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Painter and muralist Tom Brudenell lived in Jocotepec, 1967-1970

1960s 4 Responses »

Apr 062015

Tom Brudenell (Thomas James Brudenell), a painter, muralist and qualified art therapist who now resides in Canada, was born 18 July 1937 in Kansas City, and lived in the Lake Chapala region for several years in the late 1960s.

When he was a child, Brudenell’s family moved frequently, living for extended periods in Chicago, Sheboygan (Wisconsin) and Kansas City (Missouri). His father was a mechanical engineer, whose own education was cut short by the second world war when he was sent to Caterpillar to help design tank engines.

Brudenell was an active and mischievous child, with great curiosity for the world around him. He excelled in athletics, drawing, desert lore, and all branches of science.

The earliest transformative experience he remembers came when he was seven years old and first saw the Rocky Mountains. Coming from the Great Plains, in the family Plymouth en route to California along Rte. 66, he was awestruck, initially thinking that the mountains were cloud formations.

Brudenell left high school on a full scholarship to study chemical engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), a private research university located in Troy, New York. Coming to the realization that he wanted more than a pure science education, he transferred to the University of California at Berkeley.

At Berkeley, he roomed with archaeology student Len Foote, beginning a lifelong friendship. Brudenell took courses in psychology, the history of art and architecture (given by Walter Horn), literature, and studio art courses taught by Glenn Anthony Wessels (1895-1982), then close to retirement.

After completing his bachelor’s degree in psychology in 1961, Brudenell was drafted into the U.S. Navy, was made an officer, but resigned his commission in 1962 at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. He returned to Berkeley and spent the next several years there.

In mid-1965, Brudenell was one of several volunteers who joined Foote, now a qualified archaeologist, on a summer dig in Tizapán el Alto, on the southern shore of Lake Chapala. Brudenell’s job was to live on an isolated rancho, sift earth for pot shards, and explore some caves in the nearby hills.

In September 1965, Brudenell started work as a research assistant in psychology for Dr. Gordon Paul at the University of Illinois. He still found plenty of time to paint, and held a two-person show, with Eva Wei, in 1966, before cutting his research short. By a strange coincidence, four years later he met one of his Illinois professors unexpectedly at the Chula Vista Myth-Mass. Paul asked what he was doing in Mexico, and Brudenell replied that he was painting, writing and experimenting with sensory stimulants – smell bulbs – as olfactory triggers for the recall of past experiences; in fact, he was doing precisely what he had not been able to do in the graduate psychology program at the University of Illinois.

After Illinois, and prior to Mexico, Brudenell spent most of 1967 working in Pueblo Pintado, under the auspices of VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America), with the Navajo Nation, New Mexico.

Move to Mexico

Brudenell moved to Mexico in late 1967. The truck he was driving broke down on the south side of lake, just beyond Jocotepec. He sold it on the spot to a local mechanic for $150, and rented a house in the village. He remained in Jocotepec until mid-1970, painting and filling a series of sketch books and journals.

Even a severe bout of hepatitis served as fuel for his thoughts; it resulted in an extraordinarily intense series of journal entries, “hepatitis dreams”, musings and ideas. Brudenell credits his recovery from hepatitis to the conscientious nursing of Beverly Johnson, a free-spirited young woman with a brood of children, who was also Ajijic’s unofficial village photographer.

Brudenell credits fellow Jocotepec-based artist Donald Shaw, a “vigorous, larger-than-life” painter and sculptor, with convincing him to meet other artists and display his work. Brudenell recalls how Shaw remarked, in a very early conversation, and on account of Brudenell not reciprocating visits or offers of friendship, that he had never previously met anyone who had no ego.

In March 1968, works by Brudenell were included in the inaugural show, entitled “10 Jalisco artists”, at Galeria Ajijic Bellas Artes A.C., organized by Hudson and Mary Rose. That gallery was at Marcos Castellanos #15 in Ajijic, at the intersection with Calle Constitución.

Tom Brudenell: Passage of the patient tortoise (1968). Reproduced by kind permission of the artist

Later that year (31 May-21 June), Brudenell was given his first solo exhibition at the same gallery. His artwork was enthusiastically reviewed by Allyn Hunt for Guadalajara’s Colony Reporter. Hunt urged readers in Guadalajara to take a trip out to the lake: “The most impressive work in this show is the recently-produced “Passage of the Patient Tortoise” which is stunning for its daring compositional structure, its brilliant color use, and its lucid and intelligently-styled forms. This single piece is more than worth the trip to the lake.” Brudenell was familiar with tortoises from his time in the desert south-west and, indeed, shared his Jocotepec home with one.

A few months later, in September 1968, Brudenell was one of 8 painters and a sculptor displayed at the “re-opening” of Laura Bateman’s Rincon del Arte gallery at Calle Hidalgo #41 in Ajijic. The single sculptor was Joe Wedgewood, recently arrived from Santa Monica, California. The other artists were Alejandro Colunga, Coffeen Suhl, Peter Paul Huf, Eunice (Hunt) Huf, John K Peterson, Jack Rutherford and (Donald) Shaw. (Shaw preferred to be known only by his surname.)

Friday 13 Dec 1968 saw the “grand opening” of La Galería, Zaragoza #1, Ajijic, a gallery run by a co-operative of local artists, including Peter Paul Huf and Eunice Hunt. The opening show entitled “Art is Life; Life is Art”, ran through to 10 January 1969 and featured works by Tom Brudenell, Alejandro Colunga, John Frost, Paul Hachten, Peter Paul Huf, Eunice Hunt, John K Peterson, Jack Rutherford, José Ma. de Servin, Shaw, Cynthia Siddons and sculptor Joe Wedgwood.

Brudenell also showed his work in a collective exhibit that opened 18 April 1969 at La Galería, Ajijic, alongside the works of John K Peterson, Charles Henry Blodgett, John Brandi, Peter Paul Huf, Eunice Hunt, Jack Rutherford, Shaw, Cynthia Siddons and Robert Snodgrass.

Brudenell’s works were also shown in Guadalajara, at the Galeria 8 de Julio. At the opening of one show in that city, a brawl erupted when a friend of Brudenell’s, visiting from Oakland, took offense at what he considered a discourteous act towards his girlfriend. The provocateur, who had no invitation to the opening, was a local street-gang leader, and the two men quickly squared off. Things turned nasty when the other members of the street gang turned up. A fist fight broke out, and rocks were thrown. When the gallery guests, and members of the musical band, pulled his friend inside, and barricaded the windows and doors, Brudenell was left behind in the street, where he explained to the street youths why he was sad, not angry, that the people inside the gallery, who painted and collected Mexican-inspired works, were so disconnected from most Mexicans. That was the night when the seed of Brudenell’s “People’s Murals” was planted, a seed that would germinate and flourish in the next few years.

North of the border, Brudenell’s work has been shown in galleries in San Francisco (Puma Gallery), Los Angeles (Ankrum), Victoria, B.C. (Beau Xi) and Friday Harbor, Washington (The Cannery Gallery) and the San Diego Art Museum. Brudenell generally declined to attend openings, preferring to simply send his works from whichever remote studio-home he happened to be in at the time.

Examples of pen and ink drawings from Brudenell’s time in Jocotepec

Tom Brudenell: Blue Heron (1975), serigraphed print

The image to the left shows one of a series (1974-1984) of pen-and-ink drawings by Brudenell, meant to appeal to a broader range of tastes and more decorative and salable than his meditative, more personal works.

The drawings were used for serigraphed prints and lithographed cards in the period 1974-1984. Most of them were sold in the Royal British Columbia Museum, Victoria.

By the early 1970s, Brudenell, who had never signed his name on the front of a painting, stopped signing them at all, preferring to use a circumpunct (a dot enclosed by a circle) which came to signify the state of observing without the observer.

The original drawing for Cows (below) dates to the late 1960s, though the print is dated 1970.

Tom Brudenell: Along the Road (1970), reproduced by kind permission of the artist

The Re-Creation of Adam (serigraphed print from original ink drawing of 1969) was “also somewhat commercial, but for a more reflective audience, this was the product of doodling and just letting forms appear without direction. Notice the tortoise or turtle coming into the picture!”

IMG_2622-brudenell-tom-recreation-of-adam-s

Tom Brudenell: Re-Creation of Adam (1969), reproduced by kind permission of the artist

By the time he left Mexico, Brudenell’s canvas painting was exploring “the edge”, where matter and energy meet. His “Hepatitis Dreams” writing and his “Micro-macro edge” paintings date from this period.

The Chula Vista Myth-Mass

On 13 June 1969, Brudenell joined with Shaw snd John Brandi (all three artists were living in Jocotepec) in staging a Cocktail Party Myth-Mass or “happening”, in a building alongside the Chula Vista motel, mid-way between Ajijic and Chapala.

