Eleanor Smart (1909-1993) was an American artist who lived with her husband Douglas in Chula Vista, Lake Chapala, from the late 1960s until shortly before her death. The couple had visited the Lake Chapala area several times before purchasing the “Radke house” (Calle del Redondo #122, in Chula Vista) in 1968. She worked in a variety of media (oil, acrylic, watercolor and collage and was a regular exhibitor during her time in Mexico.
Eleanor Smart. Women with Green Hair. ca 1971. (Cover of Ajijic Cookbook)
An example of Smart’s work, “Women with Green Hair” was used as the cover illustration for the locally-produced A Cookbook with Color Reproductions by Artists from the Galería (Guadalajara, Mexico: Boutique d’Artes Gráficas, 1972).
Smart’s maiden name was Eleanor Frances Storm. She was born on 6 June 1909 in Michigan, either in Washtenaw County (listed as her place of birth in the 1910 U.S. Census) or Grosse Pointe (quoted in later articles), where she lived most of her life. She died on 9 February 1993 in St. Clair Shores, Macomb, Michigan.
Smart graduated from Northern High School in Detroit, Michigan, in 1927 and entered Sullin’s College, an all-girls Methodist junior college in Bristol, Virginia.
In 1929, the 20-year-old Eleanor Storm married Douglas Levering Smart, a 26-year-old electrical engineer with the Ford Motor Company. The couple married on 25 June 1929 at North Woodward Congregational church in Wayne County, Michigan, and subsequently had two sons: Addison (born 1931) and Richard “Dick” Levering (1932-1994).
Though the precise timing is inclear, Smart trained at the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts (under Sarkis Sarkisian, Walter Midener and Guy Palazzola) and at the University of Michigan, studying under Robert Brackman and Dong Kingman. She also studied, at one time or another, with Emil Weddige, Gerome Kamrowski, Hughie Lee-Smith and Kraig Kiedrowski, as well as with José Gutiérrez of Mexico City in 1951. Smart’s travels included trips to Japan, the Middle East, the Mediterranean, France, Turkey and Greece.
Smart was a member of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts and Letters, the Detroit Society of Women Painters and Sculptors and the Grosse Pointe Artists Association. Her works can be found in many private and corporate collections including that of Monsanto Chemical Company and Detroit Bank and Trust. Smart was a regular exhibitor in the Michigan Artists Annual, the Michigan State Fair, and numerous other regional exhibitions.
These exhibitions included the annual meeting of the Grosse Pointe Artists’ Association in 1949 and again in 1957. Smart’s work was featured in numerous group shows, including the Galleries Raymond Duncan, in Paris, France (1959), the Detroit Society of Women Painters and Sculptors in Grosse Pointe (1962), Les Galleries de Kenee, Grosse Pointe (1963), the Grosse Pointe Garden Center and Library (1966) and the Grosse Pointe Artists’ Association (1967).
By 1967, Smart had held eight one-woman shows in all, including one at the Ligoa Duncan Galleries in New York in 1959.
Smart continued painting after moving to Mexico and was one of the numerous artists invited to exhibit at the “Fiesta of Art” held in May 1971 at the home of Mr and Mrs E. D. Windham, alongside Daphne Aluta;Mario Aluta; Beth Avary; Charles Blodgett; Antonio Cárdenas; Alan Davoll; Alice de Boton; Robert de Boton; Tom Faloon; John Frost; Dorothy Goldner; Burt Hawley; Peter Huf; Eunice (Hunt) Huf; Lona Isoard;Michael Heinichen; John Maybra Kilpatrick; Gail Michael; Bert Miller; Robert Neathery; John K. Peterson; Stuart Phillips; Hudson Rose; Mary Rose; Jesús Santana; Walt Shou; Frances Showalter; Sloane; Robert Snodgrass; and Agustín Velarde.
Smart’s work was shown in a group show at the ex-Convento del Carmen in Guadalajara in January 1980, which also featured works by Paul Fontaine; Daphne Aluta; Georg Rauch; Betty Warren; Richard Lapa; Stefan Lokos; Evelyne Boren; Digur Weber; Gustel Foust; Taffy Branham.
In 1988, one of Smart’s paintings was chosen for the “Help Save Lake Chapala” exhibit which was shown in Mexico City. Other artists in that show included Daphne Aluta, Nancy Bollembach, Luisa Julian, Conrado Contreras, Rick Ledwon, Georg Rauch, Enrique Velázquez and Laura Goeglin.
Sources:
Anon. 1986. Portrait of the Artist: Eleanor Smart, in El Ojo del Lago, Oct 1986, Vol III, No 1.
Detroit Free Press, 9 April 1949, p 11; 5 May 1957, p 38
Guadalajara Reporter, 14 December 1968
Informador, 26 January 1980
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We know disappointingly little about the life and work of artist Emanuel(e) Mario Aluta. Aluta moved to Ajijic with his second wife Daphne Greer Aluta (born 1919) in the late 1960s. It is unclear whether or not Mario remained in Ajijic after 1974 when Daphne married Colin MacDougall in a small ceremony at the home of Sherm and Adele Harris, the then managers of the Posada Ajijic.
Mario Aluta. Untitled. ca 1970. Reproduced by kind permission of Ricardo Santana.
Mario Aluta’s artwork, described in a review by Hannah Tompkins as a “series of male figures … vigorously painted with strong emphasis on planal design”, was included in a 1970 exhibition at the Casa de la Cultura Jalisciense in Guadalajara. The show opened on 6 June 1970 and featured a long list of Lakeside and Guadalajara artists. Among the other Lakeside artists in the show were Daphne Aluta, Peter Huf and his wife Eunice Hunt, John Frost, Bruce Sherratt and Lesley Jervis Maddock (aka Lesley Sherratt).
Both Mario and Daphne Aluta also showed work in the “Fiesta de Arte” in May 1971 at the home of Frances and Ned Windham at Calle 16 de Septiembre #33 in Ajijic. More than 20 artists took part in that event, including Beth Avary; Charles Blodgett; Antonio Cárdenas; Alan Davoll; Alice de Boton; Robert de Boton; Tom Faloon; John Frost; Dorothy Goldner; Burt Hawley; Peter Huf; Eunice (Hunt) Huf; Lona Isoard;Michael Heinichen; John Maybra Kilpatrick; Gail Michael; 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.
Emanuel(e) Mario Aluta was born in Constantinople, Turkey, on 3 January 1904, but (also?) had Italian citizenship. He died in California on 22 September 1985.
I know nothing about Aluta’s early life, education or art training, but believe his first wife was Charlotte Maria Richter, who was born in Vienna, Austria, in about 1911. The couple seem to have first entered the U.S. in about 1936. In November 1937, they are recorded as crossing the border from Mexico back into the U.S.. The following year (1938) they applied to become naturalized U.S. citizens. Their application was finally approved in August 1943.
At the time of the 1940 U.S. Census, the couple was living in Los Angeles. According to the census entry, they had been living in Nice, France, five years earlier in 1935.
Mario Aluta was 56 years of age when he married 41-year-old Daphne Greer in Clark County, Nevada on 25 May 1960.
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During a month-long trip to Chapala with his wife in June 1975 to celebrate their tenth wedding anniversary, Walden Swank painted a prize-winning picture of the lake. The painting, which won best-of-show and a purchase award in a show entitled Two Flags Festival of the Arts in Douglas, Arizona, now hangs in a museum south of the border in Agua Prieta. Swank later did a second painting of the lake, shown here, as a gift for his wife.
Walden Swank. Lake Chapala. 24 x 48″. 1975. Reproduced by kind permission of the artist.
Walden Swank was born in Kansas on 2 June 1933, but the family moved to Colorado when he was in his teens. Swank attended Littleton High School in Colorado and then served in the U.S. Navy from 1951 to 1955. While in the Navy, he designed the insignia for Fleet Aircraft Service Squadron Eleven. This proved to be the start of a long career in design and fine art.
After leaving the service, Swank studied Graphic Design and Illustration at the Colorado Institute of Art, from where he graduated in 1956. His first regular job was at The American Greeting Card Company in Cleveland, Ohio. Swank then worked for a series of advertising agencies and graphic design firms, before forming his own company, Design Studios, Inc., in 1964.
In 1988 he began a career in fine art after additional training at the Art Student’s League of Denver. He retired completely from commercial art and design in 1995.
His work has been in numerous group and solo exhibitions across the U.S., and won numerous awards. His shows include University of New Mexico; Two Flags Festival of the Arts; Lake Worth 47th Anniversary; Taos Connections Art Gallery; Poudre Valley Art League’s 29th Annual Art Exhibition; La Ventana Art Gallery; Colorado State Fair; The 10th Annual Pikes Peak Watercolor Society Exhibition; The Heartland Exhibition, Merriam, Kansas; Westbank Art Gallery, Austin, Texas; Marks & Marks Art Gallery, Denver, Colorado; Taos National Exhibition of American Watercolor VIII; Taos Art Museum at the Fechin House; and Bold Expressions, Northern California Arts, Inc., Sacramento Fine Arts Center.
His work has been published in Southwest Art magazine and is in several corporate collections including Johns Manville and The Motorola Corporation.
My thanks to Walden Swank for permission to reproduce his painting of Lake Chapala, and for information contained in an exchange of emails in May 2012.
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Photographer Michael Heinichen (born in Kleberg, Texas, on 8 January 1944) is best known for his portrait of Dave Sheridan, used on the cover of the first issue (June/July 1972) of The Rip Off Review of Western Culture, published in the summer of 1972. The Rip Off Review of Western Culture was a short-lived underground comics magazine from San Francisco that featured the work of many noteworthy underground artists and writers.
Cover of The Rip Off Review of Western Culture, Vol 1 #1 (June/July 1972). Photo by Michael Heinichen
Heinichen lived in Mexico for some time – certainly more than he originally intended. His link to Ajijic is via Beverly Johnson who was already living there. In 1969, Johnson returned to California to renew her tourist papers, and met and fell in love with Heinichen. Early in 1970, they returned to Ajijic where Heinichen taught Johnson photography and darkroom techniques.
By summer 1972, Heinichen had amassed a significant body of work from his travels around Mexico and had also separated from Johnson and moved to Jocotepec to live with his new girlfriend, Laura Katzman.
In September 1972, Allyn Hunt, writing in the Guadalajara Reporter, reviewed a month-long, two-man show at El Tejabán in Ajijic of work by Heinichen and young Mexican artist Adolfo Riestra. Hunt clearly liked the “sharp, many-toned photographs of Michael Heinichen featuring Mexican beach- and mountain-scapes.” Heinichen had taken his camera all over Mexico, “seizing those images one always hopes for but seldom gets…. The delicate range of greys in these pictures is proof of Heinichen’s discerning eye and technical nimbleness.” (Guadalajara Reporter, 23 September 1972)
The following year, it seems that Heinichen and Katzman visited Columbia. On their return to Mexico City, they were arrested at Mexico City international airport and charged with importing a kilo of cocaine between them. They were each sentenced to seven and a half years in jail.
Heinichen was one of 68 American and 7 Canadian prisoners at the American wing of Lecumberri men’s prison who held a 13-day hunger strike in 1974, which drew press attention. Described at the time as aged 30 and “a photographer from Kingsville, Texas”, Heinichen argued in the press that the couple had been coerced into making statements and had not been allowed to contact the U.S. embassy. He said that the couple were planning to get married, but that judicial authorities kept stalling the process. [The Dispatch, Lexington]
After their release, Michael Heinichen and Laura Katzman married in San Francisco on 2 April 1978, where Michael worked as a contractor. In 1984, Heinichen divorced Laura and married Kathleen M Carroll. The new couple had a son the following year but divorced in about 1993.
Michael Heinichen died in Lafayette, California, in 2012.
Sources
Jennifer Heinichen, personal communication, October 2023.
The Dispatch, Lexington, N.C. 7 August 1974
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Photographer and illustrator Haig Witwer Shekerjian was born 3 November 1922 in Chicago, Illinois, and finally laid his camera to rest at the age of 79 on 21 August 2002 in Schenectady, New York. He and his wife, Regina, first visited Ajijic in 1950s and became regular visitors to Ajijic thereafter.
