Since the French traveler Jean Baptiste Louis Gros, better known as Baron Gros, painted the emblematic silhouette of the volcanoes East of Mexico City, the Iztaccíhuatl and the Popocatépetl as seen from Texcoco, painted in the early 1830´s and shown on top of these lines, the subject became a favorite for painters wishing to explore the exotism of this new discovered land in the years following the war of Independence.
The names of these two volcanos, translated to English, are the White Lady on the left and the Smoky Mountain on the right, and they hark to the Aztec legend when a warrior placed the dead body of her beloved and sat close by to await his own death. Soon snow covered them both forever, making them the perpetual guardians of the Valley.
Local folks nowadays call them Doña Rosita and Don Gregorio, and shamans leave ritual offerings for them, specially because Doña Rosita has got bad fame trapping inexperienced climbers in a nasty topography of deep ravines mostly shrouded with sudden fog banks. Many have found their death in free falls among pointed volcanic rocks or get disoriented by the fierce storms that rage her aparently calm silhouette. Don Gregorio is more easygoing, user-friendly even though he shakes violently and puffs smoke to show he is still living and kicking, active to the point that in the past twenty years his crater has routinely contributed to Mexico City polution with a heavy coat of volcanic ashes.
In the second period of the Academy of Fine Arts, in the mid XIXth century, Eugenio Landesio, an accomplished painter of Italian origin trained in the Romantic and Nazarene stronghold of the St. Luke Academy in Rome, made the high altitude skies of the Valley of Mexico the perfect counterpart to the rugged silhouette of the peculiar profile of these mountains as can be see here below from the Tenayo Heights painted in 1870.
One of his most acomplished students was José María Velasco, who succeeded him as Chief Professor of the landscape class for the students in the now renamed Fine Arts School at the time of the Restored Republic under President Juárez, which survived into the first years of the 1910 Revolution and the presidency of Francisco I. Madero. Velasco was the author of this huge oil painting made in 1892 of the Valley as seen from Santa Isabel Heights.
Academic paintings aimed to compete with the photographic realism and Velasco was a consumated artist to the point of distorting the Valley proportions to suit the composition and making it in such a way that the viewer became his accomplice in the visual trick. The ideal of the Porfirian era -to show the world a new and vibrant country, finally en route to material progress thanks to the years of political stability the dictatorship had provided- was represented in his work. Those huge, empty and beautifully wild scenarios, under infinite skies, were the best publicity for a country rich in natural resources and open to foreign investment to further boost its growth.
The Revolution of 1910 changed many perspectives in Mexican life. Addressing the subject of this blog post, the biggest change was done in a formal way. The Impressionism and Symbolism were already old trends in Europe at the time but in Mexico the were discovered much latter in the years before the Revolution as a reaction to the extreme academicism. The new Fine Artes School and the Open Air Mexican Barbizón experiment offered the posibility of getting some independence from the obssesive accuracy of the Academic style of painting. Far was the time -some fifty more years ahead- when the abstract, the vogue of the first decades of the XXth century, became trendy.
Gerardo Murillo, better known by his pseudonym, Dr. Atl, was one of the main landscapists of the time, contemporary to Francisco Romano Gullemín and Fernando Best Pontones, the first still influenced by the Impressionists and the second tending to a Seurat-like pointillism. Under these lines, in the painting representing the Valley and the volcanoes Dr. Atl displays his trademark freedom in the use of color and composition, indebted to the Fauves and the German Expressionists.
Then a tiny masterpiece: a watercolor by Jose Hanhausen, made in 1977. One of the hundreds he did in a span of a little more than 50 years.
A no-brainer once you get to draw the silhouette, the heavy stuff comes afterward because when unaware and happily smearing colors, the subconcious mind pops in, uncontrolled when not harnessed to the Academic way of doing it. The result is the shell of the outer geography with character and mood of the painter inside.