In autobiographical notes written later for the Emily Carr College Outreach program, Brudenell summarizes the event as follows:

“Worked with poet John Brandi and painter Donald Shaw to create early forms of “audience participation” shows such as the highly ritualized light-show “Myth-Mass” (Ajijic, Mexico, 1969) where Mr. Brudenell’s brush searched for universes beyond the limits of the biologist’s microscope and the astronomer’s telescope.”

Quick trip back to Berkeley in summer 1969

Shortly after the Chula Vista event, Brudenell made a trip north to Berkeley to complete his mixed-media “book objects” for a San Diego Art Museum Show. A private showing, sponsored by Gene and Lee Novak, was held at the Berkeley residence of Mr. William Turner. The Novaks, who apparently published various off-beat works and poetry, subsequently issued limited edition versions of two of Brudenell’s “visual books”: Thaw and Mim.

It was on this trip that Brudenell met and fell in love with Suzie. Suzie later visited Brudenell in Jocotepec and the couple traveled in her VW Bug through several parts of Mexico, from the Gulf coast to the Baja California Peninsula. Brudenell painted “Artist” on the side of the Bug, which never failed to attract great interest from passers-by. (Similar to the experience of Mary Fuller McChesney years earlier.)

Besides Shaw and John Brandi, Brudenell became acquainted in Jocotepec with several other local artists including photographer John Frost, and the bearded, khaki-loving John Thompson. Ray Cooper, a painter Brudenell had known in Berkeley, visited and spent some time with him one winter.

Two other artists then living in Jocotepec, painter Bruce Sherratt and his wife sculptor Lesley Jervis Maddock, both from the U.K., apparently kept themselves so much to themselves that Brudenell, reclusive by nature, never met them.

Tom Brudenell: Detail of mural at La Primavera, painted 1970, photographed 1979; reproduced by kind permission of the artist.

Brudenell’s first mural

In 1970, during his third and final year living in Jocotepec, Brudenell painted his first ever murals, at the Rio Caliente hotel-spa in the Primavera Forest, just west of Guadalajara, at the invitation of the spa’s owner, Dr. B. Lytton Bernard. Brudenell may not have had any previous experience of murals, but he did have considerable experience of house painting and wall preparation.

Sadly, in spite of the paint chemist of Sherwin-Williams in Guadalajara giving Brudenell PVC emulsion, these particular murals, on an exterior wall, lasted less than a decade, due to spalling of the walls’ concrete substrate and the spa’s sulfurous moisture. They were decorative murals and, given the Mexican sun and geothermal steam, were never likely to remain pristine for long.

The Rio Caliente murals may have been Brudenell’s first, but they were certainly not his last.

Leaves Jocotepec to return north

By mid-1970, Brudenell and Suzie had left Mexico, and were traveling up the coast of Oregon, for Washington State and British Columbia, Canada. Brudenell painted murals in exchange for rent, food and beer money, while Suzie worked as a cocktail waitress. A fishermen’s tavern in Astoria, Oregon, was the site of Brudenell’s first “People’s Mural” in the U.S., and was painted in exchange for all the beer he could drink and $20 on completion.

Over the next few years, he conducted the painting of more than 80 school and community murals, mostly for the Washington State Arts Commission. Brudenell supplied the wall preparation and the organization; the students supplied the ideas and art.

He also painted several murals in the early 1970s in the city of Portland, and two 30 foot x 40 foot murals on the 8-story Belmont Building in Victoria, B.C. (1973), which can still be admired today, forty years later.

In 1978, Brudenell emigrated from Shaw Island, Washington State, to British Columbia, complete with his pick-up truck and donkey! While building a pole-frame cabin, he lived in a tent during an unusually snowy winter on Hornby Island.

Shortly after meeting Dianne (later to become his wife), the couple built a home on ten acres of raw forest land on nearby Denman Island, where they lived during the 1980s as homesteaders. Brudenell spent several months each year conducting his collaborative murals in remote areas of Washington State.

Tom Brudenell: Microedge. Reproduced by kind permission of the artist

Throughout his career, Brudenell has alternated between painting large-scale works such as murals, followed by a period of smaller, more intricate, highly detailed paintings of subjects such as an individual rock or a single clump of moss.

Tom Brudenell. Kuakumé. 1974. By kind permission of the aritst

Tom Brudenell. Kuakumé (1974). Reproduced by kind permission of the artist

Brudenell’s three years painting in Jocotepec at the western end of Lake Chapala were creative and formative years. Much of his later work, especially his paintings, are evidence of a lasting Mexican influence on his composition and use of color. In Brudenell’s words,

“Color-vibrations are seen everywhere in Mexican and Indian designs. The natural flora exudes purples in sharp contrast with lime greens, reds flashing next to blues. Intense sunlight can dominate flat surfaces and color-vibrations, strong forms and colors shout back so that they find a happy balance.”

In the words of one reviewer, “All of Tom’s murals show a strong Mexican influence with earth colors…”

Brudenell himself treasures the words of Allyn Hunt, Editor of the Guadalajara Colony Reporter, who, after studying one of his early works, The Passage of the Patient Tortoise, informed his readers that Brudenell’s work, “for all of its simplification is much too sophisticated for a few seconds’ attention.”

This post was updated in October 2015.

Sources:

Tom Brudenell, first interviewed at his home on Vancouver Island in February 2015.
Allyn Hunt. Review of group show “10 Jalisco artists”, in “Art Probe”, Colony Reporter, 27 April 1968.

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

Georg Rauch (1924-2006), artist extraordinaire

1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s onwards 20 Responses »

Apr 022015

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.”

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

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)

For more images of works by Georg Rauch, see Georg Rauch: Artist in Mexico gallery.

Comments, corrections or additional material are welcomed. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.

David Morris (1911-1999) and Helen Morris (1917-1992)

1950s No Responses »

Mar 312015

David and Helen Morris were well-known potters who lived for several years in Guadalajara and Ajijic in the late 1940s and early 1950s, before moving to the San Francisco Bay area of California.

David Morris was born in 1911 in Washington D.C., where his father was a doctor at Walter Reed Army Hospital. Morris graduated from Georgetown University and was then employed in the city to head the arts section of the Work Projects Administration, a New Deal program, in the 1930s. This is when he first met Helen, a dance student. The couple married in 1937, and spent their honeymoon in Mexico.

During the second world war, Morris served in the U.S. armed forces in Europe and the Pacific. After the war, they returned to the Washington D.C. area for a short time where David Morris studied at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, presumably on G.I. Bill funds. He transferred his G.I. Bill tuition for a Masters degree in Fine Arts to the University of Guadalajara and the couple moved to Mexico in the late 1940s. (Their son Nicolas was born in about 1949).

David Morris had several works – one tempera, one watercolor, one monotype, and four ceramic pieces – included in the end-of-academic-year exhibition at the Fine Arts school of the University of Guadalajara in June 1951.

David Morris: Railroad Station at Lake Chapala. 1950.

The family subsequently settled in Ajijic (they were definitely living there by mid-1951), where they became active members of the area’s growing artistic colony of the early 1950s. At this time, David was better known as a painter, though the couple were beginning to develop their extraordinary skills as potters. Among his Mexican paintings is an oil on board, entitled “Railroad Station at Lake Chapala”, dated to 1950, which was sold at auction in California in 2009.

While in Ajijic, the couple were good friends of black American painter Ernest Alexander (“Alex”), who ran the Bar Alacrán (Scorpion Bar) in Ajijic. Alex, his common-law wife Dolly and their son Mark, moved to the San Francisco Bay area at about the same time as David and Helen Morris did.

The couple returned to California in 1953, where they became political activists and began to work together as potters. Living and working initially at 701, Humboldt Street, David and Helen Morris began to produce exquisite ceramic pieces that quickly gained national attention.

David Morris was active on the committee behind the Sausalito Art Festival, held in November 1956, on the Casa Madroño grounds, and even performed as a singer at that festival. He continued to be actively involved in organizing several other Sausalito Art Festivals, including those held in May 1957, October 1957 (which drew record crowds of almost 20,000 over three days) and June 1958.

In June 1957, Morris was the spokesperson for a group of 60 freelance artists who objected to the regulations imposed for exhibitors by the organizers of the annual Marin Art and Garden Show, which, despite receiving public monies was open only to paid-up members of the Marin Society bf Artists. The freelance artists argued that entry should be open to all regardless of whether or not they were members; their petition was upheld by the Marin County Board of Supervisors.

They were riding the crest of success when, in 1960, their first joint studio, in a former boatyard in Sausalito, California, was totally destroyed by fire. According to the last verse of a song written shortly afterwards by Malvina Reynolds, the blaze was not without its silver lining:

In the midst of smoke and ruin, old David Morris stands,
A look of wonder on his face, a pot shard in his hands,
It has a wond’rous color never seen on hill or plain,
And they’ll have to burn the boatyard down to get that glaze again.

(From “Sausalito Fire” by Malvina Reynolds, 1960. The song was published in her Little Boxes and Other Handmade Songs)

Undeterred for long, David and Helen Morris soon built a new studio in Larkspur, where they would go on to craft more than 10,000 pieces of stoneware and porcelain, some of which found their way into the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Institution, the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York, and other museums.

