show at the Galería Municipal in Guadalajara in 1969.

Bruce Sherratt. 1970. Silent Cataclysm (oil on canvas). Credit: Bruce Sherratt Gallery.

Sherratt showed works at the Easter art show at Posada Ajijic in March 1970, alongside John K. Peterson, Peter Huf, Eunice Hunt, (Don) Shaw, John Frost and Lesley Sherratt.

In June 1970, Bruce Sherratt’s work was in a group exhibit in Guadalajara at the Casa de la Cultura Jalisciense. Other artists participating in this show, included Eunice Hunt, Peter Paul Huf, John Frost, Mario Aluta, Daphne Aluta, Chester Vincent, Lesley Jervis Maddock (aka Lesley Sherratt), Gustave Aranguren, Hector Navarro, and Willi Hartung. According to the Guadalajara Reporter, the three works by Sherratt, titled “Victims,” showed “imaginative fluidity,”

Bruce Sherratt – 1971 exhibit

The following month (July 1970) the Anglo Mexican Institute in Mexico City held a joint show of Sherratt’s paintings and sculptures by ‘Madock’ (the art name used by Lesley, his wife). This show in Mexico City was apparently at the encouragement of the surrealist painter Leonora Carrington.

After his time in Jocotepec, Sherratt traveled to California, where he painted for a year in San Francisco. His work was exhibited in a group show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1970) and in an exhibit entitled “Surrealist Painters in San Francisco”, in the Vorpal Gallery, San Francisco (also 1970).

The following year, he had another exhibit of oils and drawings in Guadalajara, in the Galeria Municipal. In his review for El Informador, John Frost called it “a passionate description of a trip to another world”, writing that Sherratt, “guides us through regions that could alarm and depress us if it was not for his vision and artistic discipline”. El Informador‘s regular art columnist, J. Luis Meza Ina, however, viewed the show as the work of a painter, not an artist.

At the end of 1971, Sherratt’s work was included in the San Francisco Vorpal Gallery Christmas Show, alongside works by Robert Clutton (who had also lived for several years at Lake Chapala), John Denning, Muldoon Elder, Roy Glover, Stephen Haines Hall, and Gary Smith.

After his time in San Francisco, Sherratt decided to travel the world and spent several years meandering through Latin America. He became sufficiently interested in the ideas of Rudolf Steiner, and color theory, to return to the UK to take a degree in Art Education, before becoming a respected international art educator, whose teaching career has taken him to international schools in Germany, Tanzania, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia.

Sherratt’s studio is currently in Ubud on the island of Bali in Indonesia, where he is the founder and CEO of the Bali Center for Artistic Creativity (BCAC). The powerful and colorful images on his website show there are few limits to his imagination and artistic abilities. In the past twenty years or so, he has exhibited in numerous countries, including several shows in Jakarta, Indonesia: a retrospective at the Duta Fine Arts Foundation (1998), a show entitled “Synthesis and Abstraction” at the British Council (2001) and an exhibition at the ExpatriArt Gallery (2005).

Several chapters of Foreign Footprints in Ajijic: Decades of Change in a Mexican Village offer more details about the history of the artistic community in Ajijic.

Acknowledgment

Sincere thanks to Bruce Sherratt for sharing, via email, some of his memories from his time in Mexico. To see more of his work, please visit his website.

This is a revised version of a profile first published 25 June 2015.

Sources

• El Informador, 5 June 1970; 10 May 1971; 16 May 1971.
• Evening Sentinel (Stoke on Trent), 21 Sep 1963, 8.
• Guadalajara Reporter, 21 Mar 1970; 13 June 1970.
• The Peninsula Times Tribune, 1 Jan 1972, 42.
• Justino Fernández. 1971. Catálogo de las Exposiciones de Arte en el año 1970. Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Mexico.

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.

Alice de Boton (1906-2010) started an art school in California, painted in Ajijic in the early 1970s, and continued to paint regularly until well after celebrating her 100th birthday.

Born in Jaffa, Palestine, on 25 December 1906, de Boton painted from childhood. After her family moved to France, she took painting classes in Paris and gained a law degree, as well as a certificate in chemistry.

In 1939 she married Jean Robert Bernard, a French biochemist. When the second world began, the couple fled Paris for the relative safety of southern France.

Alice de Boton. River Course (EBay).

The disruptions of the second world war ended the family’s ambitions for a secure life in France. In the turmoil of the war, Alice, who spoke five languages-English, Spanish, French, Italian and Hebrew—also picked up a smattering of German. Very near the end of the war, she and her husband found themselves having to care for her young niece, Aline, whose father (Alice’s brother, Yves) had been captured and killed while participating in the French resistance. Alice and Robert later formally adopted Aline, and the blended family left Europe in 1947 for a new beginning in the U.S.