Haig’s parents were Haig Rupen Shekerjian, a rug salesman originally from Constantinople, Turkey, who became an art lecturer at the Art Institute in Chicago, and Frances Louise Witwer, a concert pianist from Chicago. His cousins included Brigadier General Haig W. Shekerjian.
Haig Shekerjian. Old Posada. 1950. By kind permission of Michael Eager.
Haig attended Oak Park and River Forest Township High School in Oak Park, Illinois. His interest in photography started at an early age and, as a teenager, he was an avid member of the school’s Camera Club. After high school, he studied at the Eastman School of Photography in Rochester, New York, and at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. A 1943 yearbook entry shows that he was not only handsome, but also an accomplished actor, and member of the University Dramatic Club.
On leaving university, Haig joined the U.S. Navy in November 1943. In early 1944, before leaving to serve for the remainder of the second world war in the Pacific, Haig married Regina deCormier, his lifelong love.
Working as a Navy photographer, Haig Shekerjian was in the first landing party at the Battle of Iwo Jima (1945), saw action elsewhere, and photographed the Japanese surrender. He was the recipient of several military decorations. Haig’s return to the U.S. was noted in a poignant local newspaper entry in December 1945 which stated that Haig, “was one of 11,382 High Point Navy veterans returning from Guam on the U.S.S. Cowpens.”
Regina DeCormier Shekerjian (1923-2000) was a well-known author, translator and illustrator of children’s books. The couple, and their two sons (Tor and Jean-René), lived for many years in New Paltz, New York, where Haig was Art Director of the Media Services Center at the State University College for over 30 years, until the age of 75.
Taking a sabbatical break over the winter of 1950-51, Haig and Regina spent several months living in Ajijic. (Regina later published an article about why Ajijic was an excellent choice for anyone seeking an inexpensive art-related summer). They returned many times in the late 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s, often staying a few months.
Haig Shekerjian. Untitled. 1950. By kind permission of Michael Eager.
Haig was apparently never very interested in the commercial aspects of photography, though his work appeared in many books, publications and literacy works, and his work was rarely exhibited or sold, though he gave away a few photographs as treasured gifts. His peers recognized the quality of his photographs and in 1977, one of his photos was included in the inaugural exhibition of the Catskill Center for Photography in Woodstock, New York.
Together with Regina, Haig Shekerjian illustrated several books, most of them written by Nancy Willard and aimed at young readers. They included The Adventures of Tom Thumb (1950); Life in the Middle Ages (1966); The boy, the rat, and the butterfly (1971); King Midas and the Golden Touch (1973); Play it in Spanish : Spanish games and folk songs for children (1973); The merry history of a Christmas pie : with a delicious description of a Christmas soup (1974); All on a May morning (1975); How Many Donkeys? A Turkish Folk Tale (1971); and The well-mannered balloon (1976).
Haig was an accomplished violinist and the Shekerjians also co-wrote, with Regina’s brother Robert deCormier, A Book of Christmas Carols (1963); and A Book of Ballads, Songs and Snatches (1965).
Michael Eager, owner of La Nueva Posada hotel in Ajijic, remembers the couple well: “Haig had short gray hair with a goatee and was rarely without his Greek sailor’s cap. Both he and Regina dressed casually, Haig with jeans, checkered shirt, and somewhat “beatnik” looking. He was never without his camera.” Both Haig and Regina loved the local people, music and traditions.
Haig Shekerjian. 1950. Ajijic Plaza.
Artist Pat Apt remembers Haig photographing Mexican families in the early 1990s, and how: “He made appointments for just after church when they would be dressed in their finest.” When Apt ran the Rabbit in the Moon Gallery in Ajijic (Ramón Corona #11, opposite the Lake Chapala Society), Haig’s work was included in a collective show, which opened 1 February 1997, alongside works by herself, Georg Rauch and Juan Navarro.
The dining room of La Nueva Posada in Ajijic has a permanent exhibition of Haig’s evocative photographs of what the Lake Chapala area was like years ago—clear evidence, if any were needed, of the couple’s immense enthusiasm for the area and its people.
Note: This post was last updated 13 August 2023.
Sources:
Poughkeepsie Journal, Poughkeepsie, New York: 19 February 1944, p5; 23 August 2002, p 4B.
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The Clique Ajijic was a group of eight artists that existed as a loosely-organized collective in Ajijic for three or four years in the mid-1970s. Many of the photos of Clique Ajijic artists and their paintings were taken by John Frost, the artist-photographer who was a long-time resident of Jocotepec. The photo below (believed to be by Frost) shows several members of the Clique Ajijic, together with family and friends, at the opening of a show in Galería OM in Guadalajara in October 1975.
Clique Ajijic artists at opening of show at Galeria OM, October 1975
The Galería OM was co-owned by Enrique Lázaro and Alejandro Colunga.
If you can fill in any of the missing names, please get in touch.
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Muralist Guillermo Chávez Vega (1931-1990) is not usually associated with Lake Chapala, but is responsible for one of the area’s earliest surviving murals. The murals, painted in 1971, are in the private sailing club Club Náutico, in La Floresta, Ajijic.
The murals are painted on the four sides of a pyramid-shaped roof “dome” on the northern side of the main lounge. They show local historical events from pre-Columbian Indian rituals to the heroic resistance of insurgents occupying Mezcala Island during Mexico’s War of Independence.
Cuillermo Chávez Vega. Detail of mural (1971) in Club Náutico, Ajijic
Sadly, one additional mural by Chávez Vega, painted in the lobby of the club, and depicting a woman reposing in a hammock made of fishing nets, was lost during renovations in the 1980s.
Guillermo Chávez Vega was born in Guadalajara on 23 March 1931. Best known as a muralist, he was also a painter, watercolorist and engraver. Besides murals, he also painted family scenes and landscapes, especially of the Jalisco coast, and a popular series of watercolors of Guadalajara. He held about 30 solo exhibits and participated in 20 group exhibits during his distinguished artistic career.
Cuillermo Chávez Vega. Detail of mural (1971) in Club Náutico, Ajijic
Chávez Vega completed his formal primary and high school years at the Colegio Instituto de Ciencias in Guadalajara. In his later years at that institution, he illustrated the school’s Revista Juventud (Youth Magazine).
Cuillermo Chávez Vega. Detail of mural (1971) in Club Náutico, Ajijic
In 1948, he began formal art studies with José Vizcarra in Guadalajara. From 1950-51, he studied art at the San Carlos Academy in Mexico City, and then returned to Guadalajara to continue his studies at the Escuela de Artes y Letras of the University of Guadalajara. In 1952, he joined a study trip to south-eastern Mexico, looking closely at Mayan art and motifs. In 1956, he illustrated Artes y Letras, the University of Guadalajara magazine.
Cuillermo Chávez Vega. Detail of mural (1971) in Club Náutico, Ajijic
From 1957 to 1962, Chávez Vega gave painting and drawing classes in the Escuela de Artes Plásticas of the University of Guadalajara. From 1958 to 1960, he gave art classes at the Universidad Femenina de Guadalajara.
He painted his first murals, including one in Ciudad Guzmán in the south of Jalisco, in 1957. In 1960, he started working as an illustrator for the artistic-literary magazine El Despertador. In 1963, he was granted a Jalisco State scholarship to travel to Europe and the Middle East. In 1968, he was asked by President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz to travel to Poland and paint a mural in Warsaw as a national gift from Mexico to the Polish people. From 1969 to 1989, Chávez Vega ran the Guadalajara branch of the Instituto de Amistad e Intercambio Cultural Mexico-USSR, which promoted a better understanding between Mexico and the Soviet Union.
He painted at least 25 murals, most of them located in or near Guadalajara. His murals include “The Reform and the Constitution” in the Palacio de Justicia in Guadalajara, and “Guadalajara, Homage to Humanity” in the city’s International Friendship Center (Centro de la Amistad Internacional). Also in Guadalajara, in Preparatoria número 3, in 1988, he painted his final mural, “Revolutionary Latin America”. Murals by Chávez Vega can also be admired in the Centro de Arte y Cultura in San Pedro Tlaquepaque, and in the building of the Sindicato de Trabajadores del IMSS in Mexico City.
Guillermo Chávez Vega received the Jalisco prize for plastic arts (1960) and the Silver Medal of the Jalisco State Government (1964). He died in his native city on 5 July 1990 and his remains were later interred in the Rotunda of Illustrious Jalisicienses in 2002.
Acknowledgment
My sincere thanks to the administration and members of Club Náutico for graciously allowing me to view and photograph the murals that are in their care.
Portraitist De Nyse Wortman Turner Pinkerton (aka De Nyse Turner) was born in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, on 3 December 1917 and died in Naples, Florida, on 3 April 2010, at the age of 92.
De Nyse Turner. Still life (1951). Image courtesy of Ricardo Santana.
Pinkerton resided and worked at Lake Chapala, for at least part of each year, for more than thirty years, from 1970 to 2004.
She grew up in Utica, New York, and studied at the Utica Country Day School, Smith and Hollins Colleges, and The Art Student’s League in New York City.
Her maiden name was Wortman, and she had two marriages, the first to Lee Turner and the second to Edward C. Pinkerton.
She was an active supporter of several environmental organizations including the Friends of the Animals, the Nature Conservancy Marine Program, the World Wildlife Foundation, the Sierra Club and the Environmental Defense Foundation.
Pinkerton was a prolific painter and during her lifetime completed more than 7000 portraits in pastel and oil.
Her work has been exhibited at The Peale Museum; The Baltimore Museum of Art, The Concoran Gallery, and The National Galleries in Washington, Philadelphia and New York.
De Nyse Turner. Portrait (1951). Image courtesy of Ricardo Santana.
During her time in Chapala, she was one of a group of artists showing in an exhibition in May 1985 at Club Campestre La Hacienda (km 30 on the Guadalajara-Chapala highway) entitled “Pintores de la Ribera” (Painters of Lakeside). This group show also included works by Laura Goeglein, Carla W. Manger, Jo Kreig, Donald Demerest, B.R. Kline, Hubert Harmon, Daphne Aluta, Eugenia Bolduc, Emily Meeker,Eleanor Smart, Jean Caragonne, Tiu Pessa, Sydney Moehlman and Xavier Pérez.
The striking portrait of Neill James that hangs in the Lake Chapala Society in Ajijic is by Pinkerton.
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American sculptor and painter Mym Tuma had her studio in San Pedro Tesistan, near Jocotepec, the town at the western end of Lake Chapala, from 1968 to 1973. Tuma, formerly known as Marilynn Thuma, has become an important figure in the contemporary American art world.
Tuma was born 23 September 1940 in Berwyn, Illinois. She studied at Northwestern University in Evanston, at Stanford University in California and undertook graduate work at New York University.
After university, she moved to Mexico, setting up a second floor plein air studio in San Pedro Tesistan to experiment with three dimensional works. This was a formative period in her artistic development, fostered by the support, moral and financial, of her mentor Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986), the “Mother of American modernism”.
Mym Tuma: La hojancha (The Original Seed) (1970)
Tuma first contacted O’Keeffe, fifty years her senior, in 1964 when she was studying in Irving Sandler’s modern art seminar for postgraduates at New York University. Despite the age difference, O’Keeffe and Tuma discovered they shared several common interests. O’Keeffe, then living on a ranch in Abiquiu, New Mexico, bought one of Tuma’s early works, and the two women corresponded for a decade. (The story of this correspondence is told by Tuma at OkeeffeAndMe.com).
The studio in San Pedro Tesistan had neither electricity nor running water. In her “Feminist Artist Statement” on a Brooklyn Museum webpage, Tuma recalls her time there:
“In the high plateau of southern Mexico, overlooking Lake Chapala, I painted in remote San Pedro Tesistan. In that village were only two vehicles: a red Firebird, and a paneled truck, until I arrived in 1966 in a Volkswagen bus. I rented a studio for $8 per month and worked with an assistant, 17-yr. old Cruz Robledo who I taught to drive. She suppressed her giggles learning how to control the VW on cobblestone streets, rumbling down a string of plastered, cracked and chipped adobes. Women like Cruz worked at home, sewing and cooking, but she had a streak of independence. She did not let people, or men subordinate her. She grew more confident, while working on my sculptures, sanding fiberglass to smooth curves. She helped me prepare my paintings. Her mother still scrubbed clothes on rocks at the edge of Lake Chapala, her Aunt Deodata partnered with another woman near my studio. Cruz respected my work. I tutored her to become as independent as I myself.
