Art and Graffiti in Oaxaca, Mexico

(Please click on the photos to enlarge them.)

In Oaxaca, art is everywhere, from the works of local artists like Francesco Toledo, hanging in galleries and museums, to the embroidery on the traditional trajes (costumes) worn by women in places like Tehuantepec and sold for hundreds of dollars in the shops here.

The people of Oaxaca seem to create art instinctively, even when choosing to paint their houses and doorways in startling colors with a sophistication that never ceases to amaze me. A mask hanging on a wall near the door to a latrine, or signs glued to a wall, constantly make me stop and stare. An orange doorway becomes abstract art worthy of Mondrian. The sign about the ¨Ninos¨advertises that the store is a place to dress your Child of God. These Christ Child dolls which sit on the family altar, evidently need to get a new set of clothes and to be blessed in the church before Lent begins (last Tuesday) which is why I have seen so many people carrying their Christ Child dolls lately.

I’m presently in Oaxaca taking an art class sponsored by the Worcester Art Museum and led by photographer Mari Seder and artist Humberto Batista. They are teaching us the art of collage. Above is a photo of the first one I tried in its UNFINISHED state. I incorporated photos I took of Mexican church statues and photos taken by daughter Eleni Gage and myself of women encountered in various parts of Mexico. Most of them were selling their traditional art — embroidery, bracelets, necklaces, weaving. We always asked their permission before taking their portraits. I’m calling this collage “Our Lady of the Sorrows” because these women all seem sad or reflective.

I’m also posting some photos of the graffiti that you see everywhere in Oaxaca. The people who own these buildings consider the graffiti destructive and a terrific nuisance, but I can’t help thinking it’s another kind of striking Oaxacan art. One row of the photos above shows graffiti art taken indoors to decorate a small restaurant called Nuevo Babel. (Whoops--I just realized I didn´t download that series of photos to this Mexican computer--will use it in a posting tomorrow.) I’m sure much of the street art is politically motivated, inspired by the riots here four years ago and government corruption and oppression, but as an outsider, I enjoy it as art without understanding the underlying political message, if there is one.

Last night, Friday, we were privileged to see more local art in the costumes and traditional dances of the seven different regions of the state of Oaxaca, presented at the beautiful Camino Real Hotel in a buffet and dance spectacle held in the former convent’s chapel. The men are wearing costumes of the Dance of the Feather, which symbolizes the Mixtec-Zapotec fight against the Spaniards. The women in the black embroidered costumes come from the Isthmus, where women rule in a matriarchal society. Their dance celebrates the gathering of turtle eggs (with erotic undercurrents.) Each of the seven regions of the state of Oaxaca have their own embroidered costume and dance. In two of the regions, the women dance slowly, looking grimly down at the floor. But not the women of the Isthmus!

It’s going to be hard to leave the colors, flowers and art found everywhere in Oaxaca to go back to the snow of Massachusetts.

Mardi Gras with Devils in Oaxaca, Mexico

I’ve been in Oaxaca for three days now and have had lots of adventures while on an art course from the Worcester Art Museum led by my friend photographer Mari Seder. Today I want to tell you how we celebrated Fat Tuesday in the village of San Martin Tilcajete about a 45-minute drive from Oaxaca. It’s all about devils and gossip and cross-dressing and music and a faux wedding where the bride, groom and attendants are all male.

The bride is prepared by her attendants amid much loud band music, shooting of fireworks and drinking of Corona beer. The nuptial donkey is also decorated. Eventually the band and assorted devils lead the wedding parade to the house of the mayor.

All over town young men have painted their faces, covered their bodies in dark grease (I think from cars) and, wearing skirts of noisy cowbells and brandishing sticks and machetes, they run about trying to terrify people while bystanders hand them cold beers.

When the bridal procession reaches the mayor’s house, there is a false wedding ceremony where a “priest” does the honors and then, in rhyming couplets, tells over a loudspeaker the scandalous gossip about everyone on hand. I couldn’t understand a word of it, but the villagers, from small children to old crones, were doubled over with laughter.

When he concludes, favors like rubber balls are tossed at the crowd and the bride stands on a chair under a tent while ribald comments are made and grotesque monsters dance around her. The devils and monsters terrify the children, make obscene gestures to the adults and generally have a good time dancing.

I wish I could have been able to understand the Spanish, but the bizarre celebration didn’t need an interpreter. It seems that every nationality needs to go a little crazy and misbehave once a year and often it is on the day before the strictures of Lent begin. We have cousins in Corfu Greece who e-mailed that they are off to hear the gossip of their town announced in a Carnival celebration. I don’t know if there was a faux wedding involved (although such silliness goes back to pre-Christina times in many cultures) but I doubt that any other town, including Corfu and New Orleans and Rio, has more fun than San Martin Tilcajete on Fat Tuesday.