The couple worked closely together and shared a single wheel in their studio. A contemporary account says that while David worked on the larger pieces, Helen crafted the smaller, more delicate forms. According to art critic Tom Albright, David Morris was particularly adept at creating “rich, lush glazes”, based on ancient Chinese techniques.

David and Helen Morris and their work were regularly featured in ceramics-related magazines of the 1950s and 1960s. For example the April 1960 issue of Ceramics Monthly had a photograph of the couple at work in their studio on its cover, and an illustrated 3-page feature article about them and the “crystalline” stoneware glazes they had developed.

Despite their aversion to taking part in juried shows, their stoneware won numerous awards, including a first prize in the Berkeley Art Show in July 1957. In April 1958, David Morris was invited by the Artist League of Vallejo to highlight the official opening of their new building in Vallejo.

Helen Morris (born 24 February 1917) died on 6 December 1992, aged 75 years; David Morris died on 26 January 1999, his 88th birthday.

Sources:

Design Quarterly. 1958. “Eighty-Two American Ceramists and Their Work” in Design Quarterly 42-43.
Malvina Reynolds. 1960. Little Boxes and Other Handmade Songs.
Sausalito News: 28 September 1956; 2 November 1956; 9 February 1957; 22 June 1957; 29 June 1957; 6 July 1957; 24 August 1957; 26 October 1957; 18 January 1958; 5 April 1958.
Stephen Schwartz. 1999. Obituary “David Morris“. 25 February 1999.
Yoshiko Uchida. 1957. Helen and David Morris: Pottery is Their Business, in Craft Horizons, December 1957 (Vol 17 #6)
Oppi Untracht. 1960. “David and Helen Morris”, in Ceramics Monthly, April 1960, (Vol 8 #4)

Synnove Pettersen, portraitist

1970s 2 Responses »

Mar 262015

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).

In Ajijic, Pettersen was an integral member of the Clique Ajijic group of artists, along with Tom Faloon, Hubert Harmon, Todd (“Rocky”) Karns, Gail Michaels, John Peterson, Adolfo Riestra and Sidney Schwartzman.

The shows of Clique Ajijic included:

Chapala: Villa Monte Carlo, opened 16 March 1975
Ajijic: Galería del Lago, 15 August 1975
Ajijic: Hotel Camino Real, 13-16 September 1975
Guadalajara: Galería OM, 24 October 1975
Manzanillo: Club Santiago, 29 October 1975
Cuernavaca: Akari Gallery, 7 February 1976
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 ca 1975 (Photo by John Frost)

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.

Jaime Lopez Bermudez, artist and architect

1940s 13 Responses »

Mar 192015

Jaime López Bermúdez (Mexico City 1916-) is a Mexican artist and architect who lived and worked for at least several months in Ajijic in the mid-1940s. He exhibited some of his painting in a group show in 1944 at the Villa Montecarlo in Chapala, alongside paintings by Betty Binkley, Ernesto Butterlin (“Lin”), Otto Butterlin, Ann Medalie, Sylvia Fein and others.

His stay at Lake Chapala is briefly described in an article published in 1945 by American author Neill James, who had moved to Ajijic a couple of years earlier. Jaime López Bermúdez, “a surrealist from the Capital, occupied a huertita overlooking the lake and worked for several months with his charming wife, Virginia, and a Mexican cat for company.”

In reality, Virginia was a long-time girlfriend, and López Bermúdez’s status was correctly listed as “single” on the certificate of his marriage to American-born Josephine Blanche Cohen Sokolski in Mexico City in December 1949. Unfortunately the marriage did not last very long. After living in Jaime’s experimental house (see next paragraph) for about a year, the couple moved to the U.S., but split up shortly after their son Jon Dario (now Cody Sokolski) was born in Manhattan on 1 December 1951. Jaime returned to Mexico.

Portrait of Jaime Lopez Bermudez, ca 1951, by Elizabeth Timberman.

Portrait of Jaime López Bermúdez, ca 1951, by Elizabeth Timberman.

In the early 1950s, López Bermúdez gained reputation as an architect. He was considered one of Mexico’s more important “modernist” architects, and was featured in a special August 1951 issue of Arts and Architecture devoted to Mexican architecture. That issue included photos of a one-room home designed and built by López Bermúdez (for himself) in the Santa Fe district close to Mexico City. The design was a modernist, steel-framed one-room house, with garage underneath, which could be completed for under 1500 dollars. According to the accompanying text, “Jaime López Bermúdez is a painter as well architect, this duel role being a commonplace among young and old of his profession in Mexico. The mural on the front of the house is his.”

At a later stage of his life, though the precise dates are unclear, López Bermúdez opened and ran an art gallery, Galeria Coyote Flaco, in upscale Coyoacán, in the southern part of Mexico City, for several years. In the early 1960s, López Bermúdez was the first to recognize the artistic talent of British-American photographer Jon Naar. He persuaded Naar to exhibit his photographs of Mexico City street scenes in the Galeria Coyote Flaco in 1963. The exhibit, entitled “El Ojo de un extrañjero” (“The eye of an outsider”) launched Naar into a hugely successful career as an artist-photographer.

Charles Frederick Surendorf and his 1960s’ linocut of Ajijic

1960s No Responses »

Mar 052015

Born 9 November 1906 in Richmond, Indiana, Charles Frederick Surendorf was an artist and printmaker, whose intricate linoleum block prints have been favorably compared in quality to the much-acclaimed work of Thomas Hart Benton.

Surendorf studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League in New York, as well as two semesters at Ohio State University in the Fine Arts program, before moving to California in 1929, arriving in Los Angeles “seated on an orange crate strapped to a Model T Ford chassis.”

He moved to San Francisco in 1935, where he studied at Mills College, was active in the local art scene, and was director of the first San Francisco Art Festival. By 1937 he had made his first painting excursion to Columbia, an evocative ghost town in the Sierra foothills of California, which appealed to his social realist leanings. He would eventually settle in this town with his second wife, Barbara Stoner, whom he married in May 1949.

Charles Frederick Surendorf: Ajijic (linocut)

During the 1940s, Surendorf traveled throughout the South Pacific, painting numerous watercolors and making woodcut views of places such as Bora Bora and Moorea. He traveled widely (including trips to New Zealand, Tahiti, New Orleans, Arizona and Mexico) and used sketches made during his travels to produce linocuts on his return home.

After the family settled in Columbia, California, Surendorf made his living as an artist and lived in the town for the remaining thirty years of his life.

Between 1934 and 1971, Surendorf produced more than 250 woodblock prints and linocuts. While best-known for his linocut images of Northern California, Surendorf also produced oils, watercolors, pastels and sculpture, in a variety of styles, ranging from naturalistic scenes to abstracts, surrealism and fantasy.

In 1956, Surendorf served as director of the short-lived Mother Lode Art School. In 1959, Art Digest called him one of the top twenty-five woodblock artists in the world.

Surendorf’s first visit to Mexico was in 1963 when he took the entire family—his wife, Barbara, and their four children, Charles Jr, Tamara Karla, Stephanie, and Cindy—on a 6000-mile month-long trip to “make a survey of the most paintable spots in Mexico for longer work in the future.” Surendorf quickly decided that Mexico offered a treasure trove of subject matter for painters, and saw innumerable painting opportunities: “Some of the most interesting painting spots are the ghost towns of the early Mexican mining days.” During that first trip to Mexico, Surendorf completed 35 watercolors from which he planned a series of linoleum-block prints.

He definitely visited Lake Chapala on this trip, as shown by this account of an attempted shake-down, reported shortly after returning home: “While painting a fishing boat on the shores of Lake Chapala, two Mexicans tried to extract a fee from me for allowing their boat to be used in the painting. While we argued in vain, the owner of the boat came up and paddled away.”

His daughter Cindy recalls a family trip to Mexico in 1968, when she was ten years old. During their time in Ajijic, Surendorf made the preliminary block print sketches needed to carve his printing blocks back in California.

Surendorf has been described as “a rugged and opinionated character”, who “was known to have torn down his art exhibitions in the middle of previews (in one case at the prestigious Maxwell Gallery in San Francisco.)” He alienated many critics which may explain why his work was under-appreciated during his lifetime.

His work was exhibited in many locations, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1936); the 1940 Golden Gate International Exposition (1940); San Francisco Museum of Art (1936-46); the De Young Museum in San Francisco (1946); the Art Institute of Chicago, and the National Academy of Design, New York.

His work is in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Monterey Museum of Art, California; Oakland Museum; Mills College Art Museum (Oakland); Frederick R Weisman Art Museum (The University of Minnesota); Print Club of Albany (Albany, New York); Richmond Art Museum (Richmond, Indiana); The Saint Louis Art Museum (Missouri); University of Michigan Museum of Art; Wichita Art Museum.

Charles Frederick Surendorf died in California 0n 28 May 1979.