In the Sixties, women lost children and we heard church bells tolling for them in my 2nd floor plein aire studio. Cruz crossed herself and whispered sad news. We’d rest to watch the peaceful blue haze over the distant mountains and breathe. We shared ideas sanding my shaped sculptured paintings, far from the conflict in Vietnam. I felt militant about my work, in that time and remote place, to quote T.S. Eliot, “to construct something upon which to rejoice.” Convinced that one day it would bolster women’s power and equality in the U.S.
Before I left, we strung a rooster pinata from the church to my studio, and invited mothers with babes, and small children. They filled the floor eating cake and cream. Women nursed babes in rebozos around us. Cruz decided to become a midwife to help reduce suffering she saw among her sisters. As difficult as living in Mexico was, its vibrant colors, forms of energy, and simple life inspired my organic principles. For centuries, rituals of planting and harvesting maize surrounded my studio. However my materials/methods were innovative and contemporary to the 20th century and beyond.
I showed an elderly American Modernist painter the forms I had so much theory about—Georgia O’Keeffe. We debated issues and theories. I created 17 sculptured paintings, traveling 3,500 miles to the U.S. and back, over five times to garner O’Keeffe’s fiscal mentorship.”
O’Keeffe’s letters to Tuma include many references to financial support. Perhaps the most poignant is the one dated 3 July 1968, shortly after Tuma has visited New Mexico:
“I am glad you came and were here a few days. Do not sell your car or part with your dog. I will send you the two thousand that you need to get your next three paintings done . . . . It may take ten days or two weeks. If I send it may I consider your black creation mine?”
The “black creation” was a fiberglass sculpture called Obsidian, which Tuma duly took north on her next trip to New Mexico.
After her time at Lake Chapala, in 1974, Tuma toured New South Wales and Western Australia, painting and sketching as she went, before establishing her studio on the East End of Long Island, New York. She is widely recognized for her work in the category of organic minimalism, which is influenced by oceanic and coastal forms, such as beach pebbles, sand, sprouting seeds, and spiraling shell forms.
Her “sculptured paintings” have been exhibited at many galleries, including Guild Hall (East Hampton), the Parrish Art Museum (Southampton village), and the Clayton-Liberatore Gallery (Bridgehampton), all in New York State. Tuma is a charter member of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and lectured at the Brooklyn Museum in 1992.
Examples of Tuma’s sculptured paintings are in the permanent collections of several museums, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, in Washington, D.C., the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford, Palo Alto, as well as in the private collections of Henry Geldzahler, Tipper and Al Gore, and others.
Tuma has also written several art-related books, including The Sea, the Simplicity of the Sea, and Other Poems, (Come to Life Graphics, 1984) and Radiant Energy, Light In My Pastel Paintings (2005).
Mym Tuma is yet another of the many famous artists who have found inspiration while at Lake Chapala, where the light, lake, people and scenery combine to stimulate creativity.
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Jack Harris Rutherford lived with his first wife, Dorothy, and their four children, in San Blas in 1963, before moving to Ajijic in about 1966. He remained a resident of Ajijic, making occasional visits to San Blas, until 1971, when the family relocated across the Atlantic to southern Spain.
Rutherford was born in Long Beach, California, on 11 May 1931. At age 11, he took art classes with eminent watercolorist Hans Axel Walleen (1902-1978), who was President of the American Watercolor Society from 1957 to 1959. In his early twenties, Rutherford, increasingly disenchanted with where U.S. society was headed and with working in his father’s oil company, opted to focus on art, taking lessons with Austrian-born Karl Seethaler, the then Director of Long Beach Academy of Art in California. Rutherford became an active participant in the “synthesis of art” cultural group in California and in 1957, was appointed Director of the School of Fine Art, Long Beach, California.
In 1963, he felt his artistic development was being seriously constrained by the position, and decided, in his words, “to dedicate all my energies to my purpose as an artist… I sold up my home and with my wife and four sons fled to Mexico to lead the life of a vocational artist.” In San Blas, Nayarit, Rutherford founded a short-lived “Academy of Art” with himself as director.
Jack Rutherford: San Blas Customs House (1963)
In early 1965, German artist Peter Huf and his future wife Eunice Hunt met Rutherford in San Blas. (The couple later lived in Ajijic for many years). Huf recalls that Rutherford “had just arrived with his wife and four sons. He had dug out of the sand the walls of some abandoned building and hung his paintings on the walls.” Peter Huf and Eunice Hunt had their first art show in Mexico on the walls of the beautifully-proportioned Old Customs House, then in ruins, but since restored.
Jack Rutherford. Ajijic Sketch (ca 1963)
Rutherford held numerous exhibitions during his time in San Blas and Ajijic. For example, in early 1964, an exhibit of his paintings opened at the Mexican-North American Cultural Institute in Guadalajara. Even then, according to a contemporary newspaper article, Rutherford planned to eventually move to Europe to paint and study. (Colony Reporter, Guadalajara, 6 February 1964). In August 1965, he had a successful one-man show at the Posada Ajijic; the following month he and his family went back to San Blas. (Colony Reporter, Guadalajara, 2 September 1965).
Jack Rutherford. Ajijic bedroom (ca 1963)
Rutherford was also a founding member of the Grupo 68 art collective in Ajijic. Grupo 68 was founded in 1967 and initially comprised Peter Huf, his wife Eunice Hunt, Jack Rutherford, John Kenneth Peterson and Shaw (the artist Don Shaw). (Rutherford dropped out of the group after a year or so, but the others remained as a group until 1971.)
In September 1968, Rutherford was one of 8 painters and a sculptor whose works were displayed at the “re-opening” of Laura Bateman’s Rincon del Arte gallery at Calle Hidalgo #41 in Ajijic. (The other artists were Alejandro Colunga, Coffeen Suhl, Peter Huf, Eunice (Hunt) Huf, John K. Peterson and (Donald) Shaw; the single sculptor was Joe Wedgwood).
In April 1969, members of Grupo 68 had a collective show at La Galería, Ajijic. The announcement in Guadalajara daily Informador (20 April) lists the participating artists as John Kenneth Peterson, Charles Henry Blodgett (guest artist) and “El Grupo” (John Brandi, Tom Brudenell, Peter Huf, Eunice (Hunt) Huf, Jack Rutherford, Shaw, Cynthia Siddons and Robert Snodgrass).
In 1971 Rutherford returned to the USA, and then went to Spain. In Spain, he lived for almost thirty years in an historical olive mill in Andalucia, where he directed an art school “Arts and Growth Center” and ran his own art gallery.
Jack Rutherford. Ajijic influences (ca 1963)
According to his website, Mexico has always remained “a strong influence on his art” and Rutherford continues to take return trips and longer stays in “this spiritual country, scene of his artistic liberation”. In recent years, Rutherford has visited, and exhibited, in La Manzanilla on the Pacific Coast of Mexico several times.
Jack Rutherford has exhibited, lectured and taught in the U.S., Mexico and Europe. His one-man exhibitions outside Mexico include:
USA: Richmond Public Library, Richmond, Virginia; Studio Gallery, Norfolk, Virginia; Atelier 7, Long Beach, California; Topanga Community Center, Topanga Canyon, California; Parkview Gallery, Long Beach, California; The Waterfront Gallery, Pensacola, Florida; Phoenix Museum Docent Committee, Phoenix, Arizona.
Spain: Nerja Library and Cultural Centre, Nerja; Caja de Ahorras Provincial de Malaga, Velez Malaga; Sala Tres, Marbella; Galeria del Arte Melia, Granada; Galeria Pintada, Nerja; Alberdini Galeria, Competa; Parador Hotel, Nerja.
Germany: C.A.G. Gallery, Bremen; Galerie Krencky, Herford; Galerie im Oha, Bunde; America Haus, Munich; and Kunst zu Hause, Cologne.
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John Liggett Meigs (1916-2003) was an American artist and designer who was a student of Peter Hurd.
Meigs sought out Hurd in San Patricio, New Mexico, in 1951, and in 1953 began to assist Hurd on his fresco mural in Lubbock, Texas, at the West Texas Museum (now the Holden Hall at the Texas Tech University). The mural depicts pioneers and influential leaders of West Texas. The two other artists working on the project, which took two years to complete, were Hurd’s wife Henriette and Manuel Acosta.
Meigs became very good friends with Henriette and Peter Hurd. He bought a small adobe house in San Patricio and spent forty years converting it into a 23-room dwelling that Peter Hurd dubbed “Fort Meigs.” In about 1968, Hurd and Meigs jointly bought the home in Chapala previously owned by American poet (and friend) Witter Bynner. Although there is no evidence that Chapala influenced Meig’s work in any way, the artist visited Chapala on several occasions.
Landscape by John Meigs.
Born in Chicago on 10 May 1916, Meigs only discovered the details of his interesting childhood when he signed up for the Navy during the second world war, and learned that he had been kidnapped by his biological father as a one-year-old and given the assumed surname of MacMillan. Meigs never knew his real mother, but grew up with his father and his father’s new partner. They moved frequently, but eventually settled in San Antonio, Texas, where Meigs first became interested in art. His father died in 1931 when Meigs was only 15 years old. Meigs and his foster mother then moved to California where Meigs later attended the University of Redlands.
Meigs with his Hawaiian shirt designs. Credit: Dennis Oda, Honollulu Star-Bulletin
Meigs worked as a reporter in Los Angeles and Hawaii, and as a designer of houses and clothing. He was one of the earliest designers of Hawaiian aloha shirts, and his shirt designs were the basis of a 1997 exhibit at the Honolulu Academy of Arts. Prior to taking his art seriously and studying with Hurd, Meigs had also served in the U.S. Navy during the second world war.
Meigs went on to become a very successful artist, producing landscape and architectural images in a variety of media, from ink and oil to watercolor and photography. He held over fifty solo exhibitions, in locations ranging from Santa Fe and Roswell in New Mexico to New York City, Lubbock (Texas) and Honolulu.
In 1960, the Society of California Pioneers, based in San Francisco, commissioned him to paint a series of watercolors of Victorian homes in the city for an exhibition at the Society’s headquarters later that year.
In addition to his art, now found in private, corporate and academic collections, Meigs edited several books about art: Peter Hurd – The Lithographs (1968), Peter Hurd Sketch Book (1971) and The Cowboy in American Prints (1972).
The biography of Meigs by Mark S. Fuller provides chapter and verse of the artistic and social circles in which Meigs developed his career. He could count among his friends the artists Andrew Wyeth, Georgia O’Keeffe and Rolf Armstrong, poet Witter Bynner, oilman and cattleman Robert O. Anderson, and actor Vincent Price.
According to Fuller, the major retrospective show of Peter Hurd’s works in 1964-65 came about because Meigs had visited a museum in 1963 to show them his own canvasses but had then asked the museum purchaser why the museum didn’t mount a show of Hurd’s work.
After Meigs and Hurd bought the Bynner home in Chapala, Meigs visited various times, and gradually brought Bynner’s extensive book collection (included in the sale) back to New Mexico. (By the 1970s, Meigs estimated he had 40,000 volumes in his personal library.) Meigs also regularly brought back select handicrafts and ceramic pieces.
In November 1993, a decade before his death in August 2003, Meigs received The Governor’s Award for Excellence & Achievement in the Arts from the State of New Mexico.
Sources:
Mark S. Fuller, 2015. Never a Dull Moment: The Life of John Liggett Meigs (Sunstone Press)
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American artist Peter Hurd (1904-1984) spent most of his life in New Mexico, but also had connections to Lake Chapala. In about 1968, together with fellow artist and former student John Liggett Meigs, Hurd bought the home in Chapala previously owned by poet Witter Bynner. Although there is no evidence that Chapala influenced Hurd’s work in any way, the artist visited Chapala on several occasions, and presumably was accompanied on some of these trips by his wife, artist Henriette Wyeth.
Peter Hurd: Country Scene (undated)
Hurd had life-long ties to New Mexico. He was born on 22 February 1904 in Roswell and died there on 9 July 1984. His parents named him Harold Hurd Jr., but called him “Pete” and, in his early 20s, he legally changed his name to Peter.