More Oaxaca adventures soon!

My Funny Valentine & “Playing with Pictures—The Art of Photo Collage”

When I go into my favorite store—Target-- I always look at what’s in the $1.00 section. Recently it was all about Valentine’s Day and I gravitated straight to these ugly velvet roses that cost a dollar each. “These are so bad they’re good!” I said, snagging three of them. Daughter Eleni feared I would put them in her (unoccupied) room but I promised I wouldn’t. Now they’re in one of the upstairs bathrooms.

I do like things that are whimsical—And today, as I drove into Manhattan on my way to tomorrow’s flight to Mexico, I made a bee-line to an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art called “Playing with Pictures—The Art of Victorian Photocollage.”

Since I am an avid collector of antique photos and I love anything whimsical, I knew this show was for me for many reasons.

The exhibit, which I highly recommend,(Google it!) focuses on albums made by aristocratic English women back in the 1860’s and 1870’s by cutting out photographs of people they knew (often titled and royal) and gluing them into fantasy scenes which the women painted or drew. It’s a trip. Check out 2 examples above.

The exhibit was charming and highlighted something that I have noticed for many years—women in Victorian times poured their creativity into creating friendship books, scrap albums , folk paintings and things like these exquisite and humorous album pages—just to amuse themselves and their friends. I bought the catalogue and may write about it in future. You could see in the photo collages the fantasy influence of books like Louis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland.”

But since I’m off to Mexico in the morning and will be participating in all sorts of crazy Carnival activities in Oaxaca (which I will report, including a crazy faux wedding ceremony and lots of devils and transvestites) I will only say a few things about Victorians and photographs.

In 1839, when the first photographic process was announced by Louis Daguerre, having your portrait taken “by the sun” was a serious business. For twenty years, through the daguerreotypes and the ambrotypes that followed, you had to go to a photographer’s studio—usually lighted by a skylight (because sunlight was required) and you had to sit very still—possibly with a head brace. Children were strapped into chairs to keep them still. Sometimes moms were seated in the chair, covered with a sheet and then they clutched the toddler to keep him still long enough for the photo. If someone died, the photographer would come to the house to make the only photograph his loved ones would have to remember him or her.

Many people gazed at the camera in total terror—having no idea if the photographic process would hurt or not. (And many daguerreotypyists became ill from the chemicals needed to develop the polished metal plates into photographs.)

But in the 1850’s and 1860’s—in time for the American Civil War—they invented metal tintypes, which a solider could carry in his pocket or send home in an envelope, and cardboard cartes de visite, --the size of a calling card--which could be made in multiples for a very low price.

This created a mania for collecting photographs of freaks and famous people, and putting them into albums, and exchanging photos among friends. And many women —especially the aristocratic English women who were encouraged to develop talents like painting, decorating china and playing the piano, as well as croquet and fox hunting—turned their creative drive into making albums of amusing and fantastic pages on to which they glued cut-out images of their titled friends.

The exhibit at the Met makes a big point about how this was done by aristocratic English women, but I know from collecting Victorian photo albums that ordinary women and men in the U. S. as well, turned their photographic experiences into humorous portraits. Before the carte de visite and the tintype, it was an extremely serious business sitting for the photographer. But many funny Victorian photos exist as tintypes or cartes de visite, such as cross-dressing ones like the gentleman above wearing a woman’s hat. Cross dressing and funny poses are frequently found in tintypes and cartes de visite (and if you want to sell me any, let me know.)

I have collected Victorian scrapbooks, photo albums, friendship books and tintypes which display lots of humor and creativity. I want to write more about them later, as I think they are an art form that has been ignored up till now but deserves to be recognized. But for now I’ll just show you the tintype above of a man in a woman’s hat and also the collage a young woman made of her own portrait surrounded by cigar labels. It is a kind of collage that lines a bowl and that sells for big bucks today.

More later. Now I’m off to Oaxaca, Mexico and some crazy happenings to mark carnival!

Oscar, the Cat Angel of Death & Our Cat,“PS”

I’m sure by now you’ve heard about Oscar the cat who lives in a nursing home in Providence R.I. and has accurately predicted 50 times when a patient was about to die.

In 2007 Dr. David Dosa wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine about Oscar’s uncanny ability to sit with dying patients right before their death. Oscar is not particularly friendly and will not sit on beds of patients who are not about to meet the Grim Reaper.