For more details of the history of Ajijic artists, art programs and hotels, see Foreign Footprints in Ajijic: decades of change in a Mexican village (2022).

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

Acknowledgment

My sincere thanks to Cindy Surendorf for sharing details of her father’s art and their 1968 trip to Mexico.

Source

Stockton Daily Evening Record, 8 August 1963.

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

Abstract expressionist Robert Pearson McChesney lived in Ajijic in the 1950s

1950s No Responses »

Feb 192015

Robert Pearson McChesney (1913-2008) was a noted California abstract artist, a pioneer of the abstract expressionism (ab-ex) movement, and one of the leading figures of American Modernism.

Robert “Mac” McChesney and his second wife, sculptor and author Mary Fuller McChesney, moved to Mexico in 1951 as a direct result of losing their jobs during the McCarthy era. They drove south in their Model A Ford mail truck and lived in Mexico for about a year, first in Ajijic and later in San Miguel de Allende. Shortly after their return to California, McChesney exhibited, alongside Ernest Alexander (former owner of the Scorpion Bar in Ajijic), Lenore Cetone and others, in the Annual Spring exhibit of Sausalito Art Center, held from 29 March to 12 April 1953.

Robert McChesney silkscreen : Yermo Noche #1

McChesney was born in Marshall, Missouri, on 16 January 1913. He attended Washington University in St. Louis (1931-34) and the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles (1936).

In 1937, he married one of his models, Frances, and they moved to San Francisco, where he was employed on the Federal Art Project. Together with 25 other artists, McChesney helped paint huge murals for the Golden Gate International Exposition (1939).

During the 1940s he assisted Anton Refregier with murals in San Francisco’s Rincon Annex Post Office. During the second world war, McChesney worked as a merchant marine seaman, painting aboard ship in the South Pacific.

After the war, he taught silk-screening (serigraphy) at the California School of Fine Arts (1949-51) and at Santa Rosa Junior College (from 1947 to 1958, with a year’s break in Mexico). He also taught at California State University, Hayward, from 1958 to 1962.

McChesney married Mary Fuller in December 1949 and the couple lived in Ajijic and San Miguel de Allende in Mexico for a year, 1951-1952. Mary Fuller McChesney, best known as a sculptor, also wrote short stories, poems, art history articles and several detective novels using the pen name “Joe Rayter”, including Stab in the Dark, set in the 1950s Guadalajara art scene.

On their return to California, they began to build their own home near the top of Sonoma Mountain in Petaluma, where they were still living at the time of Robert McChesney’s death on 10 May 2008.

Robert McChesney held more than forty solo exhibitions during his long artistic career, including many in galleries and museums in San Francisco, as well as at the Art Institute of Chicago, Whitney Museum in New York, Sao Paulo in Brazil (1955), Oakland Museum, the Nevada Museum of Art (1994), and California State University, Fresno (1999). In 2009, a major retrospective of the work of both artists (Mac and his wife) was held at the Petaluma Arts Center.

His work can be viewed in numerous museum collections such as the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, Oakland Art Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, Muskegon Museum of Art in Michigan, and Washington State Art Commission.

Sources:

Edan Hughes, Artists in California, 1786-1940.
M.V. Wood, It’s a colorful life / Robert McChesney, Mary Fuller celebrate art and their marriage with a joint show (SFGate, 2002)
Gretchen Giles, True Bohemians – Artists Robert and Mary Fuller McChesney found peace outside the limelight, (Metroactive, 2009)
Smithsonian Institution. Oral history interview with Mary Fuller McChesney, 1994 Sept. 28, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

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.

Inside job: Alfredo Santos, muralist and painter

1960s 8 Responses »

Feb 052015

Alfredo Santos spent some time painting, and dealing in art, in Ajijic (and elsewhere in Mexico) in the early 1960s. However, before we look at that period of his life in more detail, it is worth considering his extraordinary backstory.

Alfredo Santos was born in San Diego in 1927, the third of five children. He spent his early childhood in Tijuana, where his father was a union activist. The family moved back to the U.S. when Santos was 8. His early education came to an abrupt halt when he was expelled from high school for hitting a school official.

An infection that left him with fragile bones prevented him from enlisting in the U.S. military. Santos then had a series of scrapes with the law, including a prison term for helping smuggle illegal immigrants from Mexico cross the border. (Santos later said, “To me, I didn’t see anything immoral. I was sort of a Robin Hood, I thought.”)

He turned from people-smuggling to drug dealing, but was arrested again, and, in 1951, at age 24, began a four-year stint in San Quentin prison in California that would transform his life. Santos acknowledges that “San Quentin is where I became an artist.” (see this link)

His bone infection meant that he spent his entire time in prison in the hospital cells, where he read voraciously and even had his own small art studio. He drew caricatures of his fellow inmates in exchange for cigarettes.

Santos’ “Big Break” came when the prison doctor encouraged him in 1953 to enter a contest to paint some murals on the dining room walls. His quickly-sketched proposal (for a single wall), showing the transformation of California between the 1850s and the start of the second world war, was a clear winner, and he was given all three double-sided walls to work with. Because the dining room was in constant use during the day, painting was done almost entirely at night. The six murals – each about 12 feet high and 95 feet long – took two years to complete, with Santos absolutely determined to finish them before his parole date.

Alfredo Santos: detail from murals in San Quentin Prison

The murals, done in browns and blacks, show a kaleidoscope of Californian history, ranging from a cable car (that follows viewers across the room) to a wartime airplane and whimsical images of a sombrero-clad immigrant crossing the border and a soldier looking through a telescope at a woman undressing in a high-rise window further along the wall. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake is depicted, as is the golden age of Hollywood.

Alfredo Santos: detail from murals in San Quentin Prison

When he left San Quentin in 1955 Santos took with him some 50 paintings completed during his incarceration. He worked as a caricaturist at Disneyland for two years, saving enough money to return to San Diego in 1957 and open his own art studio and gallery. By 1960 the gallery “had become a mainstay of that city’s nascent arts scene.” (Russell) However, in 1961 the law caught up with him once again. He was arrested, and admitted to, one count of marijuana possession (a felony at the time). The night before he was due to appear in court for sentencing, Santos decided to go on the run. He married his 19-year-old girlfriend and they eloped to Mexico.

They appear to have first lived in Guadalajara, where a press release for the opening of his gallery in the city in 1961 proclaimed that the artist had come to Mexico to “have more freedom to express himself artistically.” At least one newspaper article [SFWeekly, 23 July 2003] includes a photo of him in his Guadalajara studio in 1961. In 1962, an exhibition of paintings by Tink Strother and other artists was held at the Alfredo Santos gallery in Guadalajara. That same year (1962), Santos exhibited his own work at the 1st Annual Exhibition of Paintings and Sculptures on Ajijic Beach, organized by Laura Bateman’s Rincón del Arte gallery. Other artists in this juried show with prizes, held in front of Posada Ajijic, included Antonio Cárdenas, Mary Cardwell, Juan Gutiérrez, Dick Keltner, “Linares” (Ernesto Butterlin), Carlos López Ruíz, Betty Mans, Gail Michels, John Minor, Eugenio Olmedo, Florentino Padilla, Gustavo Sendis, Tink Strother, Digur Weber, Doug Weber, Rhoda Williamson, Sid Williamson, Javier Zaragoza and Paul Zars.

Santos’ marriage did not last long. His homesick bride returned to California after eight months, where the marriage was annulled. Santos, though, remained in Mexico and his art flourished.

Among those highly impressed by Santos’ wood sculpting and abstract paintings was Joan Woodbury, an ex-actress turned Palm Springs art critic. In one of her regular newspaper columns, she described Santos as “one of Mexico’s foremost impressionists”. She helped arrange a month-long showing of his work at a Palm Springs gallery.

Alfredo Santos: mural in Cafe Madrid, Guadalajra

Alfredo Santos. 1961. Mural in Cafe Madrid, Guadalajara

During his time in Guadalajara, Santos, who liked to listen to jazz as he painted, became friends with the owner of the Café Madrid, a downtown restaurant on Av. Juárez that became, and remains, a Guadalajara institution, much loved by the literary and artistic crowd. At the owner’s insistence, one night Santos painted a picturesque mural, known as “Ciudad de mujeres” (“City of women”) in the restaurant. It depicts imagined daily life in the Spanish capital Madrid, full of beautiful women. Santos is said to have completed this mural in a single, liquor-fueled, fun-filled night. According to one version, the women in the mural were originally portrayed in the nude, but the wife of the café’s owner wife insisted that clothes be added. The mural is still there, and both restaurant and mural are well worth visiting.

After Guadalajara, it seems that Santos moved to Ajijic, though the precise circumstances and timing remain unclear. By 1963/64, Santos, accompanied by a young lady, had taken up residence in Ajijic’s Hotel Anita, then the social center of the village. Katharine Couto, whose parents owned the hotel from 1963/64, recalls that, “He was always quite charming and nice, but I was only 13 years old. Now I read he was “on the lam” which would explain why he and his beautiful girlfriend always stayed secluded in their suite.” She also recalls that Santos paid her parents, in part, with two paintings, one of which she later donated to the Latino Center in Omaha, Nebraska.

