"HOLY DEATH', THE VIRGIN OF JUQUILA AND MY PAINTING

My friend, photographer and teacher Mari Seder, first introduced me to Mexico, its incredible colors and fascinating folk and religious art when I visited her in Oaxaca many years ago.

Several years ago I traveled with her to the isolated Church of the Virgin of Juquila on the mountainous road from Oaxaca to Puerto Escandido. Pilgrims come here by foot from all over Mexico to ask for a miracle from this tiny, dark-skinned figure of the Virgin who is housed in a massive church.

The pilgrims walk for days, sleeping in village squares, fed by pious Mexicans, until they reach Juquila. They often approach the saint on their knees. The tiny figure (who is considered Indian because of her dark skin) has a white train which stretches out of the church and far into the distance. Pilgrims leave on the train gifts and hand-made wooden crosses either specifying the favor they need or thanking her for favors received. My photo above shows two Indian women on their knees approaching the Virgin , one with a blond baby on her back.

Three years ago on March 21 my daughter and I were on a tour led by cooking guru Susanna Trilling (www.seasonsofmyheart.com). We were at El Tajin – a pre-Columbian archeological site in Veracruz, composed of multiple pyramids. It was the Spring Equinox and hundreds of Mexicans, all dressed in white, came there to be cleansed by the Sun God with the aid of cueranderos (healers).

On the way into the pyramids, among the many objects on display on the road outside, I noticed the skeletal lady dressed as a Spanish Senorita. I had never seen anything like her … she was like the many Guadalupe virgins seen everywhere, but she was Death So I took her photo, but no one could tell me exactly what she was for. They told me she was Santa Meurte and I could see she was available for some kind of religious ceremony (for a price) but I couldn’t get any other kind of information. Everyone seemed reluctant to talk about her.

Last year in February in Oaxaca I attended a class sponsored by the Worcester Art Museum called “Expanding Your Vision -- Painting and Photography in the Magical World of Oaxaca, Mexico”. It was taught by my friend Mari Seder and Oaxacan artist Humberto Batista. (They’re doing it again in Feb. 2009 --- www.worcesterart.org) Humberto strongly encouraged the students to think outside the box and to paint something unlike their usual style.

At his urging (although I am VERY literal – usually painting just what I see) I incorporated the figure of Santa Meurte from El Tajin into my painting of the interior of the Church of Juquila. The result is the painting above which is now on display at the Worcester Art Museum in a show of art done by students during their off-site classes.

I was surprised and excited when I recently picked up the New Yorker dated Nov. 10 and found an article by Alma Guillermoprieto called “Days of the Dead, The new narcocultura.” She wrote about the narcotics trafficking that is causing such bloodshed in Mexico and she investigated the role of “The Holy Death” – especially as she is celebrated in a mass every day in a troubled neighborhood of Mexico City called Tepito where the drug dealers and addicts collect.

The author suggested that there are two thousand shrines in Mexico to Santa Meurte and that she is the saint of drug traffickers (although the woman who established the large shrine in Tepito denies that it is only for drug traffickers.)

When I painted the watercolor above, showing a woman crawling toward the Virgin of Juquila , I imagined that she was going to ask the Virgin to heal her baby and was encountering Santa Muerte blocking her way to salvation. If it’s true that Holy Death is the saint of narcotics dealers, that adds another dimension to the painting. Perhaps the baby’s health and safety are threatened by some version of the narcocultura (maybe not now but when he grows up.)

The thought gave me a shudder, appropriately enough at this season which celebrates the Days of the Dead. And it adds a layer of unexpected meaning to the painting

Tell me what you think.

Street Artist Banksy and his Peculiar Pet Shop

On the same weekend in October that I visited the CFA – IAMs Cat Championship in Madison Square Garden and the Van Gogh exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, I also went with two fellow crones down to Greenwich Village to view an exhibit by anonymous British street artist Banksy.

No one knows who Banksy really is, including the young men and women who were keeping watch over his Greenwich Village exhibit. (I asked them. They said they’ve never met him) According to Wikipedia Banksy is "a well-known pseudo-anonymous British artist believed to have been born in 1974."

His street art usually combines graffiti and a stenciling technique — leaving political statements on walls -- but in New York he opened a realistic-looking "Pet Store and Charcoal Grill" at 89 Seventh Avenue between West 4th and Bleeker Street. (Love the irony in that title…It was only there from October 9 to Halloween and we crones felt privileged to see this street art in action before Banksy folded it up and took it away. It was the first time Banksy has used animation to create exhibits that moved.)

From the outside, the Pet Store featured what appeared to be a large leopard sitting in the window with a twitching tail. (“Do not tap on the glass", said a sign.) But when you went inside, the "leopard" turned out to be a strategically folded leopard coat. With a moving tail.

In another window was a white rabbit applying lipstick while looking in a mirror. There was also a hen with several "chicks" --- really animated large chicken nuggets -- drinking out of a dish of barbecue sauce. Inside the store were fish sticks swimming in an aquarium, sliced sausages and hot dogs eating out of dishes and a chimpanzee watching a TV video of chimpanzees having sex.

As you've probably figured out by now, Banksy is making an ironic comment about how we turn animals into processed food and torture rabbits, for instance, to test cosmetics. What I liked about the exhibit (which some bewildered folk mistook for an actual pet store) is that it's good-natured and humorous piece of art that gets the artist's point across more effectively than a diatribe, or throwing flour at Lindsey Lohan or paint at Sarah Jessica Parker when they wear furs.

