Tag: mexico

Calendar: July 6

A Year: Day to Day Men: 6th of July

Torso Stretch

July 6, 1907 was the birthdate of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo.

Considered one of the Mexico’s greatest artist, Frida Kahlo was born in Coyocoan, Mexico City, Mexico. She grew up in the family’s home which was later known as the Blue House or Casa Azul. Frida Kahlo had poor health in her childhood. She contracted polio at age of six and had to be bedridden for nine months.

Frida Kahlo attended the renowned National Preparatory School in Mexico City. It was here that she first met Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, who was working on a mural called “The Creation”. Kahlo reconnected with Rivera in 1928 and the two started a romantic relationship, getting married in 1929. During the following years they moved to San Francisco, New York City and Detroit, based on Diego Rivera’s work.

In 1938, Frida Kahlo became a friend of Andre Breton, who was one of the primary figures of the Surrealism movement. That same year she had an exhibition in New York City and sold some of her paintings and received two commissions for future works. One commission was from Clare Boothe Luce; the result was the 1939 painting “The Suicide of Dorothy Hale” telling the story of Luce’s friend Dorothy’s leap to her death.

In the year of 1944, Frida Kahlo painted one of her most famous portrait, “The Broken Column”. In this painting she depicted herself naked and split down the middle, her spine shattered like a  column. She wears a surgical brace in the painting and there are nails all through her body, which is the indication of the consistent pain she went through. During that time, she had several surgeries forcing her to wear special corsets to protect her spine. She sought medical treatment for her chronic pain but treatments were unsuccessful.

In the year of 1953, Kahlo had a solo exhibition in Mexico. Although she had limited mobility at that time, she showed up on the exhibition’s opening ceremony. She arrived by ambulance,  welcomed the attendees, and celebrated the ceremony in a bed the gallery had set up for her. Frida Kahlo’s last public appearance was at a demonstration on July 2, 1953, against the overthrow of President Arbenz of Guatemala. One week later, after her 47th birthday, Frida Kahlo passed away at her beloved Blue House.

Frida Kahlo’s fame grew after her death. Her Blue House was opened as a museum in the year of 1958. In 1970s the interest in her work and life was renewed due to the feminist movement, since she was viewed as an icon of female creativity. In 1983, Hayden Herrera published his book on her, “A Biography of Frida Kahlo”, which drew more attention from the public to her works. In 2002, the movie “Frida” was released and was nominated for six Academy Awards, winning Best makeup and Best Original Score.

Dog Effigy

Dog Effigy Ceramic Pot, Date Unknown, Mexico, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland

Among the Aztecs of highland Mexico, dogs were associated with the deity Xolotl, the god of death. This deity and a dog were believed to lead the soul on its journey to the underworld. The Mexica also associated Xolotl with the planet Venus as the evening star and the twin brother of the deity QuetzalcГіatl, who personified Venus as the morning star. The dog’s special relationship with humans is highlighted by a number of Colima dog effigies wearing humanoid masks.

This curious effigy type has been interpreted as a shamanic transformation image or as a reference to the modern Huichol myth of the origin of the first wife, who was transformed from a dog into a human. However, recent scholarship suggests a new explanation of these sculptures as the depiction of the animal’s tonalli, its inner essence, which is made manifest by being given human form via the mask. The use of the human face to make reference to an object’s or animal’s inner spirit is found in the artworks of many ancient cultures of the Americas, from the Inuit of Alaska and northern Canada to peoples in Argentina and Chile.

Diego Rivera

Diego Rivera, “May Day Procession in Moscow”, Oil on Canvas, 1956, Private Collection

In 1955 Diego Rivera travelled to the Soviet Union for medical treatment. While there he made many sketches, some of which were later used as the basis for oil paintings, as appears to be the case with this artwork.

In the colorful worker’s parade, marchers carry a huge ballon painted with the word “peace” in several languages. One year after painting this scene, Rivera would die of a heart attack at the age of seventy.