Another Ajijic resident of the time, Randi Atchison, recalls how, in the early 1960s, their family “spent time at his gallery in Guadalajara, watched him paint and enjoyed his colorful character.” Atchison has several paintings by Santos, on one of which “Alfredo wrote a personal note to my mother on the back… in her lipstick, that remains legible 44 years later.” Atchison notes that, “Alfredo also came to our house in Ajijic one day and painted a large Mariachi band mural on the living room wall.” it is unclear if this mural still exists.

In 1964, Santos decided to try his luck in Mexico City. He opened a studio-gallery on Calle Niza, in the city’s trendy Zona Rosa district. The following year, he married Mary Ann Summers; the couple (who divorced in 1977) had two sons, the elder of whom (Chris Santos) is now a professional artist in New York. Summers has described Santos’ studio-gallery at this time: “Alfredo had this fantastic gallery above a Chinese restaurant with four huge rooms downstairs and a big sunny studio loft above it… Between the two levels, sort of hidden away, was his bedroom, the walls of which were completely covered with photographs and paintings of nudes.”

This 5-minute Youtube video, Broken Mold: the Life and Art of Alfredo Santos, shows him at work:

In 1966, Santos moved his gallery to Acapulco for a year, before deciding to return to the U.S. In 1967, Santos settled into a rented apartment in New York, with his wife and infant son. He undertook commissions for various New York clients who had discovered his work in Mexico. One of them convinced Santos to relocate to the village of Fleischmanns, in the Catskills and close to Woodstock. Santos’ studio-gallery in Fleischmanns became “a magnet for every hip person for miles around,” according to one of his longtime friends and patrons.

In the 1980s, following his divorce from Summers and a heart attack, Santos moved back to San Diego. In 2011, the Zoom Gallery in Fleischmanns, held a retrospective of the works of Alfredo Santos, “The People’s Artist”.

In 2003, arrangements were finally made for Alfredo Santos to revisit San Quentin, this time as a distinguished guest rather than as an inmate, and see his murals again for the first time in almost fifty years. Only then, did the full extraordinary story of these amazing prison murals make the mainstream press.

Alfredo Santos died on 15 March 2015.

Sources:

Hidden Treasure by Ron Russell, Wednesday, Jul 23 2003
Hidden Beauty (with images of the San Quentin Prison Murals) August 17, 2007
Murals behind bars: The California of Alfredo Santos by Daniel Hernandez

Charles Pollock and his Chapala Series (1955-56)

1950s No Responses »

Jan 292015

Charles Pollock (1902-1988), the oldest brother of Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), who became an icon of the American abstract art movement in the late 1940s and early 1950s, was a fine artist in his own right.

In terms of longevity, Charles Pollock’s artistic career eclipsed Jackson’s. Charles’ work has been significantly reevaluated in recent years, thanks in part to the determined efforts of his second wife Sylvia, and their daughter Francesca.

Charles spent a year in Ajijic on the shores of Lake Chapala in 1955-56, returning to the U.S. only weeks before Jackson was killed in a car accident at age 44.

Charles Pollock: Chapala Series 1 (1956)

Charles Pollock: Chapala Series 4 (1956)

While in Ajijic, Charles produced numerous paintings and drawings, collectively known as the Chapala Series. The series was first exhibited more than fifty years later, in 2007, at the Jason McCoy Gallery in New York.

According to the exhibition blurb,

From 1955 to 1956, Charles Pollock, the older brother of Jackson, lived in Ajijic, a small village in Mexico. About ten years earlier he had abandoned his Social Realist style, inspired by his former teacher Thomas Hart Benton, searching for a new form of artistic expression. While teaching design, printmaking, calligraphy and typography at Michigan State University (1942-1967), he became increasingly focused on pure form and color relationships. It was in the quietude of Mexico’s Lake Chapala, when surrounded by ancient Mayan land, that he produced a body of work that would lay the groundwork for the art Pollock made from then on.”

“The Chapala series consists of thirty large drawings and fifteen paintings. All of these works are abstract and overtly inspired by calligraphy. They are immediately striking in their unique handling of light and form, which are employed to create distinct moods of atmospheric merit. In the paintings, both subtle color nuances and stark contrasts initiate a vibrancy that easily brings the Mexican mountain landscape to mind. Burnt sienna, earth brown, and translucent blues, for example, are fused into a harmonious mélange, while shapes reminiscent of simplified hieroglyphic fragments create a mysteriously codified language.”

While “ancient Mayan land” is something of a misnomer for the Chapala region of western Mexico, the peaceful surroundings of Lake Chapala certainly proved to be the ideal destination for Charles’ first, and artistically-fruitful, sabbatical year. In the words of art critic Stephanie Buhmann:

… the Chapala works unmistakably reveal the true quality and caliber of Charles Pollock. They document a mature understanding of materials and visual vocabulary that in its consistency is as impressive as it is authentic. Charles Pollock succeeded in formulating a unique sensibility that at once can draw us in and remains inclusive no matter how abstract and mysterious its poetry.”

Born on Christmas Day in 1902 in Denver, Colorado, Charles Cecil Pollock was the eldest of five boys (Jackson was the youngest). The family moved frequently and Charles spent his early years in Colorado, Wyoming, Arizona and California.

At age 20, he moved to Los Angeles where he worked as a copyboy for The Los Angeles Times while attending classes at the Otis Art Institute. In California, he developed an interest in Mexican art, particularly in the murals of José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera. These, and other Mexican artists, would have a lasting impact on Pollock’s own art.

Charles and Jackson Pollock in New York, 1930

Pollock moved to New York in 1926 and studied at the Art Students’ League under Thomas Hart Benton, who became a life-long friend. In 1930, he helped persuade Jackson to move to New York and also study with Benton. In 1931, Charles married Elizabeth Feinberg (1902-1997); they had one daughter named Jeremy Capille.

In 1934, during the Great Depression, Charles and Jackson drive across the country to see what is happening for themselves:

Six weeks later, Charles and Jackson buy a Model T Ford for fifteen dollars and set out to visit their mother for the first time since their father’s death. (On returning to New York they would sell it for twice the cost.) Like so many other Americans they were taking to the road, not looking for work but to see how their fellow citizens were faring. Their elaborate itinerary, which took them through scenes of intense labor conflict such as Harlan County, Kentucky, and steel towns near Pittsburgh and Birmingham, indicates how politically engaged Charles had become. The ten letters he wrote to his first wife, Elizabeth, are really reports from the field to a keenly intelligent woman even more of an activist than he was. In the dry, hot landscape of Texas he is appalled by the grim condition of poverty-stricken blacks and Mexicans. “Even though this is beautiful country for these people [it] is indescribably barren and harsh.” (Source: All in the Family – Jackson Pollock)

In 1935, he moved to Washington DC to work with the Resettlement Administration and two years later he became a political cartoonist for the United Automobile Workers’ newspaper in Detroit, Michigan.

Between 1938 and 1942 Pollock was Supervisor of Mural Painting and Graphic Arts for the Federal Arts Project (WPA) in Michigan. After completing murals in the foyer of Fairchild Auditorium of Michigan State College (later Michigan State University) in 1942, the artist joined the faculty in the Art Department, where he taught design, printmaking, calligraphy and typography for over two decades. He created a department of fine printing, working with a Washington Hand Press, and was book designer to the Michigan State College Press from 1942 to 1959.

In 1945 he spent three months drawing and painting in the desert of Arizona. This experience marked a turning point in his career as he abandoned social realism and began experimenting with abstraction. To escape the artistic shadow of his younger brother, he exhibited work in 1952s in the Circle Gallery, Detroit, under the name Charles Pima.

Later in his academic career, Charles was an artist in residence at the University of Pennsylvania in 1965 and 1967, the recipient of a Guggenheim Grant in 1967-68 and a National Foundation of Arts Grant in 1967.

Charles Pollock: Chapala Series, Drawing 3 (1956)

His visit to Ajijic was the first of two sabbatical years from his university positions; the other one was in Rome, 1962-63.

Charles married Sylvia Winter in 1957. Their daughter Francesca McCoy was born in Michigan ten years later. After Charles retired from teaching in 1967, the family lived in New York. In 1970 Sylvia was offered a job in Paris. The following year, the family moved to Europe, and never returned. Charles Pollock died in Paris on 8 May 1988.

In his latter years, while living in Paris, Charles Pollock had major shows in France, England and Belgium. His work is found in numerous collections, including those of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the National Gallery of Art.

