From Xico

Pastorelas and Rain at La Ceiba Grafica

Jim and I sat on the veranda of La Ceiba to work on our lithographs last Wednesday. It was during the four hundred seventieth year of the hacienda’s existence. That’s an awful lot of years. A lot of USAer’s brains don’t have cells that can process that many years of history. There was history going on all over the place in the former British colonies that now are the United States of America, but I suspect most of us don’t tend to think of ourselves as coming from anything that far back. Or thinking that it matters. We’re more a cut and run kind of people. Here in our corner of Mexico, and in much of Mexico, history is part of the soul, the past all tangled up in one’s blood and bones with the present.

Las Pastorelas is a good example of this mixing. Las Pastorelas is a dramatization of the trip of the three kings, shepherds, and various others to see the newborn Jesus. Along the way, they encounter Lucifer and his disciples and the Angel Gabriel and his Angelitas who battle each other for the soul of the world, as they often do. As one would expect, evil in the form of Lucifer is ultimately defeated and the pilgrims make it to Bethlehem.

Las Pastorelas is said to be one of the products of the Catholic Church’s efforts to mix Aztec custom and Christianity to make the latter palatable. Specifically, from something like the 7th to the 26th of December, the prehispanic Aztecs celebrated the arrival of Huitzilopochtli, who was their most powerful god, a god of the sun and of war, and patron of the capital, Tenochtitlan. Incidentally, Huitzilopochtli means humming bird in Nahuatl. Here is his image as seen in Codex Telleriano-Remensis

Now this is a very unfair summary because it doesn’t go into Huitzilopochtli's journey through history. I’ll mention that he was one of the Gods that the Mexicas, and then the Aztecs made sacrifices of captive warriors to. To be sacrificed in this manner was considered a noble death, equal in nobility to death in war and death in childbirth. There are legends that those who died in these ways returned to earth as butterflies.
But back to Las Pastorelas. Another pre-Columbian tradition among the Aztecs and their predecessors was to have dramatic presentations of their historical successes. Thus, the Catholics constructed a story of the coming of their god and presented it as an historical success in the Aztec mold.

With time, Las Pastorelas took on its own local flavors and in fact the Church distanced itself from its presentation. Freed from the official oversight of the church, Las Pastorelas permuted into all kinds of local forms, often irreverent. At La Ceiba Grafica, we saw a mix invented by community folks from La Orduña and staff from La Ceiba. Unfortunately, the evening of the performance, it poured cats and dogs. The show started maybe an hour late as cast and crew frantically worked to restage it on porches and balconies and in the lobby instead of the courtyard. But in the end, a good time was had by all.

Here are some pictures of what we saw.

When it was clear there was going to be a substantial delay, people wandered around, some inside to look at the new exhibit, some actually just out in the rain. Note the raindrops caught by the camera.

This is the giant piñata, forlorn in the rain. It never got a chance to get cracked open. For some days after the performance, it hung limp and sad in front of the hacienda's entrance, but then finally someone decided it just looked too bedraggled and took it down.

On with the show! (Sort of.)

Lucifer and his Little Devils make their appearance on the central staircase of the lobby:

Angel Gabriel and his Angelitas appear on the veranda from stage left, a studio-classroom:

The Angel Gabriel was an interesting blend of metrosexual and WWF champion. Wrestling in Mexico, called Luche Libre, is sometimes said to be more popular than soccer/football.

The Fight between Good and Evil. Good looked pretty wimpy, but won anyway.

Somehow, the rest of the show dissolved into an undistinguishable mix of audience and actors. It was lots of fun. We ended up trooping upstairs to the kitchen for bunuelos and ponche.

Lithography at La Ceiba Gráfica

Jim and I are both doing lithography now at La Ceiba Gráfica. At our first session this winter, Martín Vinaver expanded our repertoire of techniques a bit. A complaint I had when I took it last summer was that the tools I had available at La Ceiba seemed only capable of producing very clunky images. I look at the lithographs hanging on the wall there and I cannot believe the artists made them with child-thick crayons and cheap paintbrushes and tuch (a kind of ink that starts as a stick) that seems impossible to get a black line out of or with unevenly pointed crayon-pencils, the tips of which broke when you tried to roll or chip them finer. Obviously I suffered some discontentment though I managed to come up with a couple of passable efforts.

When we asked Martín what else was available, he told us about using carbon paper, Xeroxes, and a kind of plastic sheet, the name of which I have forgotten. He suggested making stamps (I had done this last summer) and using a variety of textured items and using the printer ink itself. We went home and tried this stuff….some interesting results. He also told us there was an actual art supply store in Xalapa which we will go to soon. I think one trick is to get away from thinking only in terms of drawing, though drawings look really good as lithographs. When they're done by someone else, that is. I am still at a loss about how to draw well directly on stone, though I’ve made a little progress. Jim read me a quote about artists liking to keep secrets, and I think we may have run into that a bit. I suspect we will find our own secrets as we go along.

