Víctor J. Reynoso Tapia was born in Tepic, Nayarit, in 1929 and became an outstanding illustrator and painter. He studied, and later taught, art at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas de la Universidad de Guadalajara.
His works were included in several exhibitions in Guadalajara. As a student he had three drawings included in an end-of-academic-year exhibit at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas in 1951. (Ceramicist David Morris, another artist with close links to Lake Chapala, also exhibited at that show.)
Illustrations by Victor Reynoso in Ramón Rubín’s La Canoa Perdida (1951).
That same year, Reynoso produced several black and white drawings to illustrate Ramón Rubín‘s book La Canoa Perdida: novela mestiza. (1951).
Another drawing by Reynoso was chosen a few years later by José Guadalupe Zuno Hernández, a former Jalisco state governor, to illustrate the front cover of his short book La Muerte de un lago: Los cuentos de Chapala, published in 1955. (Curiously, Reynoso’s credit there is as ‘Victor Reinoso.’)
Artwork by Victor Reynoso on cover of J. G. Zuno’s La muerte de un lago (1955).
Both Rubín and Zuno (1891-1980) were staunch defenders of Lake Chapala, and their books helped raise ecological awareness at a time when it was desperately needed: Lake Chapala was lower in the mid-1950s than at any time since records began.
Victor Reynoso contributed start-of-chapter illustrations to at least two other works by Ramón Rubín—La sombra del Techincuagüe (1955) and Cuentos de indios (1958)—as well as the cover art for Rubín’s El seno de la esperanza (1964).
As a teacher at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas, Reynoso participated with Jorge Hurtado and Jorge Seimandi in a three-person show at the Escuela de Artes Plasticas’ gallery in November 1964. The following year works by both men were included in an Exhibit of Contemporary Painters of Jalisco. Also showing in that exhibition was José María de Servín, responsible for important early murals in the Lake Chapala area at the Chapala Yacht Club and Villa Ferrara.
Victor Reynoso’s work also featured in a show in 1975 marking the 50th anniversary of the Universidad de Guadalajara. In the late 1970s, when Jorge Seimandi Ramírez was the director of the Escuela de Artes Plásticas, Reynoso was the president of the society of teachers at the school.
Sources
- El Informador: 18 June 1951; 14 May 1964, 5; 13 Dec 1979, 30.
- Ramón Rubín. 1955. La sombra del Techincuagüe. Guadalajara: Ediciones Altiplano. Viñetas de Víctor Reynoso.
- Ramón Rubín. 1958. Cuentos de indios. Ediciones Altiplano. Viñetas de Victor J. Reynoso.
- Ramón Rubín. 1964. El seno de la esperanza. Mexico City: Editores Mexicanos Unidos. Carátula de Víctor J. Reynoso.
Comments, corrections and additional material are welcome, whether via comments or email.
Tony Burton’s books include “Lake Chapala: A Postcard History” (2022), “Foreign Footprints in Ajijic” (2022), “If Walls Could Talk: Chapala’s historic buildings and their former occupants” (2020), (available in translation as “Si Las Paredes Hablaran”), “Mexican Kaleidoscope” (2016), and “Lake Chapala Through the Ages” (2008).