Now Dr. Dosa is publishing a book about Oscar and how the cat, over five years, has correctly predicted which patients are within hours of death—in 50 cases—often trumping the opinions of the nursing staff. The book is called “Making Rounds with Oscar: The Extraordinary Gift of an Ordinary Cat.”

The whole staff now knows to call family members in when Oscar stretches out beside one of their patients, (who are generally too ill to know he’s there.) If someone closes the cat out of a room of a dying patient, Oscar will scratch at the door trying to get in.

Dr. Dosa was worried that families would be horrified to see the furry angel of death lying on their loved one’s bed, but for most, Oscar provides comfort, and he recently received a wall plaque commending his “compassionate hospice care.”

What is the secret of his powers? How does he know? Everyone has a theory. Some devout Christians believe that Oscar is an angel in disguise, since angels can take many forms. On the other hand, Dr. Nicholas Dodman, who directs the animal behavioral clinic at the Tufts University Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine, says it’s possible his behavior could be driven by self-centered pleasures, like a heated blanket placed on a dying person.

Dr. Dosa theorizes that Oscar may smell odors given off by dying cells, like some dogs who seem to be able to detect cancer with their noses. I think this is the most likely explanation.

Reading about Oscar reminded me of an incident that occurred about seven years ago with our dear departed cat “P.S.” (That’s a photo of P.S. near some flowers in the photo above. Oscar’s the one with the wings and halo.)

I was in New York City with my husband when I came down with a 104-degree temperature, chills, aches. I felt miserable, and when we got home, I walked in the kitchen door and straight up the stairs to crash on the bed, feeling too sick for anything else.

Our cat P.S. had been well trained never to enter our bedroom (because my husband really dislikes cats, most especially if they jump on the bed.) But this time she followed me right up the stairs and into the room and onto the bed, clearly concerned and wanting to help me. I hadn’t even come near her, but she must have smelled or sensed that I was really sick when I walked in.

When we put her out and closed the bedroom door, she scratched at it. This never happened before or since in the 18 years of her life. (PS is now planted in the garden under a small statue of a black cat and an azalea bush.)

Luckily, I did not pass away back in 2003. Antibiotics got me well, but I never figured out how the cat knew I was so sick that she’d defy everyone to try to come to me.

On May 7, 2008, in a special euthanasia room decorated with a memorial wall of pet photos, after long painful months of kidney failure and daily re-hydration, P.S. was put to sleep (with incredible tact and compassion) by the veterinary staff. I’m glad I could be with her as she took her last breath. I know she would have done the same for me.

SARAH PALIN, MY GLASSES AND THE FULL MOON

I’m not a fan of Sarah Palin’s political views, but I really like her rimless eye glasses. I admit I do love hearing her talk, with her colorful similes and folksy homilies in that accent that is identical to the one I had when I left Minnesota at 18.

Fifty years after that, last month, my eye doctor gave me a new prescription for my driving glasses—saying I had the beginning of cataracts and I need prisms in the lens and some sort of special film on them to improve my increasingly fearful night-driving vision.

I took the prescription to the optician and said, with some embarrassment, that I wanted glasses like Sarah Palin’s. He didn’t blink. He told me that Sarah had provided a terrific boon for Kawasaki (“Like the motorcycles”), the Japanese company that produces her high-style eyewear.

Sarah has square lenses, I chose ones that were more of a trapezoid. When the optician added the cost of the prisms, lenses and special film to the $250 skeleton of the glasses, the bill came to $465. Ouch!

But I loved my new glasses, which made everything pop into 3-D. At night I could see the road without being dazzled by oncoming cars. I even made a quick sketch of the glasses (above) in my drawing class last Monday when the teacher, Andy Fish, said to draw some small object in detail in our daily sketchbook.

Then, on Thursday night, I went to another class at the Worcester Art Museum and had to park a block away because of the crowd. The temperature hovered around zero and the wind was gusting over 50 MPH.

At 9:30 p.m. I left class, carrying my computer case and lots of other gear, and when I reached my car, I realized I no longer had the new glasses. There ensued an hour of fruitless searching in the snow while I suffered the first stages of frostbite. By now the parking lot was deserted. I couldn’t ignore the nearly full moon overheard —the Wolf Moon-- which is the brightest and biggest of the year. But it did not light my way to find the glasses. I drove home with one eye closed, trying to see the white line on the side of the road.

The next morning I decided to drive back to the Museum before anyone came. I arrived at 8:45 to see, with a sinking heart, that the parking lot had been freshly plowed and sanded.