Here Martín (center) explains some techniques.

Lithography was a dying art until June Wayne and Clinton Adams revived it in Los Angeles in 1960 at an institute they founded called Tamarind (the Institute has been located at the University of New Mexico since 1970). It is definitely a labor-intensive kind of art production, but surprisingly flexible, suitable for all kinds of creations. It was a major kind of printing in the nineteenth century. The gaudy illustrations on old-fashioned cardboard cigar boxes were apparently originally lithographs, for instance.

In the States, it is expensive to do lithography. At La Ceiba, Per Andersen and various colleagues and assistants are “mexicanizing” the process so that Mexican artists can afford it. Printing presses are made at La Ceiba and sold at a much reduced cost, the stones are Mexican marble. The ink and crayons are now locally produced (though as my first efforts showed me, they need improvement.) The next step is to make a suitable rag paper locally.

The first step in lithography is to prepare a smooth, clean stone. At La Ceiba, we have to clean our own, removing our own designs. Here Per is watering down the stone in preparation for grinding. Jim is watching. Jim's t-shirt bears a design by grandson Langston, also a print, but not a lithograph.

To polish it, you sprinkle carborundum powder on the surface and then use a grinding stone, a heavy flat disk on a rotating handle, to remove all traces of the design or other marks. Different grades remove different marks. It is important to do this evenly. Here Jim is grinding.

After you’ve put your image on the stone, you submit it to a number of processes which seem to almost completely erase it. But then, magically, with the application of the ink, the image returns.
The stone is placed carefully on the printing press tray. Then it the roller moves over it and back again picking up the image. Generally a test paper, a piece of newsprint or the like, is on the back table and is the first to receive a print.

Here you see the printing press with its roller, the stone at the left, and the test image at the right.

We learn the basics of printing, but it is quite a craft in itself, and mere beginners can't produce a good image. Generally the production of a lithograph is a partnership between the designer and the master printer.
Daniel (below) is the Master Printer at La Ceiba.

Tomorrow, Jim will bring a stone with an elegant geometric pattern he produced from a xerox of a computer design transferred to stone. I will bring a self-portrait. Our first assignment was to do a self-portrait. My effort at La Ceiba was a disaster. Per had given me a giant crayon which I dutifully tried to use. We were supposed to avoid simply outlining our features. I tried to indicate only lights and shadows and ended up giving myself a giant mustache and beard. I was happy to remove the image by polishing the stone and try with a smaller crayon at home. It actually looks a tiny bit like me!

BUT don't think I'm going to be my favorite subject for lithographs!

Follow this link to an article in Spanish but well-illustrated with photos on the process, from one end to the other, of making a lithograph.

A Mish-Mash about Lithography and Our Neighbors

I have not only been going to La Ceiba Gráfica for Tai Chi, but to learn a bit about making lithographs. It is very interesting and very frustrating. Up until maybe the late 1940s or early 1950s lithography was a very common printing process for making all kinds of illustrated material. It was the process used for cigar box illustrations, those gaudy pictures touched with gold. My grandfather, an immigrant from a city in Poland, was a printer. I wonder if he was a lithographer. Per at La Ceiba Gráfica told us lithography dominated commercial Polish printing and that quite a number of Polish printers brought their craft to the U.S. and continued practicing it. When I was a child, I spent a lot of time at my grandparents’ apartment in the Bronx. In one hallway, there was a wide set of shelves that had been turned into a kind of formal table by the addition of a well-made piece of upholstery that hid its original function. On the shelves were stacks and stacks of paper, rejects from the printing shop where my grandfather worked. Many of them had little color samples in a corner at the bottom. I used this paper for endlessly drawing, using a fat fountain pen or one of a myriad of different kinds of pencils that he filled his desk drawer with.

Blanca, our neighbor across the street, comes with me to learn lithography. She is fifteen and in love with horses, especially of the mythical sort. She has a lot easier time drawing her horses than I do trying to draw plants and such. Drawing on the stone is easy and not easy. Dragging a pen with a nib across the smooth surface, I leave crooked lines and bits of ink spray. La Ceiba has been filled this summer with people coming for a week at a time to learn the process: visiting teachers on summer vacation, rich retired men and their entire family, young workers on holiday. A couple of accomplished artists. An older woman who came by herself who also joined us for Tai Chi.

Here is a picture of Gacho, Blanca’s three-legged dog.

Gacho had four legs until last summer when he was hit by a car. I think I wrote already that I found Blanca covering Gacho with a silk cloth outside in the sun one day. The leg had gotten terribly infected and it was clear that he was going to die if something wasn’t done. We took him to our wonderful vet, Marco Antonio Córtez Pérez who said the leg would have to come off, but not until the infection was treated. For weeks, we brought Gacho in to have his wound washed and to get more antibiotics. The operation was successful, and now Gacho is the king of our end of the street, tiny and feisty, growling at interlopers five times his size.