Alice de Boton. Guitar Player. (EBay).

They boarded a liberty boat in Antwerp, Belgium, on 29 May 1947 and landed in Houston on 14 June. Mistakenly, the ship’s passenger manifest listed Aline, then 9 years old, as the “granddaughter” of Alice Bernard (chemist, aged 40) and Jean Robert Bernard (44-year-old biologist). They settled in San Francisco, where they had friends. Robert found employment as a biochemist and Alice pursued her interest in art, teaching and painting. In 1953, Alice began the Peninsula Arts and Crafts school in San Mateo, California, staffed by a number of noteworthy Bay Area artists. She sold the school four years later in order to move to Berkeley and open her own gallery.

After Robert retired in 1969, he and Alice lived for several years in Ajijic. Robert (1903-1993) took up carving and sculpture, a decision which had unusual consequences for Ajijic native Fernando García, who worked for him. After watching his employer at work, García expressed an interest in learning how to carve. He then worked by candlelight late into the night for several weeks to complete several “small primitives of extraordinary beauty and sensitivity.” When shown at the grand 1971 Fiesta de Arte, held at the home of art patrons Frances and Ned Windham, all of García’s sculptures sold within minutes.

Alice de Boton. Portrait of Gloria Marthai, a longtime resident at Lake Chapala. Coll: Sunny Russell.

Within months of moving to Ajijic, Alice had three of her works—two oils and an acrylic—selected by a four-person jury for inclusion in the Semana Cultural Americana (American Artists’ Exhibit) at the Instituto Cultural Mexicano Norteamericano de Jalisco, A.C. in Guadalajara. The exhibit was comprised of more than 70 works in total by 42 US artists (working in Guadalajara, San Miguel de Allende and at Lake Chapala) and opened on 27 June 1969.

A list of Lake Chapala artists in 1971 gave Alice de Boton’s address as Aquiles Serdán #1, Ajijic. The following year, she held a solo show at the Museo de Historia (now the Centro Cultural Patio de Los Ángeles) at Cuitlauhuac 305 in Guadalajara. Her “social commentaries” and abstracts in oils, acrylics, collages and assemblages, were praised for their “imagination, originality and artistic skill.”

In February 1973, Alice held an exhibit of “recent paintings” and tapestries at the Hotel Camino Real (now Hotel Real de Chapala) in Ajijic. Allyn Hunt considered that the artists was “at her very best in this show when executing scenes with a pallet knife, casting a deep mosaic of blade strokes to form a face of a figure.”

Robert and Alice de Boton sold their Ajijic home in 1974, and were about to move to the state of Guanajuato, when they changed their minds and opted to rent a residence-with-studio in Ajijic. The de Botons did leave Ajijic permanently not long after that, to live first in the Yucca Valley in Southern California, and then in Israel. They returned to the US in 1989 to live in Columbia, Missouri, close to their adopted daughter, Aline.

De Boton continued to paint and exhibit, and held several solo shows in Columbia. Even moving to a retirement home did little to reduce her artistic creativity or productivity, and the home devoted one entire third-floor wall to her paintings.

During her long and prolific career, Alice solo shows in several countries. Working in a variety of media, she utilized her specialist knowledge of chemistry to develop innovative techniques in encaustics, where a heated mixture of pigment and molten beeswax is applied to a suitable surface, such as prepared wood.

Alice de Boton’s works have found their way into many private collections in Mexico, the U.S. and Israel. Among her many awards was a Degree of Honor awarded by the Society of Western Artists.

Alice de Boton died in Columbia on 10 April 2010 at the age of 103.

Acknowledgment

My thanks to Sunny Russell for permission to use the photograph of Alice de Boton’s portrait of Gloria Marthai.

Sources

• Columbia Tribune. 2010. “Alice de Boton, 1906-2010” (obituary), Columbia Tribune, 15 April 2010.
• Guadalajara Reporter: 3 Apr 1971; 4 March 1972; 18 Mar 1972; 17 Feb 1973; 22 June 1974.
• Mark Humpal. 2017. Ray Stanford Strong, West Coast Landscape Artist. University of Oklahoma Press. Note 25, p 190.
• Pamela A. Mulumby. 2006. “Centenarian’s art doubles as visual diary.” Columbia Missourian, 24 December 2006.

Several chapters of Foreign Footprints in Ajijic: Decades of Change in a Mexican Village offer more details about the history of the 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.

In the early 1960s, Grant Risdon, a student at San Francisco Art Institute, lived in Chapala for some time. Risdon, a larger than life character, became friends with guitarist Jim Byers, and the two men rented rooms in El Manglar, the extensive lakeside estate in San Antonio Tlayacapan.