In 1918, he studied at New Mexico Military Institute, and three years later entered the United States Military Academy at West Point. In 1923, he left West Point to study at Haverford College in Pennsylvania. Soon afterwards, Hurd settled in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, so that he could study art under the illustrator N.C. Wyeth. He worked for a decade as Wyeth’s assistant and, in 1929, married Henriette Wyeth, Wyeth’s eldest daughter.
The couple moved back to Hurd’s native New Mexico and established the family home and studios on a ranch in San Patricio. Henriette Wyeth later became very well-known for her own portraits and still life paintings, “considered by many art scholars to be one of the great women painters of the 20th century”. Two of the couple’s children, Ann Carol Hurd and Michael Hurd, also became professional artists and continue to live on the family ranch in San Patricio.
Many of Peter Hurd’s works are set in Southeastern New Mexico, in and around the ranch in San Patricio and in the Hondo Valley:
In the 1930s, during the depression, Hurd focused on producing inexpensive lithographs for a larger audience. Convinced of the need for gallery representation in New York, he drove there with a portfolio and quickly convinced several gallery owners to display his lithographs.
During the second world war, Hurd was a war correspondent for Life. He became a full member of the National Academy of Design in 1942. Hurd’s wartime works varied from quick plein air sketches to watercolors and egg temperas (his preferred medium). After the war, Hurd traveled in North Africa, Asia and the Middle East.
From 1953 to 1954, Hurd, together with Henriette and two of his students – Manuel Acosta and John Meigs – painted a fresco in Lubbock, Texas, at the West Texas Museum (now the Holden Hall at the Texas Tech University). The mural depicts pioneers and influential leaders of West Texas, and includes a self-portrait of Hurd himself, sketchpad in hand.
A later Hurd mural, “The Future Belongs To Those Who Prepare For It”, was saved from destruction when its original location, the Prudential Building in Houston, Texas, was about to be demolished. It was rehoused in 2011 in the Artesia Public Library in New Mexico. The story of how the mural was moved makes for interesting reading.
Cover of Folkways record
Hurd was also an accomplished musician. In 1957, he collaborated with Folkways Records to release an album, Spanish Folk Songs of New Mexico, on which Hurd played the guitar and sang the lyrics (Spanish and English) of various ranchera songs.
From 1959 to 1963, at the invitation of President Eisenhower, Hurd served on the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts.
Hurd’s first major retrospective exhibition, in 1964/65, was held at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth and the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. The catalog for the exhibit, entitled Peter Hurd : A Portrait Sketch from Life (1965) was written by Paul Horgan, a lifelong friend.
A 1967 portrait of Lyndon B. Johnson by Hurd, meant to be the president’s official portrait, did not find favor with its subject, but remains in the collection of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. The debate about the painting generated plenty of press coverage, which brought Hurd’s art to a much wider public.
Hurd illustrated several books, including The Story of Siegfried by James Baldwin (1931), and the same author’s The Story of Roland (1957); Hans Brinker or the Silver Skates by Mary Mapes Dodge (1932); Deep Silver. A story of the cod banks, by Nora Burglon (1939); Great Stories of the Sea and Ships, edited by N.C. Wyeth (1940); Murder and Mystery in New Mexico by Erna Fergusson (1948); Sky Determines by Ross Calvin (1948); Montana: high, wide, and handsome, by Joseph Kinsey Howard (1974). Hurd’s portrait of Charles C. Tillinghast, Jr. for the cover of Time (22 July 1966) was featured in a 1969 National Portrait Gallery exhibit of the magazine’s cover art.
Books about Hurd’s work include The Peter Hurd Mural (1957); Peter Hurd. The Lithographs, edited by John Meigs (1968); Peter Hurd sketch book, edited by John Meigs (1971); Peter Hurd: Insight to a Painter, by James K. Ballinger and Tonia L Horton (1983); My Land Is the Southwest: Peter Hurd Letters and Journals, edited by Robert Metzger (1983); Peter Hurd: A Memorial Exhibition, by Walt Wiggins (1984); The Art of Peter Hurd from the Permanent Collection, Roswell Museum (1985);
Hurd’s work can be found in many major museums and collections, including the Metropolitan Museum; Art Institute of Chicago, Brooklyn Museum, Roswell Museum, Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts, Museum of New Mexico, and the National Gallery in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Sources:
Mark S. Fuller. 2015. Never a Dull Moment: The Life of John Liggett Meigs.
John Meigs (ed). 1968. Peter Hurd. The Lithographs.
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D. H. Lawrence, together with his wife Frieda, and friends Witter Bynner and Willard (“Spud”) Johnson, visited Mexico in March 1923, initially staying in Mexico City.
By the end of April, Lawrence was becoming restless and actively looking for somewhere where he could write. The traveling party had an open invitation to visit Guadalajara, the home of Idella Purnell, a former student of Bynner’s at the Univeristy of California, Berkeley. After reading about Chapala in Terry’s Guide to Mexico, Lawrence decided to catch the train to Guadalajara and then explore the lakeside village of Chapala for himself.
Lawrence liked what he saw and, within hours of arriving in Chapala, he sent an urgent telegram back to Mexico City pronouncing Chapala “paradise” and urging the others to join him there immediately. Lawrence and his wife Frieda soon established their home for the summer in Chapala, on Calle Zaragoza. In a letter back to two Danish friends in Taos, Lawrence described both the house and the village:
“Here we are, in our own house—a long house with no upstairs—shut in by trees on two sides.—We live on a wide verandah, flowers round—it is fairly hot—I spend the day in trousers and shirt, barefoot—have a Mexican woman, Isabel, to look after us—very nice. Just outside the gate the big Lake of Chapala—40 miles long, 20 miles wide. We can’t see the lake, because the trees shut us in. But we walk out in a wrap to bathe.—There are camions—Ford omnibuses—to Guadalajara—2 hours. Chapala village is small with a market place with trees and Indians in big hats. Also three hotels, because this is a tiny holiday place for Guadalajara. I hope you’ll get down, I’m sure you’d like painting here.—It may be that even yet I’ll have my little hacienda and grow bananas and oranges.” – (letter dated 3 May 1923, to Kai Gotzsche and Knud Merrild, quoted in Knud Merrild’s book, A Poet and Two Painters: A Memoir of D.H. Lawrence.)
DH Lawrence house in Chapala, ca 1954, Photo by Roy MacNicol
Life was not without its incidents and travails. Frieda, especially, was unconvinced about the charms of Chapala:
Lawrence went to Guadalajara and found a house with a patio on the Lake of Chapala. There, Lawrence began to write his “Plumed Serpent”. He sat by the lake under a pepper tree writing it. The lake was curious with its white water. My enthusiasm for bathing in it faded considerably when one morning a huge snake rose yards high, it seemed to me, only a few feet away. At the end of the patio, we had the family that Lawrence describes in the “Plumed Serpent”, and all the life of Chapala. I tried my one attempt at civilizing those Mexican children, but when they asked me one day, “Do you have lice too, Niña,” I had enough and gave up in a rage. At night I was frightened of bandits and we had one of the sons of the cook sleeping outside our bedroom door with a loaded revolver, but he snored so fiercely that I wasn’t sure whether the fear of bandits wasn’t preferable. We quite sank into the patio life. Bynner and Spud came every afternoon, and I remember Bynner saying to me one day, while he was mixing a cocktail: “If you and Lawrence quarrel, why don’t you hit first?” I took the advice and the next time Lawrence was cross, I rose to the occasion and got out of my Mexican indifference and flew at him. – (Frieda Lawrence: (1934), Not I, But the Wind… Viking Press, New York (1934), p 139)
The house the Lawrences rented was at Zaragoza #4 (since renumbered Zaragoza #307) and became the basis for the description of Kate’s living quarters in The Plumed Serpent. The Lawrences lived in the house from the start of May 1923 to about 9 July that year.
Interestingly, the house subsequently had several additional links to famous writers and artists.
Immediately after the Lawrences departed, the next renters were American artists Everett Gee Jackson and Lowell Houser, who lived there for 18 months. They did not realize the identity of the previous tenant – “an English writer” – until the following year. Their time in Chapala is described, with great wit and charm, in Jackson’s Burros and Paintbrushes (University of Texas Press, 1985).
[Jackson visited Mexico many times and made several return visits to Chapala, including one in 1968 when he, his wife and young grandson, “rented the charming old Witter Bynner house right in the center of the village of Chapala. It had become the property of Peter Hurd, the artist…” In 1923, Bynner and Johnson stayed at the Hotel Arzapalo. In 1930, Bynner bought a home in Chapala (not the one rented by Lawrence) and was a frequent winter visitor for many years.]
Lawrence house in Chapala – ca 1963
Over the years, the house on Zaragoza that Lawrence and Frieda had occupied was extensively remodeled and expanded. The first major renovation was undertaken in about 1940 by famed Mexican architect Luis Barragán. Another large-scale renovation took place after the house was acquired in 1954 by American artist and architect Roy MacNicol (mistakenly spelled MacNichol in Moore’s The Collected Letters of D.H. Lawrence).
Quinta Quetzacoatl
In 1978, Quinta Quetzalcoatl was acquired by a Californian couple, Dick and Barbi Henderson. Dick, a contractor, and Babri, an interior designer, set about restoring the building to accommodate friends visiting from the U.S. In 1982, the Hendersons purchased the adjoining lot to build two additional units and extend the gardens. When they ran Quinta Quetzalcoatl as a boutique bed and breakfast, it had eight luxury suites.
In the late 1970s, Canadian poet Al Purdy, a great admirer of Lawrence (to the point of having a bust of Lawrence on the hall table of his home in Ontario), wrote a hand-signed and numbered book, The D.H. Lawrence House at Chapala, published by The Paget Press in 1980, as a limited edition of 44 copies. The book includes a photograph, taken by Purdy’s wife Eurithe, of the plumed serpent tile work above the door of the Lawrence house.
The town of Chapala today would be totally unrecognizable to Lawrence, but the home where he spent a productive summer writing the first draft of The Plumed Serpent eventually became the Quinta Quetzalcoatl, an exclusive boutique hotel.
Sources:
John Busam. 1994. “Inn of the Plumed Serpent.” Travelmex (Guadalajara), No 114, 1-3.
Goldsmith, M.O. 1941. “Week-end house in Mexico: G. Cristo house, Lake Chapala.” House and Garden vol 79 (May 1941). Describes the remodeling of D.H. Lawrence’s one story adobe cottage by Luis Barragán, the “talented young Mexican architect.”
Harry T. Moore (ed). 1962. The Collected Letters of D.H. Lawrence (Two volumes), (New York: Viking Press).
Harry T. Moore and Warren Roberts. 1966. D. H. Lawrence and His World. Thames and Hudson, p 82 (image).
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Famous American photographer and photojournalist Horace Bristol lived in Ajijic from 1967 to 1976.
Born in Whittier, California, on 16 November 1908, Bristol studied architecture at the Art Center of Los Angeles, before moving to San Francisco in 1933 to work as a commercial photographer. By chance, Ansel Adams lived near Bristol’s studio and the two became friends. Bristol was introduced to other leading photographers and artists including Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham.
In 1936, Bristol became one of Life Magazine‘s founding photographers. He went on to produce half a dozen Life covers. His photos also appeared in the pages of Time, Fortune, Sunset, and National Geographic.
In 1938, Bristol worked with John Steinbeck to document the plight of migrant farmers in California’s central valley during the Great Depression. Life turned down the story and Steinbeck opted to write his findings as a novel, The Grapes of Wrath. Bristol’s photographs from this time were later known as “The Grapes of Wrath” collection.
When the U.S. entered the second world war in 1941, Bristol was recruited to the U.S. Naval Aviation Photographic Unit. He traveled to Africa and Japan, helping to document the invasions of North Africa, Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
After the war, Bristol settled in Tokyo, Japan, sold photographs to magazines in Europe and the U.S. and became the Asia correspondent for Fortune Magazine. Bristol published several books (on Japan, Korea and Bali) and established the East-West Photo Agency.
This productive period of his life came to an abrupt end in 1956 with the death by suicide of his first wife, Virginia, following a hysterectomy. Bristol was so distraught, he burned many of his negatives, packed his photos away and retired from commercial photography.
The following year, he married Masako, a Japanese librarian 20 years his junior. A decade later, the couple moved with their young daughter, Akiko, to Lake Chapala, where their second child, Henri, was born. During their years in Ajijic (1967-1976) Bristol worked as an architect, designing and building several lakeside houses.
