The Madness of Ocumicho

Ocumicho sits at the foot of a volcano in the state of Michocan, Mexico. It is not the Mexico that you imagine of deserts and sombreros but is vast and beautiful peppered with extinct volcanoes and lakes. It wavers between looking like the Lake District with cacti to looking like August in England after a long hot summer. The women take great pride in their appearance wearing the traditional reboso and plaiting their hair. Their colourful attire is in marked contrast to the adobe , wooden and now concrete structures. Ocumicho was until recently only accessible along a dirt track, which was impassable during the wet season. At an altitude of 2800m and enjoys cold nights and warm days.

Ocumicho has a long tradition of making utilitarian in pots and that would have continued if one of the villagers had not turned his dreams into clay. He turned clay into devils. Everyone laughed a first but when he started to attract the attention of collectors and traders, the village started to mimic his style of work. He died young in a drunken brawl. However his style continues four decades later.

It is mostly the women who work the clay. Eighty percent of the men in the village work in the USA. They have pit kilns in their houses and keep the completed pottery preciously wrapped in the bedrooms. They give free reign to their imagination and no two pieces are alike.

After the Spanish conquest images of native gods were replaced with Virgins, saints, devils and angels. They work with their own myths folklore but also weave in ideas from contemporary culture seen on the television and ideas brought by foreign buyers. When we went their the was a representation of the 9/11 with a plane crashing into the twin towers, women screaming for help on their mobiles and flames licking the towers while a crowd of horrified onlookers just stared. A Bayeaux tapestry of today. There was also a reworking of the Last Supper by Leonardo Da Vinci with mermaids eating watermelons.

This skeleton bride is hand made from clay in the state of Michoacan in Mexico. The artist, Alvaro de la Cruz, draws on the tradition of Mexico. The Aztec past and the subsequent Spanish influence. The skeletons are directly inspired by the work of the graphic artist Posada, as is much current Day of the Dead imagery.

Posada was a link between the pre-Columbia past, the folk art traditions and the art of the muralists. There was a revolution against the art of Spain and Europe. They wanted to create art that would go back beyond before the Conquest, which would be original to Mexico popular and authentic.

Alvaro De La Cruz uses the decorative techniques from the pottery-making village where he lives and grew up.

The skeletons come in all many guises- nuns, guitarists, brides, fishermen, cowboys and Catrinas. We have a constant procession of them gracing our shop.

It was one of the last days in April. The first rains arrived that night. As we sat in Isidoro Cruz’s house, we were cold as only you can be cold in the tropics when the temperature is 13 degrees centigrade. The excitement and relief of the rains arriving was tangible. Water is life in Mexico. It was a torrential down pour that surrounded us in white mist. We had to raise our voices to be heard Its arrival was announced with lightening that lit up the purple dessert and frightened the children. The turkeys took shelter under a tree unable to stand the noise of the rain on the tin roof. Isidoro Cruz fed us blue corn quesadillas, pork scratching, bananas from their stem and a papaya from his garden, We drank week coffee. The beans grown in his garden. He had the week before given us a papaya and had asked us to return the seeds so he could replant them. This is the story that he told. In 1970 the village of San Martin was a subsistence-farming village. As a young child he made his own masks. There was a tradition was making wooden toys and farm machinery. Ox can still be seen working the fields with a wooden yoke. The carving boom can be traced back to a couple of artists Isidoro Cruz from San Martin and Manuel Jimenez from Arrazola. Arrazola was form many years the fragment of a vast sugar hacienda, located on the plain below the ruins of Monte Alban. As a child Manual Jimenez herded goats and made models of the goats from clay. He moved from one job to another. It was when he was thirty- five years old that his carving was spotted by a local gallery owner Arthur Train. “Mine is a sacred history… I am not just anybody. I am a real tiger. I was born intelligent. Everyone here is living off my initiative. If I hadn’t started carving none would be doing anything. I invented the whole tradition. They should make a statue of me in the plaza with an arrow pointing to the house, and rename this street Jimenez Street. The carving boom started in 1985. In 1982 Mexico had devalued the pesos as oil prices dropped. The government had to pursue growth through exports. This meant the price of Mexican art work was favourable to buy and export to the USA. The wood carving boom took place in three villages San Martin, La Union and Arrazola. It transformed the lives of the carvers. Anyone born before the 1950’s in one of those villages would have been poorly fed, illiterate and lived in poor housing. The villages changed in a short time from subsistence farmers to building their own homes and sending and keeping their children at school. The wooden carvings are inspired by the villagers life, the universal world of dreams-nature, spirituality, superstitions, myths, folk stories and religion. They carve virgins, angels, animals, devils, hybrid humans and animals. Many of the villagers continue to farm, carving in their spare time. Most carvers strive for realism in their carving and fantasy in their paintings of the carvings. “ Live animals look beautiful because they are alive. Wooden animals painted the same way wood look sad.”

The trees of life are from Mexico. They are vivid in colour and joyful in design. They are made of tin, iron and clay. They influence of the Aztec past and the Catholic present can be seen in the choice of colours and imagery. They offer a tree at Christmas time without the lost of space and abundance of needles. They can be used year after year so it could be said have a green advantage.

One village in Mexico called Metepec is particularly renowned for making painted terracotta Trees of Life. However trees of life are made all over Mexico, each region having it’s own distinctive style. Trees of life are present in all civilisations. They represent fertility, a motif for religions, philosophy: a concept for interconnectedness on our planet. In Christian art Trees of Life represent earthly paradise, the Garden of Eden and the forbidden fruit.

After the Spanish invasion of Mexico, 500 years ago, Mexican art has become a hybrid art embracing several cultures. The Spanish introduced a Christian take on Moorish styles and traditions. The indigenous contribution can be seen in a preference for strong colours, the abstracted figures and the syncretism of Aztec and Mayan Gods into Christian Art.

The Mexican Trees of Life traditionally represent the myth of Adam and Eve’s banishment from Earth but interpreted through indigenous religious beliefs. They also represent Earth’s fertility, which involves dying to be reborn. The tree form is now used to depict many different stories including trees of death.

Milagros has an ever-changing collection of trees of life made from tin, iron and clay, from various regions of Mexico and by different artists in those regions.

Until the age of twenty Marie Jimenez was an embroiderer. She started painting wooden creatures that her brother had carved. She has a fine and intricate painting style, which reflects an eye for detail. Each piece can take up to three days to paint. Like her neighbours she started by copying the other carvers designs and covering her figures in polka dots. They did not sell well. She describes how one morning we went out into the fields. It was a beautiful day….barely raining. The desert looks wonderful in the rain. There were flowers, green leaves, yellow stalks, so many colours. And I ask myself, “ How can I paint like this? That’s how it started. That’s how we all start by seeing the beauty around us.”She is one of the most successful painters and is unusual for being a woman. We sell the work of Marie Jimenez in our shop.

Stork and elephant by Marie Jimenez.