There the glasses were, ground into the sand and snow; they had been run over. One bow (correctly called a "temple") on the side was entirely missing, and the skeleton was bent out of shape. Unbelievably, the super-strong Polycarbonate plastic lenses themselves were not broken—just badly scratched.

I headed straight for the optician, who shook his head and told me that the lenses could not be saved, the missing temple would cost $75 but the rest of the skeleton could be restored — so the new pair of glasses he ordered for me would cost $280 instead of $460. By then, this seemed to me to be a happy ending to the saga. Sort of.

For the past few days, at the end of the first month of 2010, there has been an epidemic of people losing things. My friend Cookie lost her checkbook and it finally surfaced at Trader Joe’s. (I had to pick it up.) My friend Chris in Florida lost her wallet with a lot of money and all her credit cards. Daughter Marina in Los Angeles, on the same night I lost the glasses, was given her boss’s expensive camera to take to an important event and lost it. Not until the next day, after a sleepless night, did she manage to reach so far into the rented van’s middle console that she could feel where it had slipped.

I spent most of last week trying to find the four high-school yearbooks that Marina had packaged in a box at Christmas, asking me to mail them to her in LA by Media Mail. (Big mistake. You can’t track Media Mail.)

After weeks of stalking the USPS by car, fax, internet search and phone, I got a letter from “Loose in the Mails” at the Los Angeles Network Distribution Center, saying that the box had arrived empty. When things become separated from the parcel they’re in, they’re sent to the Mail Recovery Center in Atlanta.

I spent Thursday and Friday filling in forms, taking photos of similar yearbooks, and writing detailed descriptions in hopes that the AWOL high-school yearbooks will find their way back to my daughter, who is heartbroken at the loss. But I feel optimistic that the yearbooks (which all have the title “Blue Moon” on the cover) will be found, as my Sarah Palin glasses were, although perhaps in an altered state.

I’m blaming the Wolf Moon of Friday and Saturday for this epidemic of lost objects. Full moons really do affect things—if you don’t believe me, just ask a doctor or nurse who works in an emergency room.

The Native Americans called this brightest of the full moons the “Wolf Moon” because, in the bitter cold of January, they could hear the wolves howling forlornly as they crept closer to the warmth of the tribal fires.

Maybe they should have called it the “Lost and Found” moon.

Historic Photo of My New England Village

New England is dotted with picturesque villages, each with its own Common or Village Green surrounded by white church spires, an ornate town hall and imposing Colonial and Victorian mansions. Every Yankee will argue that his own village is the prettiest and most historic.

I want to nominate MY village of Grafton MA , which is celebrating its 275th anniversary in 2010, and to share with you what may be one of the earliest photographs taken of the Grafton Common.

But first some of Grafton’s history:

*Grafton, incorporated in 1735, was originally called “Hassanamesit”, a Native American word meaning “place of small stones.”

*Four acres were set aside as common land in 1728. The present town Common is so typical of New England that MGM filmed parts of Eugene O’Neill’s Ah Wilderness there in 1935. MGM built the bandstand on the spot where Grafton’s first meeting house stood. It has become the town’s trademark. The Common holds a big Independence Day concert annually and the Bandstand is the site for prom and wedding photos and festivals year ‘round.

*In the 1800’s Grafton became a national leader in leather tanning and currying and in boot and shoe production, specializing in work boots for slave use in the South. By 1866 there were 10 boot-making shops, two tanneries and several other leather goods establishments around the Common.

*In 1806 Jonathan Wheeler built the Wheeler block, which still houses the Grafton Country Store and other businesses.

*The Congregational Church at the west side of the common has steeple and gallery clocks made by the Willard family, the famed Grafton clock makers. Their original house and clock factory is now a museum, a few miles north of the Common.

*Shoe manufacturer Samuel Wood built the Grafton Inn, the oldest structure on the Common, in 1805 at the intersection of key stagecoach routes from Boston to Hartford and from Providence to Worcester.

Last week the Grafton News, our small weekly newspaper, stated: “As part of this yearlong celebration, the Grafton News is compiling a virtual scrapbook of the town’s history at www.grafton275.org….If you have a historic tidbits or photos that you would like to share, please email them to us.”

Just last year I acquired a wonderful cased image-- an ambrotype of the Grafton Inn, which has functioned as an inn on the Common for its entire 205 years. It’s one of the favorite images in my collection of antique photos. So I scanned it (above) and e-mailed it to the editor with the following letter.

Dear Grafton News,

I am attaching two views of what probably may be the earliest photograph of Grafton you receive.

