Pinthila wrap-up

Karen and Natividad, at the end of the class. I'm glad I stayed with it. By the end of the third day, I began to feel comfortable, and by the end of the week, I was stitching in every direction, with much more control. Natividad has been doing this for 25 years, I can't expect to be as fast or as controlled as she is in 35 hours of work!












Michaela's work. She really moved quickly, and created a beautiful design.
















My design at the end of the fourth day. By Friday evening, I had filled in the rest of the shape, and the quality of the stitching was much improved!

We commisserated when we heard a cry of, "No, no, no"!  That meant that someone had accidentally pulled out the last few precious stitches.  Those cries became fewer and fewer by Thursday.





















We had a 'cutting' ceremony at the end of the evening. Maria asked Natividad to walk through the gallery, and talk about a few of the pieces, then asked me to join them, too. I didn't understand much of what was said, but a few things were clear: she loves what she does, and felt a deep attachment to both the art and the process.

It's been a long week. I'm proud to have been in the class, and proud of what I learned. Will I do more? I don't know, but do know that her work has inspired me to look at embroidery in a very different way.

Salud, Natividad!

Am I nuts?!?

By the end of the second day, when Jo Ann and I walked home, we were both questioning the use of our time. We're working from 10 - 2, and from 3 -6, and both of us are struggling just to form the stitch. The class hasn't even begun to talk about textures or creating a design! Jo Ann and Jeannie both drop out, I keep going.

This is the group working at another table. In spite of the humbling process, we're all beginning to talk and laugh. I'm working beside some very talented women this week!

The museum is open, and as people walk through the exhibit, they want to watch and ask questions. It's not distracting, and we take turns answering questions.





Maria Conception, and Michaela, my stitching table partners. I called them my spanish teachers. While they didn't speak any english, they were very willing help with my spanish all week. The only other english speaker in the class also spoke beautiful spanish. Cecelia was helpful, even though she worked at a different frame.

Each day we encouraged each other, and laughed at each other's troubles.



The last day, some of the class went to El Diablo y La Sandia (The Devil and the Watermelon) for lunch. It's a B&B close to the Museum, and Maria catered a delicious and beautiful lunch in the courtyard. By now, we had formed a bond with each other, as people in a common cause do so often, and it was a nice way to end the week. The woman sitting beside me in this photo is from Mexico City, and owns an antique clothing store. She, like Michaela here in Oaxaca, re-works old clothes and makes them wearable. Very talented woman, and very funny.


After lunch, we returned to the Museum, and worked almost 2 hours later than we had all week. The museum staff even found some lights, which allowed us to keep working after dark.





Lunch at El Diablo y La Sandia. Avocado soup with home-made croutons; iced tea without ice; veggie lasagna that was do die for, served with a fresh salad (almost unheard of in Oaxaca; and bfread pudding with chocolate sauce and pureed orange/tangerine served on the side. Delicious!!

Learning to stitch, step one

Learning to make the stitch

The Pinthila class had 18 participants, four of us spoke English as our first language. This is language baptism by fire! We jumped right in, stretching some cheap, polyester satin in a frame, much like setting a quilt in a hand-stitching frame. Natividad, at left in this photo, is showing us how to stitch the fabric to a muslin strip, nailed to the two long sides of the frame.













Nati, as the local women called her, and I stitch the fabric on the second side. After two sides were attached at each of the three frames set up in the courtyard of the Oaxaca Textile Museum, we pulled them tight, and reset the huge nails we were using as pins on the cross pieces of the frame.