There was a book inside the “Pet Store” where people were encouraged to write their reactions to the art. Someone who was there before me had written: "Banksy totally gets it! This is why I don't eat meat." But the children passing by outside with their parents were delighted with the moving exhibits in the "Pet Store and Charcoal Grill." Perhaps it would start them thinking, the next time they saw a chicken nugget or a sausage, perhaps not, but it was more engaging that an exhibit of calves being tortured in cages, and so was probably more effective in making people think about where their food comes from.

Another artist who is referred to as a “guerrilla artist” or street artist (because he paints his political statements on walls and then runs away before he can be arrested) is Sheperd Fairey, who is the hot young artist of the day ever since he designed the terrific red, white and blue poster of Obama for his campaign. Sheperd Fairey, Banksy and their ilk have had a huge influence on young artists.

It was fun to watch passers-by the Pet Store do a double take and then come up and study the exhibits. This is the best kind of interactive art. It reminded me of walking through a snowy Central Park on the last day of Christo's "Gates” in February 2005 and watching hundreds, maybe thousands of people--some who had flown in from Europe --touching, discussing and interacting with the 7,500 saffron-colored fabric panels which transformed Central Park on a cold winter day into an open air museum where everyone had something to say about the art.

(If you want to see more photos and a discussion of Banksy’s pet store and grill, follow this link:)

www.woostercollective.com/2008/10/the_village_pet_store_and_charchoal_gril.html

And if you want a copy of The Secret life of Greek Cats” for an animal lover on your holiday list:

www.GreekCats.com

Madison Square Garden Cat Show

“It was like herding cats” is an expression for something that’s extremely difficult (because, as everyone knows, cats don’t take kindly to being told what to do, especially in groups.)

Imagine 212 nervous cats representing 43 breeds and an equal number of nervous cat breeders herded into Madison Square Garden last Oct. 18 and 19 for the very elite CFA- IAMs Cat Championship, which included two days of judging cats in five different rings at the same time. It culminated in the choice of the best of the Best of the Best at 5:00 on Sunday.

I was there – partly to promote my photo book “The Secret Life of Greek Cats” (check it out at www.GreekCats.com) but mostly to see and photograph all those exotic breeds I’d read about but never seen in the flesh, er, fur, including the popular Sphynx Cat, hairless except for the fine down on its body.

Near the door where you come in there was even a Republi-cat and a Demo-cat named Barack Obama, in patriotically decorated cages.

Everyone was admiring the Ocicats—a breed which has markings like a leopard and would make a very chic (and expensive) accessory for ladies who like to wear animal prints (not me.) Cats and kittens were being bought and sold and $600 was the lowest price I heard mentioned.

I love the exotic long-hairs with their squashed-in grouchy faces although many people don’t. The Greek cats who tell their stories in my book are certainly not pure-breds. They’re, as the real Obama would put it, “Mutts like me”, but just as attractive as the cats who walked off with the ribbons at Madison Square Garden.

Everyone there was, of course, a cat lover, including the judges who held up each furry contestant and raved about the good points of the breed. The judges held wands with tassels on the end to get the cats interested and involved. Some, but not all, of the breeders looked like their cats. If you want to see photos of the judging, let me know.

The ultimate winner on Sunday was a Blue Russian, but I didn’t make it back in time to see it. I was down in Greenwich Village looking at a crazy art show created by the guerrilla artist Banksy which was a witty but effective statement about turning animals into food, but I’ll tell you about that tomorrow.

A Rolling Crone Gets Rolling

Here is my very first post -- I've spent far too much time getting ready to do it or, as my mother Martha would put it, spitting on my hands.

It's time to put up or shut up and so I'm trying to launch this ship TODAY despite the fact that I foolishly signed up for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo is their web site) -- for which more than 100,000 would-be novelists have promised to write 50,000 words of a novel in the month of November. (You will hear more from me about that as the pressure mounts.)

That's 1,667 words a day every day, and since I have a slight cushion, as I'm at 21,343 today, Nov.13th, I'm taking off time to start the blog A Rolling Crone. (The name was daughter Eleni Gage's inspiration.) You can get to it on www.arollingcrone.blogspot.com. Soon I’ll also have it linked to my website: www.joanpgage.com.

“Why a blog? you ask? “There are too many already! And let’s face it—you’re not a pundit, you’re just a crone.”

Well, a year or so ago I took a course at the Worcester Art Museum called “Marketing your art on the internet”, taught by a computer expert, artist and genius named Andy Fish. He told us we all must have a website and a blog which we update daily. So I’m finally doing it. I promise not to write anything about the following: Obama. McCain, Palin, the bailout and Joe the Plumber. (Unless it’s about hairless Aztec dogs suitable for Obama's allergic daughter, which I plan to write about soon.)

What I will write about, as the spirit moves me, is art (I just got back from Manhattan where I visited exhibits by Banksy and Van Gogh—a study in contrasts); cats (in NYC I visited to Madison Square Garden cat show—what a trip!); my travels (next up three weeks in India), along with photos illustrating same.

I will try to address issues and events that are of interest to crones over sixty, who are definitely under-served in the media. Yet we are, as a friend remarked, the pig in the python—the huge population of women who are still tuned in and creating despite (or because of) our age.

The blog is also meant to be (as explained by Andy) a sneaky way to call attention to my paintings and my newly published photo book “The Secret of Greek Cats, Feline Photos and Cats’ Tales of Greek Life and Lore” (now only $10 on my web site: www.joanpgage.com or www.GreekCats.com ).

About the photo: It's me and some of my watercolors at last June's Grecian Festival at Saint Spyridon Cathedral in Worcester, MA where I was privileged to show some of my paintings (and even sold some!) I also was lucky enough this year to have my first solo show of my watercolors at The First Show Gallery at C. C. Lowell in Worcester.

I hope you’ll tune in to this crone’s journey!

Joan Paulson Gage

Questions, remarks, slander? Write me at JoanPGage@yahoo.com