Charles Pollock’s solo shows include: Ferargil Gallery, New York (1934); Circle Gallery, Detroit, Michigan (1952); Galeria Pogliani, Rome, Italy (1963); Kresge Art Center, Michigan State University (1964); Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Michigan (1964); Henri Gallery, Washington, DC (1966); Gertrude Kasle Gallery, Detroit, Michigan (1967, 1968, 1969); Acme Gallery, London, GB (1979); Art Center, Paris, France (1981); Jason McCoy Gallery, New York (1984, 1987, 1989, 2007 (The Chapala Series), 2008, 2009); Ball State University Museum, Muncie, Indiana (2003); American Contemporary Art Gallery, Munich, Germany (2008) (The Chapala Series); Espace d’Art Contemporain Fernet-Branca, Alsace (2009).

Charles Pollock was a fine artist in his own right, but also deserves recognition for his considerable influence on the artistic career of his famous younger brother Jackson. Charles’ influence over Jackson is evident from the correspondence among family members that forms the subject matter of American Letters: 1927-1947: Jackson Pollock and Family (edited by Charles’ second wife Sylvia Winter Pollock). In his introduction to this volume, Michael Leja writes of Charles that,

His guidance helped Jackson early on, and the extent of his influence over his youngest brother is obvious from their exchange of letters in October 1929, the month of the stock-market crash. Charles told Jackson to forget the religion and theosophy he was learning from his high-school art teacher and accept the challenge of contributing to the progress of modern life and culture. He recommended looking up the art of Benton and the Mexican muralists in magazines such as The Arts and Creative Art and delving into psychology and sociology. Jackson took Charles’s advice very seriously: “I have read and re-read your letter with clearer understanding each time.” He “dropped religion for the present,” subscribed to the art magazines Charles mentioned, and fantasized about moving to Mexico City…”

Want to read more?

Summary timeline of the life of Jackson Pollock and his brothers, including Charles
Charles Pollock Archives
Biography of Charles Pollock for Jason McCoy Gallery (pdf file) – was at http://www.jasonmccoyinc.com/CP_Biography.pdf [29 Jan 2015]

Charles Lewis Wrenn (1880-1952), portraitist and illustrator

1940s 14 Responses »

Jan 222015

Artist, portraitist and illustrator Charles Lewis Wrenn was born 18 Sep 1880 in Cincinnati, Ohio, and died 28 Oct 1952 in Norwalk, Fairfield, Connecticut.

He painted several watercolors at Lake Chapala, including some in Ajijic in 1943, though the precise dates of his visit or visits to the area are currently unknown. This watercolor of fishermen tending their nets is typical of his work; it is almost identical to another watercolor dated 1943, presumably painted at the same time:

Charles L. Wrenn. c 1943. Lake Chapala. (Davis Brothers Auction, 2022)

Wrenn’s choice of subject matter at Lake Chapala included some relatively rarely painted scenes, such as this lovely painting of a ruined building on historic Mezcala Island:

Charles L. Wrenn. c 1943. “Old Prison at Lake Chapala.” (Reproduced by kind permission of Allen Bourne)

This gloomier watercolor, entitled “Water Carrier, Lake Chapala” was for sale on eBay in November 2015:

Charles L. Wrenn. Water Carrier, Lake Chapala. Date unknown (eBay, 2015)

And this charming Ajijic watercolor, dated 1943, with its obvious illustrator influence, was for sale on eBay in 2024:

Charles Wrenn. 1943. Ajijic. (eBay, March 2024)

Charles L. Wrenn. 1943. Ajijic, Mexico. (eBay, March 2024)

In about 1900 (when he was about 20 years old) Wrenn moved to New York City and lived in Manhattan. After graduating from Princeton in the class of 1903, he immersed himself in art, studying at The Art Students League, and with the impressionist painter William Merritt Chase (1849-1916). On 5 October 1907 he married Helen Gibbs Bourne of New Jersey, and they moved to 364 West 23rd Street; his art studio was at 9 East 10th Street. The couple later moved to Wilson Point, Norwalk, where Charles (“Charlie”) had his studio in the loft of his red barn.

Cover art by Charles L. Wrenn

In 1914, Wrenn wrote that, “My ten years since graduation have been devoted to ART. After a year at the Art Students’ League and The New York Art School, I took up the illustrating branch and have been following it ever since.” From 1911 to 1917 he drew illustrations for stories in The Red Book Magazine, People’s Home Journal, and The Housewife. He also painted cover illustrations for the pulp magazine Breezy Stories.

Wrenn illustrated numerous books, including: Molly Brown’s Sophomore Days by Nell Speed (1912); The Boy Scouts at the Panama Canal (1913) and Boy Scouts under Sealed Orders (1916), both by Howard Payson; Uncle Noah’s Christmas Inspiration (1914) by Leona Dalrymple; Guns of Europe (1915), Tree of Appomattox (1916), Hosts of the Air (1915), The Great Sioux Trail (1918), The Sun of Quebec: A Story of a Great Crisis (1919), all by Joseph A. Altsheler; Polly’s Senior Year at Boarding School (1917) by Dorothy Whitehill; Boy Scouts Afloat (1917) by Walter Walden; and For the Freedom of the Seas (1918) by Ralph Henry Barbour.

In 1918, at age thirty-eight, he was not accepted for military service in WWI, so he applied for a passport and went to France for one year as a citizen volunteer for the Red Cross, working as a stretcher bearer. His passport describes him as 5′ 10½”, blue eyes, grey hair, thin face, with a Roman nose and a scar on his right thumb. He listed his occupation as “artist”.

Cover art by Charles L. Wrenn

After the Great War ended in 1919 he traveled to study art in Morocco, Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, Gibraltar, Tunis, Egypt, and Great Britain. He returned to the U.S. in September of 1920. He returned to Europe in 1922, this time accompanied by his wife and his mother. They returned from Palermo, Italy aboard the “Providence”.

In 1929, he visited Haiti and in 1931 Bermuda.

From 1920 to 1936 he sold freelance pulp magazine covers to The Danger Trail, People’s Magazine, Ranch Romances, Three Star Magazine, and War Stories. He also drew interior story illustrations for Clues.

In 1936 he moved to Wilson Point, South Norwalk, in Fairfield, Connecticut, where he painted portraits and landscapes for the remainder of his life. Wrenn was a member of The Society of Illustrators and specialized in painting portraits and landscapes. He painted in many parts of the U.S. including the Catskill Mountains, California, and Walpi Mesa in Arizona.

After spending time in Mexico in the early 1940s, Wrenn held “a small exhibition of his Mexican water colors” at Loring Andrews gallery in Cincinnati in June 1946. According to the Cincinnati Enquirer, besides paintings of Pátzcuaro and elsewhere, “His subject matter varies from the paintings of the strange narrow streets to the old houses of the natives of Lake Chapala.”

Wrenn and his wife visited Europe in 1952, returning only four months before his death.

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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.

Source

The Cincinnati Enquirer: 16 June 1946, 74.

This post was updated on 12 November 2015, and on 30 March 2024.

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

Carlos López Ruíz (1912-1972)

1950s, 1960s 32 Responses »

Jan 012015

Born 26 March 1912 in Chiquinquirá, Boyacá, Columbia, Carlos López Ruíz (sometimes simply Carlos López) lived and painted in Ajijic for several years in the early 1960s. He came from a well-connected family, but disappointed his father by not entering the military or the church. Instead he became an artist.

He began his artistic career by drawing cartoons for newspapers in Bogotá, as a sideline while working in the Cartography Department of the War Ministry from 1944-1951. His drawings and caricatures appeared in several newspapers including El Liberal, humor section of Sábado and the sports section of El Tiempo.

In 1948, he displayed two artworks – a pencil drawing entitled “Tumaqueña” and an oil painting, “Indígenas del Pacífico” – in the first annual group show for artists from Boyacá.

By the early 1950s, he had become an established illustrator and caricaturist in Colombia, though his radical cartoons had gained him a certain notoriety. He left Colombia in 1952 for the U.S.

Detail from a Carlos López Ruiz painting

In 1953, he began a two year scholarship at the Corcoran Art School in Washington, D.C.. He was awarded first prize for oil painting in a collective exhibit arranged by the school. He spent the next five years studying the old masters in the finest U.S. museums, as well as modern art in galleries from Philadelphia to California.

In 1956-1957, he had several solo shows in Washington D.C., including shows at the Collectors Corner Gallery and the ArtSmart Gallery. He also exhibited in New York in the mid-1950s.

He returned briefly to Colombia in 1957 to participate in the 10th Annual Show of Colombian Artists. In 1959, he moved to Ajijic, Mexico, looking for new subjects to study and paint. During his time in Ajijic, he held several exhibitions in Guadalajara as well as in local Ajijic galleries. It was in Ajijic that he first met fellow artist Tink Strother (1919-2007), a relationship that lasted about seven years.

Carlos Lopez-Ruiz in his Ajijic studio, ca 1962

Carlos López Ruiz in his Ajijic studio, ca 1962

Tink Strother’s son Loy remembers that his mother first met the hard-drinking López Ruiz when the artist was living with an aging, alcoholic, silent screen star… in the fabled “Casa Estrella”, a large house overlooking the village. When the movie star’s family arrived and insisted on taking her back to the U.S. to a detox clinic, Carlos moved down the hill and installed himself in the Hotel Anita, a couple of blocks from the village plaza.