Nati then showed us how to hand-stitch strips of cotton to the ends. By ripping the strips lengthwise, we had two pieces to tie around the ends of the big frames. The fabric was as tight as we could get it. All this took about an hour, and the three tables were ready to begin stitching. I pulled up my stool between my friend Jo Ann, and Jeannie, a British artist who now lives in Bali but is travling in Mexico for a couple of years. I need a piece of paper and pencil for that story, too! Across the table sat Michaela, a local artist who owns a shop selling womens clothes that have been re-worked from their original designs. It's a cooperative, and sounds like a place I can't wait to visit. Maria, an embroiderer from Aztompa, a suburb of Oaxaca sat across from me; and Veronica, another local embroidery artist who just couldn't understand my bad prounouciation, and we never did have much conversation, but she did very nice work, and had a quick smile.
The only supply we were asked to bring to class was a size 14 crochet hook. The hook is so tiny, I can barely see it! We used polyester machine embroidery thread, held in the hand below the stretched fabric. In my right hand, I held the hook almost perfectly straight up. Natividad showed us how to punch the hook through the fabric, and with our left hand wrap the thread around the hook, and pull the hook back up through the fabric without catching part of the cloth. A loop is formed. Move the hook, repeat the action. Sounds so easy, and watching her make about two stitches per second, it seemed easy! Oh, what a lesson in patience we are all about to learn!

I spent most of the morning just 'pacing' back and forth, as you can see from the photo here. After a while, I felt a little more confident, and thought I needed to learn how to stitch in every direction, so I began the geometric design. This is the photo I took at the end of the SECOND day of class, after about 12 hours of work. This is not easy! There is not much conversation at our frame the first day, we're so focused on forming just one stitch. By the end of the first day, Jo Ann and I are questioning our capabilities.

Natividad Amador

Pinthila. Nombre de 'pintura' y 'hila'.
Pinthila. A contraction of 'painting' and 'thread'.

That's the description Nativdad Amador gives her medium. From the brochure for the show...." Nativdad studied fine art at the Autonomous University of Oaxaca. At the end of this process, in which she produced graphics and paintings in the fashion of the Oaxacan Painting School, she still had a big concern: "my painting is missing something" she said. With that deliberation she went back to her homeland, Juchitan, and she proposed to focus on the uniqueness of her culture and then assimilate it. She found what she was looking for in the typical Isthmus textiles in it's chain stitch embroidery; also known as 'tejido' (weaving)."


Natividad wanted to work with the people she considered the masters, either because they were her tutors or because she deeply admires their accomplishments. The translated the work, paintings, of those artists. Some of the work is directly translated from a painting, other piecs are a collaboration, with Natividad working in the artists studio to resolve the piece.  In other cases, the artists gave her a 'sketch' and let Natividad freely make the piece.  The other artists included in the show are Alejandr Santiago, Arnulfo Mendoza, Demian Flores, Eddie Martinez, Francisco Toledo, Gabriel Macatela, Gilberto Aceves Naavarro, Jose Villalobos, Juan Alcazar, Luis Zarate, Miguel Angel Charis and Victor Chaca.

All the pieces shown here are stitched by hand.  The cloth is totally covered with stitches.  Most of the pieces are about 25" x 30".  I think there must have been more than 30 pieces, and here are just a few pieces from the show.

When I look at the texture in the stitching, I'm amazed at how she creates that illusion.  It's all about changing the direction of the stitches.  Just covering a piece of cloth with stitches alone would not deliver the same results. 


 While I walked through the gallery that first day, mouth hanging open in awe, I fell in love with a few pieces...more attraction to some pieces than to others, and it was because of the composition.  All the works showed great technical expertise, and successful compositions (imho!)  This piece really caught my eye, I think because of the subtle color choices.  Below is a detail photo.  To get some of the subtle colors needed, Natividad used two threads at a time.  A great, old masters trick with paint; and technically very difficult to stitch.

Next post, I'll tell how the stitch is formed, and post a few pics from the class...
                                                                              

Miramar Weavers, book signing

Our neighbor, Tom Feher, took the photos for a book, written by Judith Radke, about a small village of weavers high in the Mixteca region of the state. The women have formed a cooperative, and are working on marketing their beautiful weavings. The work is all done on the typical Mayan backstrap loom, and is very intricate and complicated. Judith, who lives part of the year in the Boston area, has a beautiful house up towards San Felipe. She and her husband hosted a book signing party for the new book.

This is the two Edith's, both master weavers and both daughters of master weavers. They made the long, difficult trip from Miramar to be at the book signing.















Judith, wearing one of the beautiful shawls. I wish you could see the detail in the weaving...very intricate. And, the fringe on all the pieces was gilding on the lily! This piece in particular caught my eye, and Judith modeled for the photo. The Mirarmar weavers wanted more training in fringes, so they arranged to swap training sessions with a group of Zapotec weavers. The Miramar taught some of the patterns they weave; the Zapotec weavers showed them new fringe patterns.