In 1976, the family moved to Ojai, California, because Bristol and his wife decided that they did not want to bring up their two children as expatriates. Almost a decade later, Henri, then 15 years old, had a high school assignment to read The Grapes of Wrath. This prompted Bristol to look through his photo archive and he began to regret his decision all those years earlier to put away his camera. He brought his surviving negatives out of storage and resumed his photography career.
In later years, his work was the subject of several retrospective exhibitions.
Bristol continued to make his home in Ojai, California, until his death on 4 August 1997 at the age of 88. Bristol’s photographs will not be forgotten, since Bill Gates now owns the digital rights to most of Bristol’s 16,000 negatives.
Bristol’s work is included in many major collections, including those of the Getty Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and is the subject of the 2006 documentary, The Compassionate Eye: Horace Bristol, Photojournalist, written and directed by David Rabinovitch.
Artistic success clearly runs in the family. In 2006, son Henri Bristol opened East/West Gallery in Santa Barbara, California.
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The full name of the pioneering painter and sculptor “Shaw”, who lived in Jocotepec from 1967 to the mid-1970s, is Donald Edward Shaw. Shaw was born in Boston, Massachusetts, 24 August 1934, and passed away in New Mexico on 26 December 2015. He always preferred to be known in the art world by his surname alone.
Shaw attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (1954) and subsequently studied under sculptor John Bergschneider. He often worked in mixed media, and during the Jocotepec stage of his distinguished artistic career, specialized in presentations involving exquisitely-designed and handsomely-crafted boxes and box frames.
Shaw says that the primary influence of Mexico on his work was in showing him a different view of the formality of color, levels of brightness and color juxtaposition. “Colors become things, hence the serigraph for the Happening”:
Serigraph by Shaw for the Chula Vista Happening of June 1969
Shaw taught and lectured at several colleges and universities including the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Boston (1957), Harvard (1958; 1959), the University of Houston, Southern Arkansas University and Rice University. He was professor of painting at School of Art in San Francisco (1961) and gave workshops in Oakland, California (1963) and in Jocotepec (1967).
When he sought new inspiration in the mid-1960s, he flipped a coin to decide between Alaska and Mexico. and then, blindfolded, stuck a pin in a map of Mexico, thereby choosing the small coastal town of Barra de Navidad, where he came into contact with the indigenous Huichol people. Before long, as a result of a chance meeting with artist-photographer John Frost and his wife novelist Joan Frost, in a Guadalajara restaurant, Shaw had relocated inland, to the village of Jocotepec, where the Frosts resided, at the western end of Lake Chapala.
He first settled in Jocotepec in 1967 and lived there more-or-less full time until around 1972. For the following five or six years, he divided his time between Houston and Jocotepec.
During his years in Jocotepec, Shaw (described by a female admirer from that time as “drop-dead gorgeous”) was an active catalyst for local artists and became a tireless promoter of artistic events. Shaw’s friends and artistic colleagues in the Lake Chapala area included fellow serigrapher John Frost, Phyllis Rauch and her husband Georg Rauch, Tom Brudenell, Peter Paul Huf, Eunice (Hunt) Huf, sculptor Alice Bateman, poet Peter Everwine, poet-painter John Brandi, and many others.
Shaw was inspired by the power of indigenous music and culture, and greatly admired the pioneering work of Peter Everwine in revealing, through translation, the remarkable power of Nahuatl poems.
Shaw was a founder member of the local (Lake Chapala) art group known as Grupo 68 (founded in 1968), alongside Peter Huf, his wife Eunice Hunt, Jack Rutherford and John Kenneth Peterson. Grupo 68 exhibited regularly (most Sunday afternoons) from 1969-1971 at the Hotel Camino Real in Guadalajara, at the invitation of the hotel’s public relations manager Ray Alvorado (a singer) and also held many group shows in Ajijic, both at Laura Bateman’s Rincón del Arte gallery, as well as (later) in “La Galería”, the collective gallery they founded at Zaragoza #1, Ajijic. In addition, the group also showed in Guadalajara with José María de Servín, at El Tekare, and at Ken Edwards’ store in Tlaquepaque.
Allyn Hunt, reviewing a Grupo 68 exhibition held at the Tekare penthouse gallery in Guadalajara in July 1968, wrote that the show featured, “four highly independent artists (with four very different styles) who have the discipline, while regularly showing together, not to adopt a group means in approaching pictorial problems.” Hunt reserved particular praise for Shaw, saying that “Donald Shaw is probably this group’s most exploratory imagination, the one that when working at peak thrust, dominates technique and pictorial concepts most thoroughly.” (“Art Probe”, Guadalajara Reporter, 27 July 1968)
In December 1968, when the four artists of Grupo 68 opened their own collective gallery in Ajijic, known simply as La Galería (at Zaragoza #1), the opening show, “Art is Life; Life is Art”, included works by a dozen artists, including Shaw. A review in Guadalajara Reporter said that,
“One of the best works in the show is hung here: Donald Shaw’s tour de force serigraph, “Spore Box”, presenting us with brilliantly-conceived chromatic ideas and imaginative forms which do not relay on optical illusionism, excessive optical vibration or three-dimensionality. This is undoubtedly the best serigraph Shaw – who has executed several series of rewarding prints – has produced.”
Another Grupo 68 collective show in April 1969 at La Galería, Ajijic, featured works by Shaw, John Kenneth Peterson, Charles Henry Blodgett (guest artist), John Brandi, Tom Brudenell, Peter Paul Huf, Eunice Hunt, Jack Rutherford, Cynthia Siddons and Robert Snodgrass.
In June 1969, Shaw joined with John Brandi and Tom Brudenell in arranging the somewhat presumptuous “happening” in Chula Vista, mid-way between Ajijic and Chapala. Shaw’s contributions to this event included bound-up figures, and prints of symbols.
In September 1969, Shaw, Peter Paul Huf and Eunice Hunt presented a show at Galeria 1728, Guadalajara, entitled 7-7-7, named because each artist presented 7 works, with promotional posters emulating the scoring system used in the Olympics:
7-7-7 show (Eunice Hunt, Peter Paul Huf, Shaw), 1969. Photo by John Frost.
In 1971, he may have been among the group of artists who exhibited on 15 May 1971 at a “Fiesta of Art”, held at the home of Mr and Mrs E. D. Windham (Calle 16 de Septiembre #33). Other artists on that occasion included Daphne Aluta;Mario Aluta; Beth Avary; Charles Blodgett; Antonio Cárdenas; Alan Davoll; Alice de Boton; Robert de Boton; Tom Faloon; John Frost; Dorothy Goldner; Burt Hawley; Peter Huf; Eunice Hunt; Lona Isoard;Michael Heinichen; John Maybra Kilpatrick; Gail Michael; 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.
The image above shows a typical “decorated box” from this period. This piece, made of a Pepsi Cola box, wood, rock, bone, feathers and metal, measures 18″ (ht) by 14″ by 4″.
Two decorated panels, of a series of five known as “Jocotepec: Dream Series” (1968) were included in the exhibition “Wood in Art” at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston in 1979.
During his time in Mexico, Shaw also did some graphic art, and designed the official logo for the Mexican news agency, Agencia Mexicana de Noticias (1968). In 1972, back in the U.S., he illustrated a cover for Southwest Art Gallery Magazine.
Shaw has divided his years since Mexico between Texas, Arkansas and New Mexico. He lived and worked in Houston for many years (where he was on the faculty of the Museum School of the Museum of Fine Arts), then had his studio in Pine Bluff, Arkansas for twenty years, before relocating to New Mexico, where his studio-home is in Guadalupita, in the mountains above Santa Fe.
While remaining primarily a sculptor, Shaw has enjoyed success in a variety of media. For example, in 1975, he arranged the first of several sky paintings, hiring pilots near Houston to leave trails of white smoke in specific patterns. In 1983, he designed and installed “Strata”, a 9-foot tall steel sculpture placed on the edge of the Balcones Escarpment just prior to the summer solstice. The semi-arid landscapes of Texas and New Mexico have inspired Shaw to develop new forms and works, including the small, two-sided, polychrome, sculpted steel “Betatakin” series.
Susie Kalil, in the brochure accompanying his solo show at the Arkansas Arts Center in 1988, writes that “Shaw switches gear from one medium to another without sacrificing craftsmanship or exact vision… [his] subjective interpretations are predicated by nature, rather than art fashion.” Later, she says that “Shaw is not your average artist. He is part philosopher, part poet, part outdoorsman. His interest in ritualistic activity is part of his constant investigation of how we experience time and place.””
Shaw’s major solo exhibits include Club 47, Cambridge, Massachusetts (1956); Nova Gallery, Boston (1957; 1958; 1959); Galeria de Artes Plasticas, Universidad de Guadalajara (1968); Mexico City (October 1968); La Galería, Ajijic (1969); The Small Store Gallery, Houston (1973, 1974); Videotaped Sky Drawings, Texas Gallery, Houston (1976); Robinson Gallery, Houston (1976); Kornblatt Gallery, Baltimore, Maryland (1977); Moody Gallery, Houston (1978, 1979, 1981); Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock (1979); Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi (1979);Transco Gallery, Victoria, Texas (1987); The Arkansas Arts Center (1988); Adair Margo Gallery, El Paso (1988); Taylor’s Contemporanea, Arkansas (1997); Baum Gallery, Conway, Arkansas (1998);
His group exhibits include the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (1956, 1957, 1959); Nova Gallery, Boston (1960); Allen Gallery, New York (1962);Pacific Gallery, Mendocino, California (1964); Gaspar Gallery, California (1967); Pacific Gallery, Mendocino, California (1967); La Galeria, Ajijic (1968); Rincón del Arte, Ajijic (1968); Galeria Palomar, Tlaquepaque (1968); Galería del Bosque, Guadalajara (1968); Arlene Lind Gallery, San Francisco (1968, 1969); Tekare Penthouse Gallery, Guadalajara (1969); Instituto Aragon, Guadalajara (1969); Vorpal Gallery, San Francisco (1971); Gallery of Modern Art, Taos, New Mexico (1971, 1972); David Gallery, Houston (1972);Biennial Invitational Exhibit of Texas Artists, Beaumont Art Museum (1974, 1978); Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi (1975); Louisiana Gallery, Houston (1976, 1978); Pelham-Stouffer Gallery, Houston (1977); Art Museum, University of Texas at Austin (1979); “Wood in Art”, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (1979); Blaffer Gallery, Houston (1980); Art from Houston in Norway, Stavanger, Norway (1982); Arts and Science Center for Southeast Arkansas (2012).
Shaw’s work can be seen in public collections in Arkansas, California, Colorado, New Mexico, New York, Texas, Virginia and Washington D.C.. For example, in Arkansas, sculptures or two dimensional pieces can be viewed at the Arkansas Arts Center and Bio-Medical Research Center in Little Rock, Hendrix College in Conway, Lyon College in Batesville, University of Arkansas Community College at Hope and Bank of America in Pine Bluff.
Shaw was survived by three children from two marriages: Rima Olga Shaw (husband Pascal Jean Marie Luigi Vinardel and Adam John Marrel Shaw (from his marriage to Marie-Therese Louise Marrel) and Robert Edward Cherry-Shaw (from his marriage to Pauline Ashley Cherry). Rima Olga Shaw is an established artist living in Paris.
[A massive thank-you to Shaw for his heartfelt support of this project, for having shared memories of his time in Mexico, and for allowing me access to many items from his personal library. I deeply regret that his creative genius was called to a higher plane before we had the opportunity to meet in person.]
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Dudley Francis Kuzell, husband of Betty Kuzell, was a baritone in the well-known The Guardsmen quartet. The Kuzells lived at Lake Chapala for many years, from the early 1960s.
Kuzell (sometimes Kuzelle) was born in Cleveland, Ohio on 21 June 1896 and died in Guadalajara on 14 May 1969. He was a track athlete at Stanford University (class of 1919), but did not graduate, owing to registering for U.S. military duty near the end of World War 1. (The Stanford Daily, 28 April 1927). After military service, he settled in California making his living by acting and singing.
As an actor, he appeared in Hail the Conquering Hero (1944), Thank Your Lucky Stars (1943) and Faithful in My Fashion (1946).