Jorge Mendez Blake

Jorge Mendez Blake, “The Castle”, 2007, Bricks, Book

“The Castle” is a 2007 project by Mexican artist Jorge Mendez Blake that subtly examines the impact of a single outside force. For the installation, he constructed a 75 x 13 foot brick wall that balances on top of a single copy of Franz Kafka’s “The Castle”. The mortarless wall bulges at the site of the inserted text, creating an arch that extends to the top of the precarious structure.

Although a larger metaphor could be applied to the installation no matter what piece of literature was chosen, Méndez Blake specifically selected “The Castle” to pay tribute to Kafka’s lifestyle and work. The novelist was a deeply introverted figure who wrote privately throughout his life, and was only published posthumously by his friend Max Brod. This minimal, yet poignant presence is reflected in the brick work—Kafka’s novel showcasing how a small idea can have a monumental presence.

Felix d’Eon

Nautical Art by Felix d’Eon

Felix d’Eon was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, to a French father and a Mexican mother. At a very young age, he and his family moved to Southern California, where he spent most of his childhood and adolescence. He attended college at the Academy of Art University, in San Francisco. He lived in San Francisco until 2010 when he returned to his native Mexico. He now lives in Mexico City with his mini schnauzer, Caperucita Satori.

He is enraptured by various art-historical styles, such as Edwardian fashion and children’s book illustration, Golden-Era American comics, and Japanese Edo printmaking. In his work, he attempts to make the illusion of antiquity complete, using antique papers and careful research as to costume, set, and style. His goal is perfect verisimilitude.

Felix d’Eon subverts their “wholesome” image and harnesses their style to a vision of gay love and sensibility. D’Eon treats vintage illustrative styles as a rhetorical strategy, using their language of romance, economic power, and aesthetic sensibility as a tool with which to tell stories of historically oppressed and marginalized queer communities.

Phallic Figure

Phallic Figure, Burnished Ceramic with Slip and Incised Decoration, 200 BC-500 AD, Colima, Mexico

The state of Colima was home to a number of pre-Hispanic cultures as part of Western Mexico. Archeological evidence dates human occupation of the area as far back as 1500 BCE, with sites here contemporary with San Lorenzo on the Gulf Coast and Tlatilco in the Valley of Mexico. One period of the area’s development is called the Los Ortices era, which began around 500 BCE. During this time the elements that characterize the pre-Hispanic peoples of Colima appear, including shaft tombs and a distinctive ceramic style called rojo bruñido, or burnished red.

The next phase, called Comala and centered on a site of the same name, was from around 100 to 600 CE. Comala people perfected burnished red pottery and created representations of people and animals with skill and fluid lines. The best known of these figures are known as the fattened dogs. The Comala site shows influence from Teotihuacan. Around 500 CE, another site in Armería developed along the river of the same name.

Deer Head Mask

The Deer Head Mask Of Mexico

Fanciful headdresses were an essential component of performance costumes because they were crucial to the dancers’ perceived transformation into the personage or spirit being in whose guise they performed. In Veracruz, figurines depicting warriors and a wide variety of performers often wear full-head masks, which can be removed to reveal the person inside, such as the amazingly detailed head-mask of a deer.

Post-fire paint adorns the animal, with black-line curvilinear motifs on his long ear and bright blue-green pigment embellishing his upper lip. Large protuberances on his snout and the single horn atop his head suggest a composite zoomorph rather than a biologically accurate rendering.

The deer was an important Mesoamerican food source, and its hide was used for a variety of purposes including the wrapping of ritual bundles and as leaves (pages) for screen-fold manuscripts which contained all manner of knowledge-from history to religious mythology to astrology and astronomy. The deer also was the animal spirit form of the mother of the seminal Mexican deity Quetzalcoatl and of the wife of the maize god among the Classic Maya.

Rufino Tamayo

Rufino Tamayo, :Dia y Noche”, (Night and Day), Oil on Canvas, 1953, Museo Nacional de Antropologia, Mexico City

Rufino Tamayo, along with other muralists such as Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros, represented the twentieth century in their native country of Mexico. After the Mexican Revolution, Tamayo devoted himself to creating a distinct identity in his work. He expressed what he envisioned as the traditional Mexico and eschewed the overt political art of such contemporaries as José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, Oswaldo Guayasamin and David Alfaro Siqueiros. He disagreed with these muralists in their belief that the revolution was necessary for the future of Mexico but considered, instead, that the revolution would harm Mexico.

