ANN BALDWIN'S ART STUDIO
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The Secret Diary of an Artist
(February 15th 2000)
Last Fall I was lucky enough
to meet Robert Burridge, that well-known colorful California painter (he is
colorful and so are his paintings), and his charming wife, Kate Becker-Burridge.
I was at a small party in the home of Merrill Mack of 'Artventures'. She wanted
us to get together to talk about my experience of teaching a painting workshop
in May 1999 at Las Pozas, that exotic area of Mexican jungle developed into a
kind of surrealist sculpture park by Edward James. This strangely eccentric
Englishman turned his back on his aristocratic origins in the South of England
(where I too come from, though not from the aristocracy) and retreated to a
remote corner of Mexico about 100 miles east of San Miguel Allende in the Sierra
Madre mountains, near a small town called Xilitla. Bob will be teaching a
workshop there this summer so he was interested in finding out what the place
was like.
How do you relay such an experience accurately? Memory tends
to overlay reality with a peculiar veneer of glamour when it comes to vacations.
Of course, this was not intended to be a vacation for me because I was the
teacher. But Merrill was our well-organized and reliable leader so it felt
something like a holiday. As an art teacher at the Downtown Art Center in San
Rafael and at Amsterdam Art in Berkeley I am extremely well-organized. I always
have carefully thought-out lesson plans, which I hand out to class participants,
and I give homework. My materials are prepared weeks in advance. Yet in Xilitla
it was soon apparent that such an approach would not work. My students were a
motley band of lively, intelligent, somewhat eccentric, strongly independent
women artists ranging in age from 50 to 75+. They had their own ideas what they
wanted to do. We had advertised that the workshop would focus mainly on abstract
painting, since that has been my focus in teaching for several years now. Yet
several members of the group had never tried abstraction. For a while they were
quite happy to pursue their own representational subjects - flowers, trees,
plants, birds (one was a bird-watcher), the mountains, waterfalls, and, of
course, the sculptures. We went into the jungle and sat in the shade and painted
everything around us. I was rather disappointed to find that there were
carefully constructed pathways through the exotic vegetation, and stone walls on
which to sit quite comfortably. I suppose I had imagined thick undergrowth
tangled with vicious creepers through which we would hack a virgin path! I
expected large insects in violent colors who would eat of our flesh. The sun, I
was sure, would be deadly at noon. Not a bit of it. There were hardly any
insects at all and, though it was hot and humid at night, the May days were
comfortably warm. My acrylic paints did not dry on the brush before I had
a chance to apply it to the paper, as I'd imagined. There were not many
other people around most of the time - except on the day of the local diving
competition when dozens of young men and a few young women with enviably firm
brown bodies flung themselves one by one from a stone bridge into a deep
swimming-hole. Oh, and on another afternoon we encountered a field trip from the
local agricultural college. Apart from that, only a few mothers and young
children. Quite ordinary really.
No, ordinary is not the right word. There was
something mysterious about the place, a pervasive spirit like the ghost of
Edward slipping in and out of the banana trees, leaning in the shadows of the
extraordinary, towering sculptures which resembled the ruins of once-magnificent
British cathedrals. I felt it particularly one afternoon when the rest of the
group elected to stay back at El Castillo, the house where we were staying. I
walked the two miles of rough road, past the scrubby farmyards where ribbed
cattle grazed on dried grass. Christel, a German woman who had traveled the
world alone and often sought solitude, was my companion until we decided to go
our separate ways. Finally I found myself alone on the side of a hill, staring
across at Edward's crazy spires, which grew supernaturally out of a forest dark
trees. His creations were silhouetted against a yellow-gray sky like
hieroglyphics, unfathomable, indecipherable. AND I KNEW HE WAS THERE....in the
warm air I shivered and felt like an intruder.
Later that day I painted his portrait. With his wild, white
beard and closed eyes he looks like a ghost.
Every evening we would sit on
the terrace of El Castillo, sipping margueritas and showing our day's painted
offerings. Every evening the paintings looked wilder and weirder. Collin, the
bird-lady, who had begun the week with delicate watercolors, started producing
abstracts fractured like brilliant-colored glass. Christel, who had stayed in
her room for days on end, emerged one night with a wall-full of bright patterns.
Pat, an uninhibited child of the 60's, doubled her already prolific output of
psychedelic pastels. Kathy, the American manager of the hotel, who had never
painted before in her life, marveled in her new-found talent. Sandi's layered
abstracts grew deep and dark as Amazon jungles. Eloise, who is an experienced
abstractionist, found mask-like faces crowding her paintings. Maggie focused on
a bright orange door, turning it abstract expressionism. And the strange thing
was I had done almost no direct teaching. We all simply painted, sometimes for
hours and hours at a time, stopping only for meals. It was as if our creativity
unfurled.
I couldn't explain this to Bob Burridge at the party. All I
told him was that the food was fantastic, the pool was wonderful (several of us
swum naked at night in the moonlight), and the 9-hour bus ride from Mexico City
was a serious ordeal but fun to look back on! His trip will be totally
different.
But Edward will be there, ever watchful, as
the artists invade his jungle haven.
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