It’s an ambrotype of the Grafton Inn. Ambrotypes were introduced in 1854 and were popular until 1861. An ambrotype is a negative image produced on a glass plate which becomes positive with the addition of black backing.

(The first kind of photograph, introduced in 1839, is a daguerreotype –an image produced on a silver-coated copper plate. Both daguerreotypes and ambrotypes must be protected by a piece of glass and then a brass mat and then they are kept in a case which opens like a book.)

This is a 1/6 plate ambrotype, which means it is about 2.5 by 3 inches in size. It has black paint behind the image and the paint is damaged. I am attaching one view of the image with the protective mat and one in which I took away the mat so you can see more of the scene. Clearly the image needs cleaning and restoration but I am not expert enough to do this.

This image of the Inn could date from anytime between 1854 and 1861. If you look carefully you can see the figure of a little boy holding the horse and carriage (while the owner of the carriage, inside, is probably taking some refreshment.) There is also a figure in white clothing in the side door, watching the boy. I think it may be a woman with a white apron.

The editor of the Grafton News, Don Clark, wrote back the same day that he intends to publish it both in the newspaper and on the website. So I thought I’d give a sneak preview to the readers of ”ARollingCrone”.

The color photo above is one I took a few years ago, showing the Inn and the Bandstand as they look today.

My Favorite Painting by an Unknown Artist

I fell in love with this oil painting the minute I saw it hanging on the wall of a couple of friends in Cambridge. This (above) is a snapshot I took with my camera, that I keep pinned to the wall near my computer. The flash washed it out a little, but you can see it pretty well.

My friend Caroline found this painting some years ago hanging in a crowded antique shop in Vermont. She asked about it and managed to buy it for a reasonable sum. (She didn’t say how much.)

Turns out this is not really the work of an unknown artist—the painting is named “Last Respects” and dated 1984 and is signed by Eugene A. Fern, who was, according to his obituary, “a writer and illustrator of children’s books.” But as far as I can tell, he’s not a listed artist nor did he ever acquire fame or fortune from his paintings. He is best known for his children’s book “Pepito’s Way.”

Here’s his New York Times obituary in its entirety, dated Sept. 11, 1987.

“Eugene A. Fern, a writer and illustrator of children’s books, died Sunday, apparently of a heart attack, at his home in East Hardwick, Vt. He was 67 years old.

“A professor of art at New York City Community College, now New York City Technical College, for 29 years, Mr. Fern retired to Vermont in 1975.

“Over many years, he wrote and illustrated a number of children’s books, including “Pepito’s Story,” “What’s He Been Up To Now?” and “The King Who Was Too Busy.”

He is survived by his wife, Claire; a son, Arnold, of Manhattan; a daughter, Marcia Boston of Cambridge, Mass., and a granddaughter.”

As I said, I fell in love with the painting at first sight and I didn’t need to know anything about the artist, because it was all there on the canvas. In my mind this was clearly a painted autobiography of a man who had been a fair-haired little boy, a dark-haired teen, a soldier, a groom in a tuxedo, who grew a beard and lost his hair in his later years.

The ghosts of his former selves, transparent and each wearing a golden halo, are clustered around an open coffin that allows us a small glimpse of a white-bearded corpse of a man—the only full-color flesh-and-blood person in the painting of eight individuals.

But the ghosts of the old man’s departed selves are not looking at the corpse; they’re looking at us, the viewer. Perhaps their intense regard is meant to tell us what often was written on tombstones: “As I am now so will you be.”

I find this painting moving and brilliantly composed and painted.

I know that this will cause truly hip and knowledgeable art experts to curl their lip in scorn, because I am aware that realistic and figurative art is not “in” at the moment. Reading reviews of a recent Venice Biennale, I got the feeling that there was not a single painting in it, abstract or not. From what I read, everything seemed to be a video tape or a light show or an assemblage or an installation or a pile of found objects on the floor.

But I’m pretty old-fashioned, and when I went back to painting at the age of 60, I started with flowers and landscapes and stuff, painting en plein air in the hot sun of Greece, but pretty soon I discovered that a painting that has no human figure or face in it tends to bore me. So now I concentrate pretty much on genre, portraits, and figure drawing. All very out of style, but I keep watching and hoping for a return to representational art.

I like to share from time to time my favorite paintings by other artists and I particularly wanted to share this one, because I feel it must have been Fern’s masterpiece and his memoir. He painted it in 1984 when he was sixty-four and he died three years later. He died young, but he evidently saw his death coming and it inspired him to painting this “Last Respects” as a summary of his life and a warning to us.