Mexico Trip Paintings Part I: Cuautla

I am back in Ithaca again after a pretty incredible trip in Mexico and Guatemala. I took my watercolors and painted pretty much everywhere I went. Now I have a stack of more-or-less postcard sized paintings that altogether look like a visual journal of my trip. I think of them as little sketches that I could do more with or not. 

My first stop was Cuautla, Morelos, a town where I spend a semester in the fall of 2008 living with an incredibly sweet and generous host family, working with a local artist, and learning about Mexican history, literature, social movements, and Spanish. On this trip, I was able to visit a lot of people who were very important to me that semester as well as see some places surrounding Cuautla that I had never been to, namely Tepotzlán and Cuernavaca.

I mainly painted places rather than people. Places tend to hold still longer than people, so they were easier. Also, when you paint people they tend to want to keep the paintings, so that is also why I don't have many. I have a habit of giving away portraits. 

Without further ado, These are places I saw in Cuautla, Morelos during the first part of my trip:

Emiliano Zapata Grafitti! Viva México!

Three small children were very interested in watching me paint this:

While I was painting this one, this old guy started reciting poetry to me in Spanish:

The painting below was my personal favorite from the Cuautla set. It is the ex-convent of San Diego turned train station/art space/theatre/studio for karate lessons/make out hub for local high school students/museum. I love Mexico.

Laundry Time

I painted a mural in the laundry room of my house! I started it almost a year ago with help from my friends Marika and Abby and then I forgot about it until this week. I am heading to Mexico tomorrow to visit many, many people including an amazing artist who I worked with while I was studying abroad there. We collaborated on a mural so as I was planning this trip, I was like, "Hooray for seeing Rolando... Maybe I will see the mural we painted... Murals... Oh right, I was painting a mural wasn't I?"

Yesterday was my birthday, and I spent a lot of it napping and painting this mural. Just livin' it up over here, in Ithaca! The mural is based on some photos and watercolors I made last summer in Vacaville, California.

See? Now when we're ironing, we can pretend we are in the central valley in the summer time and not a basement! And on that note, I won't be posting again for another month or so because, as I said, I will be in Mexico.

¡Nos vemos!

Tiny Couch and Some Art Also

My dad is visiting me this weekend! Yesterday we went antiquing. It is sort of a tradition of ours that we go antiquing whenever he's in town. He knows so much about so many things that people have made, particularly American art and craft from the Civil War era through the mid twentieth century. One antique place had an old rope bed. It is a bed with a wooden frame and where we now have things like springs, they once used ropes to hold up the mattress. When the ropes got loose you had to tighten them so your bed wouldn't sag. This is why we say, "sleep tight." Isn't that cool?

Also we bought a tiny couch!

We think that the tiny couch was either used for small children or it was a salesman's sample. Furniture salesmen used to travel with these mini versions of the furniture they were selling so that people could see all of the things they could buy without having to lug around a ton of furniture. Now it is the perfect size for a stuffed dragon.

Behind the tiny couch and dragon, you might notice the infamous ugly apartment painting that I have yet to complete (but I DID work more on last night). I thought it would have been funny if my dad didn't like this painting because he finds that building so ugly, but he does indeed like it. He says it reminds him of a southern plantation.

I also painted a quick little sunset piece last week. I usually don't paint in pink and purple, but it looks like candy. Also it looks sparkly because it is they view out my bedroom window through a screen and that makes lights look kind of fancy and twinkly. Now when I look at this painting, all I see is pink and purple and sparkles. All it needs is a unicorn. 

I must be doing something right though, because I already sold it. Hooray!