As a singer, he was a member of the Ken Lane Singers and The Guardsmen quartet. The Ken Lane Singers accompanied Frank Sinatra on several occasions, including a 1945 recording of America the Beautiful; Silent Night, Holy Night; The Moon was Yellow; and I only Have Eyes for You, and for a 1947 recording that included It Came Upon the Midnight Clear; O little Town of Bethlehem; and the iconic White Christmas.
The Guardsmen quartet, 1949
The all-male quartet The Guardsmen performed hundreds of concerts throughout the U.S., Canada and Mexico, as well as many radio broadcasts. The quartet sang on the sound tracks of more than 800 motion pictures from the 1930s to the 1950s. These movies included Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), where the quartet were four of the dwarfs.
During their “retirement” at Lake Chapala, the Kuzells were famous for their musical evenings, and instrumental in the founding of the Lakeside Little Theater.
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Elizabeth L. Kuzell (1895-1986), better known as Betty Kuzell, lived in Chula Vista, Lake Chapala, for many years with her husband Dudley Kuzell (1896-1969). The Kuzells, both accomplished musicians, were active in the local community and instrumental in founding the Lakeside Little Theater, which has proved to be an enduring success. They arrived at Lake Chapala in about 1961.
Betty Kuzell was born Elizabeth Laird in California on 22 November 1895 and died in Chicago in 1986, on her 91st birthday. (Her mother was the cutely named Pocahontas Glazebrook). Betty married Dudley Francis Kuzell in Los Angeles, on 2 March 1918. The couple had one child, James Elgar Kuzell, born in about 1923.
Versions of the founding of the Lakeside Little Theater differ, according to source. According to June Nay Summers, Betty Kuzell founded the theater in 1964, a date echoed in the short book Ajijic, 500 Years of Adventures (DAR, 2011). Summers claimed that the first production of the theater group was held in the building that was the former Chapala Railway Station on 14 August 1965, and was a musical written and directed by Betty entitled “From Kokomo to Mexico”. Sadly, these details do not appear to be substantiated.
Based on the pages of the Colony (Guadalajara) Reporter (a weekly first published in December 1963), the story begins in early 1964, following an evening of musical entertainment (featuring Betty on the organ, Paul Carson on the piano, with Dudley Kuzell, William Stelling and Kenneth Rundquist as singers) at the Kuzells’ home. (This was quite a distinguished gathering since Rundquist was scheduled to sing at the World’s Fair in New York a few months later.) (CR, 2 April 1964)
A week later, anyone interested in forming a Little Theater Group was invited to meet at the “Chapala Country Club on Friday 10 April at 4 p.m”. Clearly the meeting was a success since, on 20 June 1964, “the first little theater production to be presented by the Chapala Country Club” (based at the time in the former Chapala Railway Station) opened. A cast of four (Bob Owens, Floyd Wilson, Mike Bieselt and Dick Peppin), under Betty Kuzell’s direction, put on George S. Kaufman’s brilliant satire, If Men Played Cards as Women Do.
Early the following year, on 18 February 1965, a columnist reports that “Lakeside Little Theater became an independent and solid entity with its first business meeting held last week at Chapala Country Club.” The group adopted by-laws and Betty Kuzell became founding director. Regular membership was set at $25 pesos a year (two dollars at the then rate of exchange); sponsor members had four free tickets included in their $100 peso membership fee. (CR, 18 February 1965)
By June, the Lakeside Little Theater had 130 members, and announced it would close membership at 150. In mid-June, it presented “The Saddle Bag Saloon, Duke Reagan, Prop.” at the Chapala Country Club. The play, with a cast of over 40, was written and directed by Betty Kuzell, who also arranged the music. The set included a nude painted by Bob Snodgrass. At this time, the group was variously called either the Lake Chapala Little Theater or the Lakeside Little Theater in different articles and places.
In August 1965, the Colony Reporter (19 August) announced “another hilarious Lakeside Little Theatre workshop program next Monday… when Ken Kirk… will present “Courtship in 1830″ at the Chapala Country Club.
Relatively little is known about the Kuzells prior to their time in the Lake Chapala region, though a trawl through old newspapers reveals some snippets related to their musical prowess.
For example, the 18 September 1950 edition of The Van Nuys News from Van Nuys, California, describes a “sisterhood event” held at the Valley Jewish Community Center, at which Betty sang with the Sisterhood Choir.
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George Rae Marsh (née Williams) was an actress, playwright and novelist who lived for many years in Ajijic in the 1950s and 1960s with her first husband, the novelist Willard Marsh. The couple were married in 1948 and were together until Willard died in Ajijic in 1970. Two years after her husband’s death, George Rae married the science fiction writer Theodore R. Cogswell.
George Rae Marsh has several published plays and short stores, and also wrote at least one novel. Piecing together her bibliography is complicated by the fact that she wrote under several different names. Her plays were written as George Rae Williams, her novel as Georgia Cogswell, and most of her stories appear to have been written as George Cogswell. She was also sometimes referred to as George Rae Marsh Cogswell. To the best of my knowledge, despite several of these works having been written while she was living in Ajijic, they have no textual connections to the village.
However, George Rae Marsh was the basis for the character Sam Chester, wife of Willie Chester, in Eileen Bassing’s Ajijic-based novel Where’s Annie? (1963). George Rae’s most substantial work set in Mexico was the novel Golden Obsession (1979).
George Rae Williams was born in 1925. She graduated from the Wichita Falls High School in the early 1940s and became an actress at the Pasadena Playhouse.
Her brother John Williams (1922-1994) was a novelist, editor and professor of English whose 1972 novel Augustuswon a National Book Award. He also wroteStoner (1965), the tale of a professor of English at the University of Missouri. Williams’s work has seen something of a revival in recent years in Europe and he is the subject of a biography titled The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novelby Charles J. Shields, who was kind enough to share with me the information that John Williams had started a novel about bohemians living in Mexico (presumably based on his visits to his sister and brother-in-law) but that it has since been lost.
Shortly after George Rae married Willard Marsh, they decided to move to Ajijic, so that they could concentrate on their writing. They lived on-and-off in the village from the early 1950s through to 1970, though with numerous intermissions elsewhere, including several spells in the U.S. where Willard taught English at Winthrop College in South Carolina (1959-1961), at the University of California, Los Angeles (1961-64) and at the North Texas State University, Denton (1968-70). They also spent some time in the literary and artistic circles of San Miguel de Allende.
Two years after Willard’s death, George Rae married Theodore Rose Cogswell (1918-1987) in San Miguel de Allende. Cogswell was an American professor of English and science fiction writer. After their marriage, the couple divided their time between Ajijic, San Miguel de Allende and the U.S.
The photo below, from the Megan Cogswell Collection, shows George and “Ted” Cogswell on their wedding day in 1972, in their matching leather safari suits.
At the time, George Rae owned a discotheque in Ajijic, presumably one of the earliest discotheques, if not the earliest, in the village.
Jerry Murray, a writer who lived in Ajijic at the time, was invited to the wedding, and later recalled (e*I*43–(Vol. 8 No. 2) April 2009) how the couple had ended up spending the first night of their honeymoon in separate cells in the city police station:
George owned a discotheque in Ajijic, and like everyone else in the wedding party at the Episcopalian church, including the priest, she was an atheist. The ceremony was followed by the wettest reception I’ve ever attended, and that was followed by Ted and George getting into her Jeep and heading for their honeymoon suite in Puerto Vallarta.
An hour later the reception was winding down when the Jeep came roaring back, stopping between the plaza and the police station for Ted to shove his screaming, cursing bride out on the cobblestones, where bride and groom were immediately arrested for being drunk and very disorderly. Placed in separate cells, Ted made a pillow out of his boots and went to sleep on the thin mattress of the cell’s wooden cot. George propped her mattress against her cell’s door, set it on fire, and screamed bloody murder until the cops turned them loose at dawn to continue on their honeymoon. When the honeymoon ended, George sedately began serving tea at the Sunday seminars Ted hosted for his graduate students at Ball State Teacher’s College in Muncie, Indiana.”
As George Rae Williams, she wrote five published plays: Mind Over Mumps: A One-act Farce (Eldridge Publishing Company, 1951); Augie Evans: Private Eye: A One-act Farce (Eldredge Publishing Company, 1951); Leave it to Laurie: A Comedy in One Act (Northwestern Press, 1952); Keeping it in the Family: A Comedy in One Act (Northwestern Press, 1953) and A will and a way – A Three Act Comedy (Eldridge Publishing Company, 1962).
As George Rae Cogswell, she wrote (with her husband) the short story “Contact Point” (1975) and they contributed a joint story to Six Science Fiction Plays, (Pocket Books, 1975).
In 1979, as Georgia Cogswell, she published Golden Obsession(Zebra Books, 1979).
George Rae Williams Marsh Cogswell died in 1997 and was interred next to Theodore Cogswell in Arlington National Cemetery.
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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 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.
American artist Walter (“Walt”) Peters lived from 15 June 1894 to 26 March 1985 and painted several paintings of Ajijic and Lake Chapala.
Peters served in the U.S. Navy from 4 August 1917 to 28 March 1919. He lived most of his life in Woodstock, New York state, where he was a member of the Woodstock Art Association.
Peters and his wife Margaret spent several winters, including that of 1973-74, at Lake Chapala, at Rancho Santa Isabel on the eastern edge of Ajijic. A Colony Reporter (Guadalajara) article described him as a “retired Art Director of New York City advertising agencies”, who had held one-man shows in Woodstock, New York (where he lived) and Key West, Florida.
Peters is best known for his meticulously executed plein air landscape and harbor scenes. He was a prolific watercolorist who completed numerous paintings of Mexican village scenes, although the original locations of some of them are difficult to pin down.
Peters’ watercolors of the Lake Chapala include scenes of Ajijic as well as of the lake, and of the church in San Antonio Tlayacapan.
Other Woodstock artists and authors associated with Lake Chapala:
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Dated 1981, these Georg Rauch designs for a children’s playground demonstrate the versatility of this amazing artist.
Georg Rauch: Playground designs, 1981. Click image to enlarge.
Georg’s widow, Phyllis Rauch, has kindly shared the following recollections related to Georg’s interest in playgrounds, and to these designs in particular:
“Georg designed a number of large playground pieces for a famous park in Vienna. When he arrived in the United States he was still fascinated by the topic and we visited playgrounds wherever we went – especially in New York.
When we moved to Mexico, Georg designed a very large and amazing playground for the town of El Molino, near Jocotepec. At the time there wasn’t even a church there, only a bell. The completed playground, utilizing all things that are freely available and could be replaced, was inaugurated by the then Governor of Jalisco’s first lady.
Sadly the only thing we didn’t take into consideration was upkeep, a fund for replacing tires, ropes etc., and over the years it basically disappeared. But I’m sure there are people in their late 40s and 50s who remember it well and enjoyed playing there.
Georg’s first and only stipulation was that a bathroom first be built and installed.
Sometimes when returning from Guadalajara, I think I can see it still there, among the many homes that have since been built.”
When Georg Rauch later learned that the Lakeside School for the Deaf (now the School for Special Children) in Jocotepec planned to build new play equipment, he gave the designs to Gwen Chan, the school’s director from 1985 to 1994. Some of Rauch’s designs were subsequently incorporated into the deaf school’s play equipment.
John Macarthur (“Jack”) Bateman was a painter, author and architect who was born on 9 October 1918 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and died on 15 March 1999. Bateman moved to Ajijic with his wife Laura Woodruff Bateman and three young children in 1952; the couple quickly became pillars of the local community, making exemplary contributions to the local social, cultural and artistic scene.
The Batemans were living in New York City prior to moving to Mexico. They responded to an advert in The New York Times which offered a home in Ajijic, together with five servants and a boat, for the princely sum of 150 dollars a month.
Jack Bateman studied architecture at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University), prior to be called up for military service in January 1942. He served in the U.S. Navy from 21 January 1942 to 22 September 1945 at various Naval Air Stations, including a spell in North Africa flying submarine-hunting dirigibles. After the war, he completed his studies and then set up an industrial design studio in New York to produce, among other things, molded architectural elements made of plaster.