José Hanhausen´s aquaintance with the Popocatepetl was first hand. As a young man he had climbed it several times and the epic story of the time he and his friends, young, untrained and inexperienced Architecture student got together in the dark hours, drove more than an hour to reach Tlamacas at the feet of the volcano and started to climb it, with the romantic plan of being able to watch the sunrise from its slopes ended up when a sudden deep freeze, set under the most transparent dark- blue-purple sky, sent them down as fast as they could, for to attempt climbing the Popocatepetl with nothing more than woolen coats, woolen scarves, gloves and caps and hard country shoes, plus a bag of oranges was not exactly the best idea.
Next time they did better and reached the Ventorrillo, a deep hole in the west side of the mountain probably made by the hit of a meteorite. A third time a quick storm forming over Tlamacas, the pass between the two mountains sent them back to the car and the highway.
But even with those brief encounters with their commanding nature, he was able to feel those mountains good enough as to paint their mass and shape from memory. 1977 was a year after his mother´s death, event that seemed to mark for him the starting of his old age at 58. His mourning had become a steady melancholy that poured out in dreamy watercolors of the valley´s mountainous skyline or humble potted plants in colorful Talavera recipients.
After a brief historical capsule on the genalogy of the visual subject, now comes why this post has to do with a line from a song of Waylon Jennings, a late Texan country singer, speaking about breaking with the tradition of Hank Williams, a legend in the early years of that musical style.
"It's the same old tune, fiddle and guitar
Where do we take it from here
Rhinestone suits and new shiny cars
We've been the same way for years
We need to change"
I know the feeling. Here I am recently aiming to paint that same tradition-sanctioned subject: the Iztaccíhuatl and the Popocatépetl and well, "we need to change" The same thing, yes, but no one will mistake the one done in 2010 with any of the predecesors. And not exactly because of the date.
"Old Hank made it here, we’re all sure that you will
But I don't think Hank done it this way
I don't think Hank done it this way"
Borrowing the angle of the Baron Gros painting and the protagonism of the volcanoes in José Hanhausen´s watercolor, this one came out somewhat different. All of a sudden in a gloomy morning in December 2009 I found myself attempting a nice 10x8" foreshortening of the Volcanos as seen from the Iztaccíhuatl. All started as a dreamy rendering in deep turquoises and black of the Cerro de la Estrella, a mesa-like crater in front of them but not for very long.
I had never attempted that subject before, but also I had never thought I would become a landscape painter at 49. I was taking baby steps into doing my own version of José Hanhausen´s trademark subject. In January 2010 Professor Earl handed me a commanding size masonite board and the order to gesso it. Huge at 31x23" compared with the delicate 15.5x3.5" strip of the 1977 watercolor over Fabriano hard grain paper it was the proper surface to attempt that legendary subject.
I used palette knives and a flat brush to create the rugged topography almost monochromatic, after using bold complementaries of purple and yellow. It took weeks and weeks of work. Little by little a dramatic sunrise behind the Popocatepetl started coming up. Not easy at all to reproduce in a photo, since a coat of transparent blue smalt brushed on with my father´s watercolor flat brush, my hands and a rag is responsible of the bluish shines that appear in the surface of that painting, depending from where light hits it. The more I have been around attempting to paint skies the more I believe that God must use His hands to do them everyday .....
I´m recovering my homeland thru painting my personal memories of a land long gone. I had never climbed those mountains, the closer has been getting to Tlamacas and Nepantla where their commanding presence is so powerful. Yet I saw my father paint them over and over from the living room of the department we lived in for the first 14 years of my life, where that awesome sight was the ornament of the panoramic window in the front of that building.
With this painting the chain has another link: Margarita Hanhausen Cole painted the sunrise over the Iztaccíhuatl and the Popocatépetl in 2010.
Yes...."I don't think Hank done 'em this way"
Even raising on the shoulders of giants, as Michaelangelo used to say, I feel far from Waylon´s lyrics " You finally got it made".
Seems to be the first miles of a long road. Quite bold, for painting my homeland´s landscapes in a foreign land is not the quickest way to gain acceptance among the locals. But then again, if there is no road available, leave a trail... and that is exactly what I´m doing.
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