Scott Hampson, who visited his half-sister Beverly Johnson in Ajijic over the winter of 1963-64, shared his tales of his own adventures with Grant Risdon:

By that time I had two close friends who kept me company out at Manglar. One, the one I was closest to, was Tony Bateman…. He and I and a friend named Grant stole two very expensive early era inflatable boats from two explorer tourists who were en-route back from South America. They were staying at a lakefront hotel in town and had the boats out on their deck. We stored them at Manglar and took midnight floats out on the lake, which was the only time one could float stolen boats…. One late night in the graveyard we unbuckled the crypt of an important ancient citizen, a priest perhaps. When we got the lid off and shone our flashlight inside we saw the skeleton, screamed, and took off running like contestants in a 100 yard dash.”

A year earlier, an encounter with Risdon and Byers had left an indelible impression on Doctor Avis, as recounted by Dayton Lummis in Spaceships and Liquor: Venus and Mars Are All Right Tonight. According to Lummis: “Ajijic was then, 1962, just barely beginning to be discovered, mostly by a few beatniks and adventurers” when Doctor Avis got out of the army and decided to stay there a few days:

Not long after getting off the bus in Ajijic he fell in with two American chaps, Jim Byers and Grant Risdon from Chicago, who playfully called himself “Pancho Napoleon Anaya… These two chaps directed the Doctor to some cheap lodging and then suggested they buy some of the locally available and very cheap marijuana, or mota, to assist them in getting through the afternoon…”

Risdon’s moniker reflected the fact that he had been informally adopted by the prominent Anaya family in Chapala.

Grant Risdon. Credit: Monterey County Weekly.

Risdon, who was born in Monterey, California, in about 1943, started life with an abusive father and, while still a child, lost his mother to a heroin overdose. Brought up by his grandfather in Jamesburg, near Cachagua, RIsdon eventually graduated from Carmel High and served briefly in the US Marines before moving to Lake Chapala.

His art education had begun with Monterey painter Buck Warshawsky, and his early works were sufficiently original to be greatly admired by Jack Swanson, a renowned cowboy painter living in Carmel Valley. Swanson awarded him the top prize in an art contest at the Trail & Saddle Club for a painted three-panel door.

The only Risdon artworks known to have been published are the “brilliant illustrations (Aztec Design)” linoleum block prints he produced for a hand bound book of poems by Richard Denner, published in 1968.

Risdon sold pastel drawings of ships in local galleries, and often painted scenes of the Civil War, the Old West and Native Americans. Adorning the Cachagua General Store for years was one of his “Indian Surrealism” pieces: an image of a canoe under a full moon, with its Native American rower only visible as a reflection in the water.

In 1981, following a violent altercation with a naked man, Risdon fled police to hide out in a cave in Los Padres National Forest for the next three years, before returning to the scene of the crime to turn himself in. Or did he? Risdon was a brilliant raconteur but, according to many friends and journalists, was liberal with the truth and often embellished his stories for dramatic effect. Years later, Conall Jones, a New York filmmaker, produced a 20-minute documentary short, An Unwanted Man (2014), about Risdon’s years on the lam. [link is to trailer]

Friends considered Risdon “a sensitive soul who loved horses, painted Western-style art and pursued history and culture with almost as much passion as he did pretty women.” He always retained very fond memories of Lake Chapala and Mexico. In the words of one journalist:

Reliving those memories behind the General Store, Risdon clacks his castanets and sings “El Lechero,” a Mexican folk song about a handsome milkman. The nostalgia begins to flow like tequila: how he tangoed with beautiful women in the Guadalajara dance halls, received a presidential smile during Jonn F. Kennedy’s visit to Mexico, and learned spirituality from the Huichol Indians of Jalisco.
– “Honey, that place – ” he says with a dreamy smile, “that is the most beautiful time in my life.”

Risdon, who returned briefly to Chapala in about 2014, died in Cachagua, California, in 2018.

The story of El Manglar is told in chapter 34 of If Walls Could Talk: Chapala’s Historic Buildings and Their Former Occupants.

Several chapters of Foreign Footprints in Ajijic: Decades of Change in a Mexican Village look at Ajijic’s vibrant art community and its 1960s’ drugs scene.

Sources

• Kera Abraham. 2010. “The improbable and irresistible saga of Cachagua’s living legend, Grant Risdon.” Monterey County Weekly, 29 April 2010.
• Jim Byers, personal communications, August 2015.
• Richard Denner. 1968. Poemes. D-Press (Ketchikan, Alaska).
• Scott Hampson. 2016. Unpublished document dated December 2016 titled “BEVERLY AND MEXICO 63-64″, sent to me December 2020:
• Dayton Lummis. 2011. Spaceships and Liquor: Venus and Mars Are All Right Tonight. iUniverse, 159-160.

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.