According to a blog post by Jack’s son-in-law Tom Vanderzyl, this led to Bateman having an unexpectedly significant impact on the work of the great German-born abstract expressionist artist Hans Hofmann who was living on the floor below:
…the painter/architect John MacArthur Bateman had a studio just above Hans Hoffmann (sic). In his studio, John poured large heavy 55-gallon drums of plaster into molds for architectural elements. It seems one day a plaster mold broke and sent 55 gallons of plaster pouring across his wooden plank floor that was also the ceiling of the studio under him, and the plaster dripped through the ceiling of the studio below. At the time, Hans had all of his paintings out looking them over for his upcoming show. Hans shouted upstairs in German for it to stop and that he needed help covering his work from the dripping plaster. Bateman along with his klutz brother-in-law, who had dropped the mold in the first place, came down to help. They used blankets and canvas in an attempt to cover the paintings, but it was too late. The plaster was setting up and the damage was done. Bateman put the best spin on it by telling Hans that his paintings needed that texture made by the pressed fabric and wet plaster and that the new tactile surface was in many ways more interesting. Now, he only needed to paint over the white plaster to get a far more interesting surface. Hans Hoffmann’s show was a success, and he would pop up to borrow plaster from time to time and talk with Bateman about materials.
For the first few years in Mexico, Jack Bateman commuted back and forth to New York, spending about one week a month in the U.S. At home in Mexico, he spent time on his art and began to write. He authored five books including Loch Ness Conspiracy (New York: R. Speller & Sons, 1987), as well as a play, Caldo Michi, first performed in Ajijic in November 1998.
When the Lakeside Little Theater needed a new home in the mid-1980s, Bateman was a strong supporter of a plan to build a purpose-built facility on land donated by Ricardo O’Rourke, and acted as architect. The theater opened in 1987 and became the permanent home of Mexico’s most active English-language theater.
At various times sailor, artist, pilot, architect, writer and marketing consultant, whatever he turned his mind to, Jack Bateman made many unique contributions to the world.
For her part, Laura Bateman was a patron of the local arts scene in Ajijic, opening the village’s first purpose-built gallery, Rincón del Arte, at Hidalgo #41, Ajijic in about 1962. (For a couple of years prior to that, she had arranged shows in her own home). Rincón del Arte, which ran for many years, had monthly shows, featuring dozens and dozens of artists.For example, Whitford Carter exhibited at Rincón del Arte in both February 1967 and August 1968, while Peter Huf and his wife Eunice (Hunt) Huf held a joint exhibit there in December 1967 .
Jack and Laura Bateman’s eldest daughter, Alice M. Bateman, studied in Guadalajara, London (U.K.), New York and Italy before becoming a successful professional artist-sculptor based in Forth Worth, Texas.
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Phyllis (Porter) Rauch, born 28 October 1938, was an American artist, writer and translator who lived in Jocotepec for more than forty years. Her husband was internationally-acclaimed artist Georg Rauch (1924-2006). The couple lived in Guadalajara from 1967 to 1970, before moving to Laguna Beach, California for six years. They returned to Mexico in 1976 and established their permanent home in Jocotepec.
Phyllis Rauch. “Chayito”. Photo reproduced courtesy of the artist.
Phyllis Rauch grew up in Ohio and received her bachelor’s degree in English at Bowling Green State University and her master’s degree in library science at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. She studied German at the Goethe Institute in Rothenburg ob der Tauber and then worked at German libraries, including the Internationale Kinderbibliothek in Munich and the Amerika Gedenkbibliothek in Berlin. She met Georg Rauch in Vienna in 1965 and they were married in Ohio, September of the following year. Phyllis’ own highly-entertaining account of this love story was published on MexConnect in 2006 as “Not your usual wedding – a Valentine’s Day story.”
Phyllis Rauch: Pablito. Reproduced courtesy of the artist.
As a writer, Phyllis has written non-fiction and poetry, mainly for English-language magazines, newspapers and websites. She has also worked as a Spanish-English translator. During the 1968 Olympics in Mexico, Phyllis was a trilingual guide (English, Spanish, German) for the cultural events associated with the 1968 Olympics that were held in Guadalajara. She enjoyed very much squiring around the city the likes of the Berlin Opera and Duke Ellington’s band. Phyllis has never forgotten that after his last concert he kissed her on the cheek and said, “Shuugar.”
Phyllis Rauch. Rousseau-inspired jungle scene. Photo reproduced courtesy of the artist.
Somewhat late in life, and encouraged by her husband, Phyllis began to paint. Her charming, somewhat naif paintings of rural scenes and Mexican life have received deserved acclaim for their universal appeal.
Phyllis Rauch. Cat, kitten and maguey. Photo reproduced courtesy of the artist.
The Rauchs opened their home and studios, on a one-acre property overlooking Lake Chapala on the outskirts of Jocotepec, as the Los Dos Bed & Breakfast Villas in the 1990s. Phyllis continued to welcome visitors there, especially those with an interest in her husband’s art.
Phyllis Rauch died in September 2021. QEPD.
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Elizabeth Bartlett (1911-1994) was a poet and writer who lived for a time in the Lake Chapala area with her artist-author husband Paul Alexander Bartlett and son Steven James Bartlett in the early 1950s. Later, in the 1970s, the family revisited the Chapala area several times from their then home in Comala, Colima. Bartlett gave several poetry readings in the Chapala area, though the precise dates and locations are unclear.
In addition to her poetry, Bartlett is remembered as an author of fiction, essays, reviews, translations, and as an editor. She was also founder of the international non-profit organization Literary Olympics, Inc.
Elizabeth Bartlett, circa 1973. Photograph courtesy of Steven James Bartlett, literary executor for Elizabeth Bartlett.
Eizabeth Roberta Bartlett (née Winters) was born in New York City in 1911. She was awarded her degree from Teachers’ College in 1931 and then undertook postgraduate studies at Columbia University (1938-40), before dedicating herself to writing and teaching.
She first met her husband in Mexico in 1941, and the couple married in Sayula (Jalisco) in 1943. Their son Steven was born in Mexico City two years later. The family divided their time between the USA and Mexico. In Mexico, the family lived in numerous different states while Paul Bartlett was researching his book on Mexican haciendas.
Elizabeth Bartlett had a distinguished teaching career, including spells at Southern Methodist University (1947–49), San Jose State University (1960–61), the University of California at Santa Barbara (1961–64), San Diego State University (1979–81), and the University of San Diego (1981–82). She was a visiting poet at universities in Canada, California, Florida, and Texas, and Poetry Editor for ETC: A Review of General Semantics and for Crosscurrents.
Bartlett was founder and president of the international non-profit organization, Literary Olympics, Inc., which was established to reintroduce a cultural component to the Olympic Games. In relation to this, Bartlett edited three international multi-language anthologies to coincide with the Olympics, beginning in 1984. A fourth volume was published in 1997 in memory of Bartlett, to honor her for her work with the Literary Olympics, and to commemorate the 1996 Olympic Games.
Bartlett’s writing has been published in numerous journals, anthologies and books of collected poetry, including Poems of Yes and No (1952), It Takes PracticeNot to Die (1964), Address in Time (1979), Memory is No Stranger (1981), TheGemini Poems (1984), Candles (1988), and Around the Clock (1989).
Acknowledgment.
Sincere thanks to Steven Bartlett for sharing his memories of the family’s time in Mexico.
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The art group known as Grupo 68 was founded in 1967 and initially comprised Peter Huf, his wife Eunice (Hunt) Huf, Jack Rutherford, John Kenneth Peterson and Shaw (the artist Don Shaw). Jack Rutherford dropped out after about a year, but the others remained as a group until 1971.
Grupo 68 exhibited regularly (most Sunday afternoons), from early in 1968, at the Hotel Camino Real in Guadalajara, at the invitation of the hotel’s public relations manager Ray Alvorado (a singer) and also held many group shows in Ajijic, both at Laura Bateman’s Rincón del Arte gallery, as well as (later) in “La Galería”, the collective gallery they founded at Zaragoza #1, Ajijic. In addition, the group also showed in Guadalajara with José María de Servín, El Tekare, and at Ken Edwards store in Tlaquepaque.
January 1968 – 20 January 1968 – All four artists included in a group show at Ken Edwards (El Palomar), Tlaquepaque – 9 artists in total. Opened Saturday 20 January 1968. Artists: Eunice Hunt, Peter Paul Huf, Shaw, John Kenneth Peterson, Coffeen Suhl, Hector Navarro, Gustavo Aranguren, Rodolfo Lozano, Gail Michaels [“Michel” on invite].
1968 – 1971 Camino Real Hotel, Guadalajara. Grupo 68 members held weekly shows most Sundays by the hotel pool. Participation varied, but usually included works by all four artists.
July 1968 – Tekare penthouse, 16 de Septiembre #157, 10th floor, Guadalajara. All four members of Grupo 68 (Eunice Hunt, Peter Paul Huf, Shaw, John Kenneth Peterson). Opened on Tuesday 23 July 1968, and was very favorably reviewed by Allyn Hunt in “Art Probe” (Guadalajara Reporter, 27 July 1968) :
“four highly independent artists (with four very different styles) who have the discipline, while regularly showing together, not to adopt a group means in approaching pictorial problems.”
“Most immediately charming are Eunice Hunt’s acrylic and pen and ink pieces, “Fleurs du Mal”, “Ophelia” and “Aurora”.”
“Peter Huf exhibits two serigraphs of exceptional strength… these are among the show’s best works.”
“Donald Shaw is probably this group’s most exploratory imagination, the one that when working at peak thrust, dominates technique and pictorial concepts most thoroughly.”
“John Peterson displays several mosaic-like watercolors, the best of which are his ferris wheel pictures and “Butterfly”.”
September 1968 – “re-opening” of the Rincon del Arte gallery in Ajijic – Calle Hidalgo 41, 21 Sep 1968 – 10 October. Group show, including all four Grupo 68 members, opened Saturday 21 September – Eight painters, one sculptor (Joe Wedgewood, recently arrived from Santa Monica, California). Artists: Tom Brudenell, Alejandro Colunga, Coffeen Suhl, Eunice Hunt, Peter Paul Huf, John K Peterson, Jack Rutherford, Donald Shaw, Joe Wedgewood. [by then Shaw had been identified as Donald Shaw]
October 1968 – Works of Jose María de Servín and Grupo 68, at Galería del Bosque, Calle de la Noche 2677, Guadalajara; opened 24 October 1968. All four members of Grupo 68 (Shaw, John Kenneth Peterson, Eunice Hunt, Peter Paul Huf) in a joint show, as part of the Cultural Program of the International Arts Festival for the XIX Olympics.
December 1968 – “Art is Life; Life is Art” at La Galería, Ajijic. All four Grupo 68 members joined with other artists in a group show “The Group” (“El Grupo”) at the re-opening of La Galeria in Ajijic; show ran from Friday 13 December 1968 to 10 January 1969. Artists: Tom Brudenell, Alejandro Colunga, John Frost, Paul Hachten, Eunice Hunt, Peter Paul Huf, John Kenneth Peterson, Jack Rutherford, José Ma. De Servin, Shaw, Cynthia Siddons, Joe Wedgewood. A review in Guadalajara Reporter said that,
“The very entryway bristles with such attention-grabbing pictures as Paul Hachten’s etching of the map of the United States, John Frost’s delicate photoprint nude, Eunice Hunt’s haunting “Labyrinth” – in which webs of gentle orange have been deftly squeezed against a gray and black background. One of the best works in the show is hung here: Donald Shaw’s tour de force serigraph, “Spore Box”, presenting us with brilliantly-conceived chromatic ideas and imaginative forms which do not relay on optical illusionism, excessive optical vibration or three-dimensionality. This is undoubtedly the best serigraph Shaw – who has executed several series of rewarding prints – has produced.”
February 1969 – Three of the Grupo 68 exhibited at the Tekare penthouse restaurant-gallery, 16 de Septiembre #157, 10th floor, Guadalajara; opened 4 February. Artists: Eunice Hunt, Peter Paul Huf, Shaw.
April 1969 – All five members of the original Grupo 68 showed works in a collective exhibit that opened 18 April 1969 at La Galería, Ajijic. The announcement in Guadalajara daily Informador (20 April) lists the artists as John Kenneth Peterson, Charles Henry Blodgett (guest artist) and “El Grupo” (John Brandi, Tom Brudenell, Eunice Hunt, Peter Paul Huf, Jack Rutherford, Shaw, Cynthia Siddons and Robert Snodgrass).