López Ruiz gradually melded into the local art scene, and painted prolifically, specializing in fine portraits of horses and toreadors, as well as village scenes.

Carlos López Ruiz in his Ajijic studio, ca 1962

After he and Tink Strother became “an item”, they lived together in Ajijic, and exhibited together in a group show at the Alfredo Santos gallery in Guadalajara (1962). That year, both López Ruiz and Strother also exhibited at the 1st Annual Exhibition of Paintings and Sculptures on Ajijic Beach, organized by Laura Bateman’s Rincón del Arte gallery. (Other artists from Ajijic in that juried show with prizes included Antonio Cárdenas, Mary Cardwell, Juan Gutiérrez, Dick Keltner, “Linares” (Ernesto Butterlin), Betty Mans, Gail Michels, John Minor, Eugenio Olmedo, Florentino Padilla, Digur Weber, Doug Weber, Rhoda Williamson, Sid Williamson, Javier Zaragoza and Paul Zars. Alfredo Santos and Gustavo Sendis.

In July 1962, López Ruiz returned for a short time to Colombia. The Galería “El Automático” in Bogotá held a one-man show for him later that year with twenty oil paintings.

Tink Strother and Carlos López Ruiz left Mexico and moved to California in 1963/64, where they opened a joint studio and gallery, first in Pico Rivera and then in Whittier. López Ruiz lived in Whittier until his death in 1972.

Loy Strother knew Carlos López Ruiz in the latter stages of his life as well as anyone, and still has the artist’s notebooks, drawings and personal writings. He admires Carlos as a fabulous painter, whose rapid brushwork was in no way inhibited by his copious consumption of brandy. López Ruiz was choosy about selling his work and would refuse to part with anything unless he decided he liked the purchaser.

The magnificent works of Carlos López Ruiz have been exhibited in Washington D.C., New York, Virginia, Texas, California, Mexico and Colombia.

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

Howard Baer painted at Chapala in 1941

1940s No Responses »

Dec 112014

Howard Baer, born 1906 in the small mining town of Finleyville, Pennsylvania, died in 1986 in the city of New York. Baer was a writer, painter, illustrator and cartoonist, whose first known solo exhibition in 1941 was a showing of paintings resulting from several months of work in Mexico, based in the town of Chapala.

Baer studied art at the Carnegie Mellon Technical Institute in Pittsburgh before moving to New York in 1929. New York remained his home base for the rest of his life, though he traveled widely, with extended spells in Mexico, France, the U.K., China and India.

Howard Baer: Untitled watercolor (date unknown) Howard

Howard Baer: untitled watercolor (date and location unknown)

Prior to his trip to Chapala, Baer’s drawings, illustrations, and cartoons had appeared, to considerable acclaim, in The New Yorker (1933-1937), Esquire and various other mainstream magazines. In about 1937 he married fashion model Lenore Pettit. The couple divorced seven years later in 1944, and Pettit would later befriend and eventually marry artist Matsumi (Mike) Kanemitsu (1922-1992), a close friend of Jackson Pollock (1912-1956).

Baer’s first opportunity since high school to devote himself to plein air easel painting came in 1941 when he spent several months in Chapala. It is unclear if his wife accompanied him on this trip. The resulting series of paintings, together with a large mural of the town, were exhibited in September 1941 in the gallery of the Associated American Artists in New York City. Critics’ praise of his talent was unanimous. The exhibit handout was entitled: “This is Chapala”.

Howard Baer: untitled. Date unknown

During the war, he was chosen as a Navy artist, responsible for a series of drawings and paintings of WAVES (“Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service“) in aviation. He was later sent overseas to record actual battle warfare in the China-Burma India Theater of Operations.

Following the war, Baer illustrated children’s books on China and India. He lived for several years in Paris (1948-1951), wrote and illustrated a children’s book called Now this, now that (1957), taught art at the Henry Street Settlement, and at Parsons School of Design, in New York City, and also lived at least part of the 1960s in London, England.

Baer’s major exhibitions, besides that in 1941 based on his time in Chapala, included The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1942); Carnegie Institute (1949); Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. (1949), Paris, France (1950; 1958), Toninelli Arte Moderna in Milan, Italy (1963; 1965) and the Ben Uri Art Society in London, England (1965; 1972).

His works can be found in many museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art; Walker Museum, Youngstown, Ohio; the Pentagon Archives of War, the Butler Institute of American Art; The Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, University Of Oklahoma; The Navy Museum-US Navy Art Collection; and The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.

David Holbrook Kennedy (1919-1942) painted a mural at Chapala in 1941

1940s 6 Responses »

Dec 042014

Artist David Holbrook Kennedy was the youngest brother of food-writer Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher. David Kennedy was born 19 May 1919, and educated at Whittier Union High School, Lake Forest Academy in Illinois, and Princeton University, before graduating from Colorado College in Colorado Springs.

In 1941, when David was 22 and his sister Norah 24, “Norah and David decided to go to Mexico for an extended stay. David had received a small grant to paint murals at Lake Chapala in west-central Mexico, and Norah intended to join him, and write about her experiences in Lanikai, Honolulu, and Molakai the previous year. On June 20 [1941] they left Whittier [California] with only a forwarding address of Wells Fargo in Mexico City… What Mary Frances and the family did not know was that David intended to invite his girlfriend, Sarah Shearer, to join him in Mexico, and that they planned to marry there in late September” (Reardon, 134).

In October 1941, Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher visited David, Sarah and Norah in Chapala. David and Sarah, “a petite, blond, affable girl,” married on 11 October 1941 in Casa Casimiro Ramírez in Ajijic, described in one newspaper as the residence of author Nigel Stansbury-Millett and his father, Harry Millett; this must be one of the first all-American marriages in Ajijic. Guests at the wedding, and reception which followed, included Sarah’s mother—artist Inez Rogers Shearer; David’s two sisters; Swedish artist Nils Dardel and his partner Edita Morris; Mr and Mrs Francisco Nicolau of Guadalajara and their son Sergio; Mr and Mrs Casimiro Ramírez and two children; and the Honorable Mr Maurice Stafford (US Consul).

At Lake Chapala, the young couple lived in a “small house, where the whitewashed walls, tile floors, serapes, and minimal furnishings were enhanced by David’s pictures on the walls”. (Reardon, 140)

“The little house in the fishing village was fairly new, built to rent to summer-people who came for the lake and the quiet. It has a bathroom upstairs, fed from a tank on the roof which a man came every night to fill by the hand-pump in the tiny patio.” (Fisher, 545)

David, who had discovered and found he loved mariachi music, was infatuated with the falsetto voice of “Juanito”, the lead singer of a mariachi band – but Juanito turned out to be a girl! Fisher devotes an entire chapter to this rather confusing story about a girl from the hills who becomes, as a boy, the lead singer in an all-male mariachi band, before (perhaps on account of giving singing lessons to David) deciding to re-assume her female identity and leave the band. However, when David and Sarah married, the girl readopted her male persona and rejoined the mariachi band! The story, in all its colorful detail, is related by Fisher in the chapter entitled “Feminine Ending” in The Gastronomic Me.

David’s murals in the municipal baths in Chapala must have been among the earliest, if not the earliest, murals in the Lake Chapala region. Sadly, neither the murals nor the building that housed them still exist.

The murals were painted by the entire group (David, Sarah, Norah and Mary Frances) under David’s direction. The group worked on them every day for several weeks: “Norah and Sarah and I were helping David paint murals in the municipal baths, and spent several hours every day neck-deep in the clear running water of the pools, walking cautiously on the sandy bottoms with pie-plates full of tempera held up, and paint-brushes stuck in our hair.” (Fisher, 545)

The murals were finished toward the end of November 1941. Fisher and Norah flew back to Los Angeles, with David and Sarah following by car.

David credited Fisher’s second husband Dillwyn with encouraging him to pursue a career in art. The fact that Dillwyn took his own life [Dillwyn “was in the advanced stages of an incredibly painful and invariably fatal disease with nothing in his future but more amputations and constant, intransigent pain for which no medication was available in the USA.” – see comment below] shortly before Fisher’s visit to Chapala appears to have had a profound effect on David, who took his own life less than a year later in 1942. David was just 23 years old at the time, and he left his wife Sarah a widow while pregnant with their first child. David and Sarah’s daughter, Sarah Holbrook Kennedy, was born in August 1942.

Note

This post, first published on 4 December 2014, was updated and expanded in July 2022.

Sources

Joan Reardon, 2005. Poet of the Appetites: The Lives And Loves of M.F.K. Fisher (North Point Press)
M. F. K. Fisher, 1943. The Gastronomical Me (Duell, Sloan and Pearce, New York), reprinted in The Art of Eating (Macmillan 1979).
Buffalo Evening News (New York): 15 Oct 1941, 38; 24 December 1941, 3.
The Whittier News: 21 Oct 1941, 2.