Tamayo expanded the technical and aesthetic possibilities of the graphic arts by developing a new medium which they named Mixografia. This technique is a unique fine art printing process that allows for the production of prints with three-dimensional texture. It not only registered the texture and volume of Rufino Tamayo’s design but also granted the artist freedom to use any combination of solid materials in its creation. Rufino Tamayo was delighted with the Mixografia process and created some 80 original Mixographs. One of their most famous Mixografia is titled “Dos Personajes Atacados por Perros” (Two Characters Attacked by Dogs).

Fito Pardo

Fito Pardo, “Aztec Dancer”

Fito Pardo has become one of Mexico’s top Cinematographers, he is now part of the director board at the AMC (Asociacion Mexicana de Cinematografia, The Mexican ASC).

He has more than 14 years of experience in Cinematography, wide experience in media related to filmmaking, from pre-production, production, post-production to print.

Reblogged with thanks to a great blog http://gaypaganbrother.tumblr.com

Mariano Rodriguez

Paintings by Mariano Rodriguez

Mariano Rodriguez was born in Havana in 1912. Since boyhood, he was interested in drawing and painting. In 1936 he went to Mexico where he studied for a year and a half with the muralists Manuel Rodriguez Lozano and Pablo O’Higgins. When he returned to Cuba his technique bore a close resemblance to that of the modern Mexican masters. In 1938 his painting “UNIDAD” received top honors at the National Exhibit of Painting and Sculpture in Havana.

Mariano is part of that generation of Cuban artists who felt the urgency to break with the influences of the Academics. Constantly and tirelessly in search of a vehicle by which to express his personality in the context of a truly “Cuban” expression, in 1941 he started to elaborate on his theme of the roosters. In the early 40’s he was influenced by the great European masters, especially Picasso and Matisse.

In 1967 he started his series of “Fruit and Reality”; in 1980 he began the series of the “Masses”, and in the mid eighties, the final “Feast of Love”. Through it all he faithfully continued to strive for essentially “Cuban” elements, the most consistent of which was the virility of the rooster, master of the domestic patio. In every one of these phases Mariano painted a rooster.

Edgar Flores (SANER)

Murals and Paintings by Edgar Flores (SANER)

Edgar Flores was born in 1981 in Mexico City, where he is currently based. As a child he developed an interest in drawing and Mexican muralism and began expressing himself through graffiti in the late 1990s. In 2004, Flores received a degree in graphic design from Universidad Autónoma de México. His work has been exhibited in galleries worldwide including Barcelona, Berlin, London, New York and Mexico City. In 2014 he had a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Luis Potosí in Mexico.

Angelico and Isais Jimenez

Angelico and Isais Jimenez, Mythical Mexican Beasts, Carved Wood

Angelico and Isais Jimenez  are the sons of Manuel Jimenez, the founder of the Oaxaca School of Mexican carved and painted animals. Though relatively unknown outside of Mexico, their work is excellent and available for sale.

Further information on their work can be found at: https://www.fofa.us/woodcarving/2

Ruffino Tamayo

Graphic Work by Rufino Tamayo

Rufino Tamayo’s legacy in the history of art lies in his oeuvre of original graphic prints in which he cultivated every technique. Rufino Tamayo’s graphic work, produced between 1925 and 1991, includes woodcuts, lithographs, etchings and “Mixografia” prints. With the help of Mexican painter and engineer Luis Remba, Tamayo expanded the technical and aesthetic possibilities of the graphic arts by developing a new medium which they named Mixografia.

This technique is a unique fine art printing process that allows for the production of prints with three-dimensional texture. It not only registered the texture and volume of Rufino Tamayo’s design but also granted the artist freedom to use any combination of solid materials in its creation. Rufino Tamayo was delighted with the Mixografia process and created some 80 original Mixographs. One of their most famous Mixografia is titled Dos Personajes Atacados por Perros (Two Characters Attacked by Dogs).