June 1969 – Grupo 68 show at Instituto Aragon, Hidalgo 1302, Guadalajara, opened 25 June. All four Grupo 68 artists (Shaw, Eunice Hunt, Peter Paul Huf, John Kenneth Peterson) were involved (see image).
September 1969 – (3 September for a month) – Three Grupo 68 artists exhibited together at Galeria 1728 (owned by Jose María de Servin), Hidalgo 1728, Guadalajara. The show was entitled 7-7-7 (7 works each by Eunice Hunt, Peter Paul Huf and Shaw, the show’s title derived from the Olympics scoring system); opened on Wednesday 3 September.
Sources:
Peter Paul Huf and Eunice Hunt (interviewed in 2014); photos and gallery invitations in collections of Peter Paul Huf, Eunice Hunt, Tom Brudenell and others.
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Georg Rauch was born in Salzburg, Austria, on 14 February 1924, and lived thirty years in Jocotepec, on the mountainside overlooking Lake Chapala, prior to his death on 3 November 2006.
Rauch had an adventurous early life. His memoirs (translated from their original German by his wife, Phyllis), described his wartime experiences. They were first published, as The Jew with the Iron Cross: A Record of Survival in WWII Russia, only a few months before his death. The self-published book was reissued in February 2015 by mainstream publisher Farrar Straus Giroux, with the new title of Unlikely Warrior: A Jewish Soldier in Hitler’s Army. The memoirs are based on 80 letters sent home from the Russian trenches telling how Rauch, despite being officially classified as one-quarter Jewish, was drafted into Hitler’s army at age 19 in 1943 and sent to the Russian front. He was captured and spent 18 months in a Russian POW camp, where he contracted bone tuberculosis. After the war, Rauch spent two years recovering in Stolzalpe, an alpine sanatorium.
Rauch studied architecture for two years and life drawing with Professor Bőckl at the Akademie der bildenden Kűnste in Vienna, and was encouraged by his mother to pursue a career as an artist. He was awarded travel scholarships by the Austrian government. He exhibited and became a member of the prestigious artists’ association, Wiener Secession, and soon was showing his paintings in Vienna, Paris, London, Germany and Scandinavia.
In 1966 Rauch married his soul mate Phyllis Porter in Ohio. The couple, who had met in Vienna, lived briefly in New York before returning to Vienna in the winter of 1966/67, because Georg had been commissioned to produce the main sculpture for the Austrian Pavilion at the upcoming Montreal World Expo (1967).
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In summer 1967, the Rauchs, together with fellow artists Fritz Riedl and his girlfriend (later wife) Eva, spent two months driving through Mexico, as far south as Tehuantepec. On their return trip north, the group stopped off in Guadalajara to visit the Austrian consul. The consul, an architect, purchased several watercolors completed during the trip, as well as 4 or 5 oil paintings that Rauch had with him. In the fall of 1967, the Rauchs returned to Guadalajara when the consul commissioned a sculpture for a shopping center being built in the city. The Rauchs remained in Guadalajara until 1970.
George Rauch. Red Trees. 2002.
In 1968, Rauch was invited to do a series of posters for the Guadalajara Committee of the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. (Mexico City had commissioned its own Olympics posters, but Rauch was responsible for all the posters produced in Guadalajara). One of these Olympics posters is mentioned in Al Young’s novel Who is Angelina?, during a description of a living room in Ajijic. Another Rauch poster (not of the Olympics) would later feature in the movie 10 (1979) starring Bo Derek and Dudley Moore, shot on location at the Las Hadas resort in Manzanillo. And yet another Rauch poster was once shown in an episode of the TV series Ironside.
It was during their stay in Guadalajara, that Rauch first met artist and photographer John Frost, who had a studio in Jocotepec and would later introduce Rauch to some of the finer points of silk-screening.
Georg Rauch. The Dream House. 2003.
The Rauchs spent most of the next six years (1970-1976) in Laguna Beach, California, where Phyllis headed the San Clemente Public Library and Georg participated in the city’s famous Pageant of the Masters. Georg made several yearly visits to Puerto Vallarta, where his work was regularly shown in Galeria Lepe, the resort town’s only art gallery at the time. (This is where Rauch drew portraits of both Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, as well as Liz’s son Christopher Wilding.)
In 1974, the Rauchs purchased property in Jocotepec and began to build their future home and studio. They moved into their (as yet unfinished) home, designed by Georg, in October 1976. Rauch had finally found a place he could call home, and he would remain here for thirty years, painting a succession of expressionist oils, watercolors and silk screens, as well as building several extraordinary kinetic sculptures. Rauch was a prolific artist (completing more than 2000 oils in his lifetime), driven to paint, and to paint “only that which he needed and wanted to express.”
He also exhibited in a 1981 group show at Marchand Galeria de Arte, Guadalajara, where his paintings were shown alongside works by Tomas Coffeen, Victoria Corona, Penelope Downes, Paul Fontaine, and Gustavo Sendis.
His clown-faced self-portraits bored deep into his soul. The influence of Lake Chapala was clear in many of his haunting and sensuous Mexican landscapes. On the other hand, his watercolors revealed his particularly keen sense of observation and his delicate touch. (Of course, I’m biased because I chose a Georg Rauch watercolor of Ajijic as the cover art for my Western Mexico, A Traveler’s Treasury, first published by Editorial Agata in 1993).
Georg Rauch was a consummate professional artist, one who was sufficiently successful throughout his career to live by his art alone. In conversation, he would sometimes interject a truly outrageous statement, but his wry sense of humor masked a considerable political perspicuity and an intense desire to interrogate the world around him.
In the 1980s, Georg and Phyllis Rauch expanded their home and opened the Los Dos Bed & Breakfast Villas, where Phyllis continued to welcome visitors, especially those with an interest in her husband’s art.
Georg Rauch’s work can be found in the collections of many major international museums. His numerous exhibitions include:
1952 Konzerthaus in Vienna (first solo exhibition); and the Kűnstlerclub, Vienna.
1953 to 1968 : London; París; Stuttgart; Vienna; Dusseldorf.
1968 New York (Gallery York)
1968, 1970 Galería Lepe, Puerto Vallarta
1973 Toronto; Los Angeles
1975 Guadalajara: Galería Pere Tanguy
1977 Ajijic (Galeria del Lago)
1979 Mexico D.F. (Alianza Francesa)
1980, 1989 Puerto Vallarta (Galeria Uno)
1982 Tucson, Arizona (Davis Gallery); Acapulco Convention Center
1983 Guanajuato (University of Guanajuato)
1984 Mexico City (Galeria Ultra)
1986 Aarau, Switzerland
1987 San Miguel de Allende
1988 Guadalajara (major retrospective at Instituto Cultural Cabañas)
1990 Munich (2)
2000 Guadalajara (Ex-Convento del Carmen)
???? Guadalajara (Galería Vertice) year-long traveling show, called Austrian Artists in Mexico, including works by Rauch, Fritz Riedl, Ginny Riedl and others.
2007 Chapala (Centro Cultural Gonzalez Gallo)
2014-2015 Guadalajara (Palacio del Gobierno del Estado); Chapala (Centro Cultural Gonzalez Gallo)
Synnove (Shaffer) Pettersen (born in Norway in 1944) is a much sought-after portrait painter who lived in the Lake Chapala area from early 1973 to August 1976.
In 1956, while Pettersen was still a young girl, her family moved to Canada, to Victoria, B.C.. Four years later, they moved on to Los Angeles, though Pettersen remained in Victoria, where she was crowned Miss Victoria in 1962, and graduated from high school in 1963. She has fond memories of her high school art teacher, Mrs Francis Cameron, saying, “She was the best. I’ve since talked with fellow art students and we all agree what a treasure she was and how we really had a college type art program.”
Pettersen then won a scholarship to the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. She remains unconvinced by the education she received there, because it stressed the abstract movements, rather than the realism that she has made her specialty.
In 1973, her then husband took early retirement and decided to move south of the border. They had heard about Ajijic, “the largest retirement community outside the U.S.”, the year before while visiting Puerto Angel on the coast of Oaxaca. At Lake Chapala, the couple lived for a short time in Jocotepec before moving to Ajijic when they met, by chance, in the Ajijic post office, a couple about to relinquish their lease on a home in the village.
Pettersen’s Facebook page includes three videos of her work in Ajijic:
Her artistic talents, and the promise of her later success, are clearly evident in the charcoal drawings and paintings she completed during her three years in Mexico (see short videos).
Guadalajara: American Society of Jalisco, 21 February 1976
Pettersen says that the Clique Ajijic group, “never painted together as a group, just had shows.” She added that one additional benefit of the drawing sessions she had at her house, where she able to persuade neighboring ladies to pose for her, was that they helped her learn Spanish.
In April 1976, Synnove (Shaffer) had a solo exhibit of works done in Mexico – oils, pastels and drawings – in the Villa Montecarlo in Chapala. The show opened on 25 April.
Synnove Pettersen with one of her paintings, ca 1975 (Photo by John Frost)
In this early stage of her artistic career, Pettersen was greatly encouraged by fellow Clique Ajijic member Sidney (“Sid”) Schwartzman, and by artist-photographer John Frost, who was not a member of the Clique Ajijic but took their publicity photos. In an email, she wrote that, “John Frost was a big inspiration. So willing to share his knowledge. When I returned to L.A., I did several silkscreen (serigraph) pieces. He had refreshed my interest with his enthusiasm for a photo/sun process but I was not successful with that technique, so returned to the touche and glue method.”
Synnove Pettersen is now based in Shelton, Washington state, where she continues to undertake portrait commissions. Her Facebook page, with numerous examples of her powerful, evocative portraits, is Synnove Fine Art. Prints and originals can be purchased direct from the artist’s website.
Acknowledgment
Sincere thanks to Synnove Pettersen for her willingness to share memories, knowledge and mementos from her time in Mexico.
Sombrero Books welcomes comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.
Fred Lape, born at Holland Patent, about 10 miles north of Utica, New York, in 1900, spent several months every winter from about 1966 until his death in 1985, in Jocotepec on Lake Chapala. He died in Jocotepec on 1 March 1985, aged 85, and was interred in the local cemetery the following day.
Fred Lape (Credit: Landis Arboretum website)
Lape attended Cornell University and received a degree in English literature in 1921. He then divided his time between teaching English as a university professor (at Cornell, Stanford and the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), freelance writing, running his farm, developing his skills as a horticulturist, and functioning as the historian of the small town of Esperance (population 2000), his chosen place of residence in Schoharie County, New York.
In 1951 Lape, who never married, transformed the family farm into the non-profit George Landis Arboretum. The arboretum’s website states his mission: “He aimed to grow every species of woody plant from temperate regions around the world that would survive in the hills of Schoharie County.” Fred Lape served as its director until his death. The arboretum closed every year from 1 November to 1 April, allowing him ample time each winter in Jocotepec.
His great love was guiding visitors around the arboretum. His obituary in The Altamont Enterprise describes how, “The arboretum director, a tall, angular figure topped by a plain, undecorated wide-brimmed straw hat shielding a craggy, deeply-tanned face, would lead visitors past that landmark on regular weekend woodlot tours.”
Lape’s published work included one novel, Roll On, Pioneers (1935), and three non-fiction works, A Garden of Trees and Shrubs (Cornell Univ. Press, 1965), Apples and Man (Van Nostrand, 1979); and A Farm and Village Boyhood (Syracuse Univ. Press, 1980).
He also authored at least 8 volumes of poetry and founded a quarterly poetry and prose magazine, Trails, which published local nature verse from 1932 to when it ceased publication in 1951. His poetry titles include Barnyard Year (Poems) (1950), A Bunch of Flowers (Poems) (1954), My word to you, J.Q.A: Seven scenes in the life of John Quincy Adams (1965), At the Zoo (1966), Along the Schoharie (poems) (1968), Poems from the Blue Beach (1976), and Hill Farm (1976).
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)
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). 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 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; Dorothy Goldner; Burt Hawley; Peter Huf; Eunice (Hunt) Huf; Lona Isoard;Michael Heinichen; John Maybra Kilpatrick; Gail Michael; 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).
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
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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.
Peter 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; Dorothy Goldner; Burt Hawley; Lona Isoard;Michael Heinichen; John Maybra Kilpatrick; Gail Michael; 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.
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!
Martínez 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.
