Final Reflection

From left to right: José Argüello, Romero Cáceres, Sixto Velazquez, Jorge Carema, Estaben Klassen, Miriam Rudolph, Clemente Julios, Zunilda Julios, Eurides Gómez, Marcos Ortiz, Osvaldo Pitoé. 


What a wonderful experience this past week has been for me (and I believe for the artists as well as far as I can tell from their comments and their dedicated participation). It was a great pleasure for me to work with the kindest and humblest people who are always so polite, friendly and patient. It was refreshing to see how they live in the moment: they work when they work, they eat when they eat, and they laugh and share stories during break times. It was a bit strange and uneasy for me initially to eat in complete silence, but once it was explained to me that the whole focus lies on eating when eating, it kind of made sense and I ended up being completely comfortable with that.
I'm content with the work that was made during this workshop and even though the artistic levels varied, each artist made at least one piece he really liked. Most of the artists (unless they are unemployed) make their artwork after hours and on weekends. Not all of the participants work with drawings but with wood carvings - mostly small animals. I think it was mostly the carvers who made the woodcuts with the central animal figure, while the drawers had more elaborate compositions being more familiar with two-dimensional work. Being used to their incredibly detailed and delicate drawings, the rustic quality of the woodcuts takes some getting used to, but the more I look at the prints, the more I love and appreciate them and the more successful I think they are. The paper we used this time took the ink better than last time, but I think the woodblocks weren't as good this year. The images show a lot more deep woodgrain and while this works for some images, it's a bit distracting in others (I had to return half of the first order of wood, because the boards were just too bad in quality even though I had requested extra smooth plates). We used a eucalyptus plywood, which is one of the more affordable softwoods here. Knowing how bad Eucalyptus is for the environment, perhaps I'll have to buy a different kind of wood next time after all regardless of the price. Since several of the artists had requested colour ink, I had decided to introduce the reduction print technique. I had bought a can of red ink (the colour ink selection was quite limited unfortunately) and I showed them how to make a two colour reduction print. In the end this method didn't catch on and most chose to continue to work in black and white.

Several visitors stopped by this morning to see what we were doing and they ended up buying some of the work. Along with Verena's and my purchases, fortunately some work was sold from everyone, so all were happy to leave with some money in their pockets. They were all relieved to have earned some money by the end of the week, since they had taken time off work (despite two national holidays) to be able to participate in the workshop. We had one final meal together at noon and one final big clean up. After that we divided up all the supplies that were left over. Everyone was able to take home a set of carving tools, a brayer and a jar of ink as well as plenty of paper. I hope the artists might be able to continue some of the work, although I understand that their pen drawings require less space and are less time consuming and therefore more suitable to their circumstances.

I'm grateful I had the opportunity again to work alongside a group of wonderful people. I hope I'll meet them all again some day.