Related posts

Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher (1908-1992) describes Chapala in 1941

German-Mexican artist Hanns Otto Butterlin (1900-1956)

1930s, 1940s, 1950s 24 Responses »

Nov 132014

Han(n)s Otto Butterlin (or Otto Butterlin as he was usually known, at least in Mexico) was born in Cologne, Germany, 26 Dec 1900 and became an abstract and impressionist painter of some renown.

See also The important artistic legacy of Otto Butterlin, who lived in Ajijic from the 1940s.

He was the oldest of the three Butterlin brothers. Otto moved with his middle brother Frederick and their parents (Johannes and Amelie) from Germany to Mexico in 1907. (Otto’s youngest brother Ernesto would be born a decade later in Guadalajara.)

Woodcut by Hanns Otto Butterlin, Ixtaccihuatl (1921)

U.S. immigration records show that Otto Butterlin (5’9″ tall with blond hair and blue eyes) was resident there between August 1924 and October 1929, though he probably made trips to visit family in Mexico during that time.

Otto made his living as a chemist and supervisor of operations in various industrial plants for at least 15 years. At the time of the 1930 Mexican census (held on 15 May), he and his wife were living in Los Mochis, Sinaloa, where he was working at the sugar refinery.

The following year, in 1931 Margaret gave birth to their daughter Rita Elaine in Los Mochis. Rita went on to marry four times. Her first marriage (1951-58) was to one of Otto’s friends – textile artist and silkscreen innovator Jim Tillett (1913-1996) – and her second (1959-1963) to Chilean film star Octavio Señoret Guevara (1924-1990). She was subsequently briefly married (1967-69) to Haskel Bratter, before falling in love with and marrying (1971-his passing) Howard Perkins Taylor (1916-1993).

Woodcut by Hanns Otto Butterlin, Ixtaccihuatl (1921)

While Rita was still an infant, Otto decided to formalize his permanent right to residence in Mexico and became a naturalized Mexican citizen in October 1935. Immigration records show that he continued to visit the U.S. several times a year.

It appears to be at about this time that Otto decided to spend more time on his art.

By the early 1940s, Otto Butterlin was based in Mexico City and working as an executive in the Bayer chemical company, a position which enabled him to supply several well-known artists of the time, such as A. Amador Lugo (who was epileptic) with needed medications, at a time when they were very hard to obtain.

During this period, Butterlin taught art with, or to, numerous well-known Mexican artists, including Diego Rivera, Ricardo Martinez, José Chávez Morado, Ricardo Martínez and Gunther Gerzso.

Hanns Otto Butterlin. The Funeral (ca 1942)

In September 1945, Otto and his wife Peggy, together with daughter Rita, relocated to live in Ajijic. In a 1945 article, Neill James, who had arrived in Ajijic a couple of years earlier, described Otto Butterlin as a “well known expressionist and abstract painter who owns a huerta in Ajijic where he lives with his wife, Peggy, and daughter, Rita.”

Otto Butterlin: Modern Figure Study. 1949

The group of artists exhibiting watercolors in May 1954 in “Galería Arturo Pani D.” in Calle Niza in Mexico City includes a Butterlin (probably Otto) alongside such famous contemporary artists as Raúl Anguiano, Fererico Cantú, Leonora Carrington, Carlos Mérida, Roberto Montenegro, Juan Soriano, Rufino Tamayo and Alfredo Zalce.

Otto Butterlin died in Ajijic on 2 April 1956.

Note (April 2016): We thank the Registro Civil in Chapala which kindly emailed us a copy of the official death certificate of Otto Butterlin.

This is an outline profile. Contact us if you would like to learn more about this particular artist or have information to share.

Partial list of sources:

Monica Señoret (Otto Butterlin’s granddaughter), personal communications via email. April 2015.
María Cristina Hernández Escobar. “Gunther Gerzso, The Appearance of the Invisible”. Voices of Mexico. UNAM. n.d. [formerly at http://www.revistascisan.unam.mx/Voices/pdfs/5323.pdf]
Robert L. Pincus, “WPA captures the soul of a nation”, The San Diego Union-Tribune, 5 February 2006, page F-1.
Robert Hilton (ed). Who’s Who In Latin America A Biographical Dictionary of Notable Living Men and Women Of Latin America. Part I – Mexico. (1946)

As always, we would love to receive any comments, corrections or additional information.

Related posts:

Unraveling the story of Lake Chapala’s artistic Butterlin brothers

1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s 4 Responses »

Nov 062014

While researching the history of the artists associated with the Lake Chapala region, I came across more and more references to the “two Butterlin brothers”. The problem was that different sources, including otherwise reputable art history sites, gave them quite different first names: Ernesto and Hans? Hans and Frederick? Linares and Otto?

There was very little evidence and it seemed impossible to tell which source was accurate, and why different accounts gave such different names, ages and details. They were usually described as “German”, but it was unclear whether they had been born in Germany or were the sons of German immigrants to Mexico.

Eventually, I compiled enough evidence to prove conclusively that there were not two Butterlin brothers, but three! Two had been born in Germany and were brought by their parents to Mexico. Safely ensconced in Guadalajara, the parents then had a third son, several years younger than his siblings.

The picture was complicated by the fact that two of the brothers used different names at different stages of their life, with the older brother rarely using his first name on his art once he arrived in Mexico, while the youngest brother adopted a surname for much of his artistic career that had no obvious connection to his family name.

Small wonder, then, that confusion reigned about the Butterlin brothers on many art history sites, some of which even failed to identify correctly the country of birth of each of the three brothers.

The three brothers (in order of birth) are:

There are still great gaps in my knowledge of this family, but the picture that finally began to emerge showed that the Butterlins deserved wider recognition as an artistic family of some consequence.

In future posts, I will show how all three Butterlin brothers contributed significantly to the development of the artist colony in the Lake Chapala area, albeit it in rather different ways.

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

1960s, 1970s, 1980s 7 Responses »

Sep 292014

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

Robert Neathery: Young Bather (1968)

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; Fernando García; Dorothy Goldner; Burt Hawley; Michael Heinichen; Peter Huf; Eunice (Hunt) Huf; Lona Isoard; John Maybra Kilpatrick; Gail Michael (Michel); Bert Miller; John K. Peterson; Stuart Phillips; Hudson Rose; Mary Rose; Jesús Santana; Walt Shou; Frances Showalter; ‘Sloane’; Eleanor Smart; Robert Snodgrass; and Agustín Velarde.

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

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

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

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

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

Sources:

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

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

Eunice and Peter Huf

1970s No Responses »

Aug 112014

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

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

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; Fernando García; Dorothy Goldner; Burt Hawley; Michael Heinichen; Lona Isoard; John Maybra Kilpatrick; Gail Michael (Michel); Bert Miller; Robert Neathery; John K. Peterson; Stuart Phillips; Hudson Rose; Mary Rose; Jesús Santana; Walt Shou; Frances Showalter; ‘Sloane’; Eleanor Smart; Robert Snodgrass; and Agustín Velarde.

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

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

Acknowledgment:

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

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

Francisco Ochoa (1946-2006)

1980s, 1990s onwards No Responses »

Jul 282014

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

Francisco Ochoa. 1982. El canto de las sirenas.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1980s 3 Responses »

Mar 222012

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

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

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

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

Ledwon then worked for Air Canada (Latin America and Caribbean) and as a freelance graphic artist. He visited Jocotepec in the early 1980s to meet artist-photographer John Frost (on the recommendation of a mutual friend), and then worked with both John Frost, and also with Georg Rauch, another Jocotepec-based artist, for almost two years. During this time, he developed silk screen and other techniques.

After returning to Canada, he worked as a picture framer at an art gallery, but returned to Jocotepec later that year to work on silkscreens and paintings, primarily of flowers and architecture.

R. Ledwon. c. 1988. (Print for sale on FaceBook in Dec 2022)

Richard (Rick) Ledwon. c. 1988. (Print for sale on FaceBook in Dec 2022)

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

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

When he returned permanently to Canada, in his early thirties, and was living in Ottawa, Ledwon exhibited in a group show at The Front Gallery in December 1990, and his pastels were shown at the city’s Old Chelsea gallery in April 1991. Ledwon’s most noteworthy artistic achievement in Ottawa in 1991 was his decorated ‘Envirobus’ (see image), which was used to promote local environmental groups and environmentally oriented businesses, such as organic farmers and recycling companies. The bus itself was a moving mural, painted to represent Ledwon’s impression of forests from all over the Americas.

In 1992, Ledwon was one of a small group of artists contracted to help restore the Sisters of Charity Chapel on Sussex Drive.

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

Note

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

Sources

Anon. 1987. Portrait of the Artist, in El Ojo del Lago, January 1987.
Ottawa Citizen: 1 December 1990, 76; 4 April 1991, 64; 8 August 1991, 13; 3 May 1992, 29.
Rysiek Ledwon. 2003. Building with Strawbales. Issues Magazine, June/July 2003.

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