This is a picture of the houses across the street from our house. Blanca lives in the blue one in the middle. Her family has a dirt floor and water that comes from a hose into an outdoor sink and shower area. But while I am sure that Doña and Blanca and Rosi would find life easier with indoor plumbing, their lives are not grim, all things considered.

And here is a picture of Doña Victoria, Blanca and Rosi.

You can click on the pictures to make them bigger.

Yesterday Morning at La Ceiba Gráfica

July 20,2007

Yesterday when I drove up the hill towards La Ceiba Gráfica in La Orduña for my Tai Chi class, I was surprised to see the road lined with cars. It turned out a film crew had arrived to use the hacienda for a setting. Martín, my Tai Chi teacher and one of the two heads of La Orduña, had no idea what they were filming for; renting opportunities to use the hacienda as a setting is just another way of making money.

Martín and I (I am still the only student – what a shame! Martín is an excellent, very patient teacher) have class on the long side of the second story veranda with views through giant old trees of the jumble of small, sometimes crumbling industrial buildings, the old church, and piles of brightly painted houses. And above them, the glorious mountains and the clouds puffing and tumbling slowly around them.

The lesson was not its normal calm and quiet self. Cameramen and technicians and boss-types were everywhere, shouting and climbing as they ran cables and lugged cameras and sound equipment and who knows what else, here and there and here again. At one point Per, the other boss of La Orduña, poked his head out one of the French doors onto the balcony where we were pretending people weren't running up and down alongside us as we practiced our slow, precise moves, and, in what seemed near panic, waved Martín over and rolling his eyes and with all the muscles of his face in a dance of despair said the film crew was going to blow all the electricity! They needed to find another source outside! Martín told me to keep doing what I was doing (I certainly needed the practice) and left with Per, putting a comforting arm around Per's shoulder.

Per is, in addition to being one of the jefes of La Ceiba Gráfica, a scholar of lithography and a master lithographer. A stocky Scandinavian who appears much shorter than Martín though he is not, he is probably in his sixties, with a blocky, shaved head and a warm and nervous smile. I think his current art must reflect his anxieties. He is into skulls. This seems really to be an effort to deal with his own mortality: one bigger piece is a long piece of pleated paper. As you walk towards it from one direction, you see Per. As you walk awayin the other direction, you see his skull.

The electricity did not go off. Martín, the opposite of Per returned, calm and smiling, and resumed the lesson.

There is an updated web page for La Ceiba Gráfica. Check it out here.

The Perfect Tai Chi Chuan Class

The pictures in this post were taken my brother-in-law, Peter.

The first clue that it was the perfect Tai Chi Chuan class came about half way through it when I realized that since the class had started, I hadn't once thought about the fact that on the way, I had driven into a bus. If you've visited, you know that we turn left to the main road right onto a one-way bridge. So there was no traffic on my right when I arrived. A truck came from the left and I was about to turn when a bicycle appeared, being very slowly pedaled. I waited, looked right again, looked left, and another slow bike drifted into view. I waited and didn't look right. I drove into the bus's wheel. Nothing at all happened to the bus, but my car's right everything was pretty much done in. Fortunately, nothing hit the wheel. What the hell, I drove on to my first class in my life in Tai Chi. Among other things, it's supposed to relax you, right?

Martin Vinaver, our friend and the co-director of La Ceiba Grafica is the teacher. I, at this point, the only student. You all can head for your gyms with their studios and fancy equipment. I'll take this for a classroom any day:

The classroom is this balcony on the second floor of La Hacienda la Orduña which is the home of La Ceiba Grafica, a project I've written about before. Here Martin and Per Andersen are developing a graphics school/gallery/residency program for artists in the hacienda which they are, at the same time, renovating. All the renovations must represent pre-1930's styles and techniques.
Here you sees a bench in one of the residency bedrooms set in front of a wall with, I think, Matisse-inspired stencilling. The shelf/box above it is a wooden sculpture.

La Ceiba, by the way, is the tree the Mayans referred to as the axis of the earth, its umbilical cord. Here is the tCeiba tree in front of the hacienda which inspired the project's name.

Here is the kitchen:

The residents cook their meals here, and cooking classes are sometimes offered here as well.

One of the projects at La Ceiba is the making of traditional tiles. These tiles are not glazed ceramic tiles, but rather they are made from a cement-like substance with the colors pressed into them. Here is the making area:

Here are some of the tiles made in this fashion:

Bathrooms are also being restored. Here is the kind of toilet I remember being terrified of at my grandmother's house when I was a child. I think Per made the seat:

And a view of the balcony from outside, to conclude:

La Ceiba Grafica is a wonderful project.

The tai chi class on the balcony was, too. I have taken Pilates, but I have never taken Yoga. Tai Chi after my first class is nothing like Pilates. Maybe it is like Yoga. It is certainly like dancing -- the dance I remember studying for many years all those years ago. The body becomes unified, fluid, even for an old lady like me. The movements bring joy, and, yes, sweat and twinges in the shoulders and in the knees, and, well, you can imagine.