It was a very nice evening...we met other travelers, and I saw a few old classmates from my Spanish class. It's really a small town!
















This is my friend Jo Ann, my neighbor and the wife of the photographer; and her friend Suzanne. You have to love their embroidered blouses!
















Judith and her husband Warren renovated this old building, creating a beautiful space with great outside areas. I snapped this image, the view from their bedroom looking north. The giant, folding glass doors are in every room, blocking the weather when needed, but keeping the outside close by all the time.

It was a nice evening, and we walked home, stopping for a snack on the way.

More Aztompa pottery

Enedina, son and husband, in their gallery in Aztompa.


















Later, at the artisan's mercado...I love these big pots! No way to get it home, however.


























The colors are as pretty as the colors of the valley. In these pots, I see the sky, the mountains and the flowers.














Aztompa, pop 5,000, is on the edge of the mountains. While it's close to the city, it's still in a different time. We watched this man move his cows through town, one car patiently waiting for them to turn off to the pasture.

We met a couple from NY, and after some conversation invited them to join us for lunch of quesdillas at the restaurant by the artisans mercado. We ordered drinks, and waited for what seemed like an hour. Later, we learned that Jesus, our waiter, had to go fetch the woman who cooks. There isn't enough business for her to hang out at the restaurant all day. She brought her children along, and they played a game at a table nearby while she cooked and we ate.

We got on a bus to go back to Oaxaca, the bus was still on it's outbound direction, but the driver laughed when we told him we'd like 'the tour'. He drove through the little village, where the pavement ended, and we drove through a valley towards a new neighborhood. Cement, two story townhouses, 1,000 of them. Exactly alike, same colors, same floor plan. The driver turned off the bus, and began to sweep and clean. We talked to his wife, who was riding in the front seat with her new baby, and eventually headed back to the city.

Aztomp, Oax.

We've been 'home' for a couple of days from our Guatemala trip, and our neighbors, Eshkie and Gerry invited us to join them to go to Aztompa. There are many things we love out being here: so many arts; so many villages where specific art is made, very close to the city; the food; our little community at Villa Maria.

Aztompa is just west of the huge, important ancient Mayan city of Monte Alban. We can see one of the Monte Alban structures on the hill from our rooftop garden. Aztompa spreads over the western end of Monte Alban, where there are acres and acres that haven't been excavated. But, the city is not looking at it's past so much as looking forward to making more beautiful pottery. The city is known for it's distinctive green glazed bowls. I think every restaurant in the city has several sitting on the burners in the kitchen! These days, however, the artisans are making multi-colored vases, many with holes cut in them. The more skilled artists are making these unglazed figures. Eshkie had the address of one very accomplished artist, Enedina Vasquez Cruz.

Five people (and the driver) will fit in a colectivo, a compact car, and we were six (Rita and Al were with us, too), so I hopped in a separate colectivo. We later learned there was a bus from the central. The trip is just across the river, about 15 minutes away. I had no idea where in the little village we were going, so got out in the center. The others, thank goodness, saw me on the sidewalk, and stopped. Enedina's shop is just around the corner.

This piece, with all the roses at figure's feet, is the second copy. The first is now in a museum in Mexico City. Enedina is recognized all over the country for her skills, and has earned many awards and recognitions. I didn't ask any prices, but am sure this piece was marked at several thousand pesos.


The faces on her sculptures are so sweet! This figure caught my eye...I love the bowl of fish in her hands.

Rita wanted to buy just one of the figures of this group but it's not to be broken up (detailed photo, too). There is time! Enedina will make another one...Rita choses another figure. Some of the work on display in the tiny gallery is the work of her husband and 10-year old son. But, her work is the reason for the gallery, and she's very gracious. I didn't buy anything, but was surely tempted!

Later, we walked to the artisan's mercado, and I'm glad we saw Enedina's work first. The stuff here is fine, but the quality of the work was far below what we saw at Enedina's gallery. I'll post a couple more pics...