TWO MURALISTS PAINT THEIR OWN HERITAGE
JOE B. VERRENGIA ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS SCIENCE WRITER
May 6, 1992 Section: LOCAL Page: 32
Copyright (c) 1992 Rocky Mountain News

 

Murals:Their artistic styles couldn't be more different, or their inspirations more alike.

 

Muralist Carlota Espinoza is creating a bucolic landscape that seems ready to float away in the midday heat from the bottom of the Valley of Mexico.

 

The reflection of willow trees shimmer in the calm waters of canals that surround and nourish the Aztecs' prolific raised gardens, or chinapas. Beans, tomatoes, jalapenos and other produce have been piled into canoes and await the languid paddle into the city.

 

Small brown figures nearly blend into the muddy canal banks as they chop reeds for thatch huts and steal peeks at the women grinding corn.

 

Espinoza paints this pastoral setting as if she were laboring in her own mural, steadily and quietly, first the willows, then the marigolds, and so on.

 

"These," she said, gesturing to the mural figures with her brush, "are my relatives."

 

I relate to the Indian blood in myself and the European blood in myself. I feel like I'm being pulled in two directions.

 

"Across the hall, muralist Stevon Lucero acts as if he's having a seizure.

 

His graying hair flops against his shoulders. Paint is smeared on his thick arms and the apron covering his belly. He strides back and forth the 20-foot scene of the bustling central marketplace, or tianquiztli, dabbing colors here and there on life-sized sketches of 125 Aztecas.

 

In Lucero's mural, farmers have spread their produce on the Aztec market's vast courtyard of hardpacked clay. They squat shoulder-to-shoulder with traders peddling exotic wares from the corners of the empire, as well as barbers, potters, weavers and porters for hire, creating a din that could be heard miles away. Towering above the market are the splendidly geometric twin temples of fire and rain, and beyond them the rugged mountains.

 

"I work on everything simultaneously," Lucero said, darting to and fro. ''If I was to get involved with just one guy on the mural, I'd get burned out.

 

"I've redone it two or three times. I'm going to try to give each of the figures a different character. Maybe I'll put my kids in there.

 

"Lucero said he initially had no interest in painting the mural, but relented after considering his own Mexican heritage and experiencing emotionally powerful visions about the project. "I feel like I've already painted it," he said, jabbing his paint-soaked brush toward the proud figure of a warrior, "and these people are inside of me waiting to come out.

 

"While Espinoza had to worry about how to depict a complex agricultural system that disappeared five centuries ago, Lucero's interpretation of the huge marketplace benefits from excavations of the actual Aztec sites in Mexico City today. But his mural is burdened by technical problems of scale and horizon, not to mention creating individual expressions on dozens of close-up figures.

 

Yet the artists' inspirations are much the same. The village where Lucero's grandmother lived traced its roots to an Aztec party sent north by Moctezuma to hide gold and manuscripts from the invading Spanish.

 

"You can feel yourself become a participant," Lucero said. "This is my way of paying them homage. I owe them respect.

 

"Feather Banners: Feathers were to the Aztecs as gold was to the Spanish.

 

The plummage of tropical birds - notably the rare emerald quetzal - was collected for tribute payments to chiefs and nobles. Guilds of feather-workers, or amantecah, wove and stitched the prized feathers into outrageously garish robes, headdresses and banners.

 

Re-creating this painstaking featherwork requires the nimble fingers of more than 100 museum volunteers who have been sewing in shifts since February - 45 days straight at one point - like an Aztec quilting bee.

 

The "quilters" task is considerable: Hand-stitch eight long banners made of turkey feathers dyed in the brilliant colors important to the Aztec world, among them blood red, sun yellow and quetzal green.

 

"It becomes almost a compulsion," said banner coordinator Linda Wilson, affecting a wide-eyed, maniacal look. "Just one more row of feathers! . . . You kind of get addicted.

 

"The task has spawned its own category of Aztec trivia known to museum insiders as "feather facts:" Wilson ordered 40 pounds of turkey feathers from a New York theater supply company; the banners will use 160,000 feathers that each measure 1 inch by 2 inches; and most volunteers stitch a quarter of a square foot an hour, or about one feather per minute.

 

To make a banner, one volunteer uses scissors to snip the feather's sharp quill. A second voluteer secures the feathers in densely packed rows to a white silk background (curly side down, opposite of how it lies on the bird).

 

A third pushes a threaded needle through the fabric as a fourth lies beneath the preparation table and, reaching up, loops it around the shaft of the quill and pushes the needle back up.

 

The result is a simple and strong push-poke stitch. Wilson's standard is three stiches per feather. Modern methods would have saved time, but stitching gives the banners both authenticity and resiliency. They will flutter over a two-story model of an Aztec temple in the museum's glass atrium.

 

"It takes practically no skill to make the stitch, but you need a good eye to consistently place the feather well and make sure it looks right," Wilson said. "Anyway, the Aztecs didn't have hot glue guns.

 

"Scenery and figures:

 

Nature takes three months to make an ear of corn. Karen Pomeroy has needed more than a year.

 

The foregrounds artist is re-creating the details of the lost Aztec lifestyle. Immersing visitors in a typical Aztec moment demands lush foliage, but public health laws and common sense prevent curators from piling tons of perishable produce and blossoms inside exhibits for five months.

 

So Pomeroy is deftly manipulating latex and other synthetic materials to make avacados that won't melt into guacamole under hot display lights and squash vines that twist wildly with tiny tendrils and buds.

 

"It used to bother me when people didn't notice what I did," she said. ''But now I realize it's a compliment when they don't know something is fake.

 

"Across the workshop, sculptor Gary Staab cracks open a fiberglass egg that yields the slight humanoid figure of an Aztec farmer. Staab is making 13 figures for the dioramas, both men and women. Made of painted rubber and fiberglass, they will be silently engaged in weaving, grinding, digging and other pre-Columbian pursuits.

 

"The first thing people look at are their eyes, so getting a convincing facial expression is the most important thing," Stabb said. "Everybody watches people and everybody knows the shape of the body. If something is amiss, it's really evident.

 

"Pomeroy's biggest challenge is making corn, both for the complexity of the broad leaf and its importance to the Aztec civilization.

 

She gave a packet of Hopi blue corn seeds to the Denver Botanic Gardens last spring. She returned in the fall to collect her harvest, stalks and all.

 

Now she is reinforcing the stalks with steel rods and highlighting their tough, woody shells with paint. The corn ears are real, but the silk is made of thread.

 

Impression molds churn out loads of vinyl leaves in three sizes. Volunteers - nicknamed the "God Squad" because they help to create these faux lifeforms - paint details in thin washes so the leaves will appear transluscent when backlit by an artificial sun.

 

The leaves' edges are crinkled and browned with a blow-drier, then varnished for a slight sheen. Insect boreholes actually are the work of a hammer and nail.

 

"I love tedious, meticulous, little details," Pomeroy said. "We're finishing them for a long time."