CONVERSATIONS WITH ARTISTS IN SAN MIGUEL DE ALLENDE / BY MARGARET PAUL

Excerpt from the book, “Conversations with Artists in San Miguel de Allende” by Margaret Paul.

 

In an essay written in 1917 called, “Art as Technique”, the Russian formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky discussed something he called ‘defamiliarization’. He maintained that, “the automatisation of perception must be zealously guarded against, otherwise life is reckoned as nothing. Habitualisation devours work, clothes, furniture, one’s wife and the fear of war… Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stoney… to impart of the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known….to make objects ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult, to increase the length and difficulty of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.”1.

J

ust by chance, I came across Viktor Shklovsky’s name and the term “defamiliarization” while I was working on my article about Edgar Soberón. I had interviewed Edgar in 2008 and had only begun to put my notes into some kind of cohesive form nearly four years later. Shklovsky’s ideas immediately struck a chord in my attempts to understand Soberon’s work and his approach to art. When I met Edgar again in the early months of 2012, I asked him if he knew of Shklovsky’s essay Art as Technique and he responded enthusiastically. “Victor Shklovsky is one of my influences. I read his wonderful essay in art school. Since then, his ideas have lingered in my mind. If you see his influence in my work then I feel I have succeeded in some way.”

 

 

At this moment, Edgar is working on a huge painting, which sits on an easel in the centre of the large room which serves as his studio. The subject of the painting is a variety of common vegetables on a round plate against an intricately patterned background of muted pastel colours. In the centre of the plate is an outline of a square surrounding a handful of seeds. I feel a sensation of falling as I look at the seeds and I seem to be perceiving the painting, not with my eyes but with a different unnamed sense. I ask Edgar if he has intentionally tried to draw the viewer into the painting as if into another world. “I am painting this shadow here in the corner. Now I am having to go into it to take the light back out. The pattern behind the plate began as a very colourful idea but I ended up taking all the colour out of the background. It was too much. I want all the colour to be in the centre so that there is focus. When you start to work like this you can lose yourself and you have to remind yourself to be more objective. I put seeds in the centre of the painting and it was only afterwards that I realized I was copying the design in the centre of that ceramic platter up there.” Edgar points to a large, very old plate hung high on the stonewall near us.

 

“The symbolism of the sun and the seeds and of course, life, these are an ancient tradition in pottery. All of these images connect and it is kind of nice to plan some of these things in advance but it is also pleasing to discover their hidden symbolism as you’re doing it. This opens another door for selecting, editing and emphasizing certain elements. (Its Beautiful) Beauty is found in the very process of making. It’s not just the idea. The ideas that the image can evoke are important but one should also be creating something beautiful which evokes an emotional resonance. When I taught in New York, I used to send my students to the Forbes Magazine gallery next door where often there were original documents or drawings on display. I still recall one particular document, it was Lincoln’s original Gettysburg Address. It wasn’t only Lincoln’s words that were beautiful but their execution, the way the ink was applied on the paper was perfect. Something wonderful happens when those two things meet. There is a connection between that which is made or manifest visually or physically, and the idea behind it. There is a unity or rather wholeness about it all when they come together. It makes one kind of happy to be able to experience it.”

 

“In his essay, Schklovsly talks mainly about poetry. In the most erotic literature, all of the parts of the body are given another names. In order for them to become erotic you can’t have that direct cognitive approach. A metaphoric approach allows something to become whimsical and beautiful. The breasts are pidgeons or doves for example. In this painting of vegetables on a plate, the forms are voluptuous. They have personality, texture. I try to do that with my still lifes. They are a metaphor for something that in many ways can be personified and they can be related to as we relate to the body, to our anatomy. I use nature, fruit, flowers and forms, in a way that brings to mind the human body, because I strictly keep the human form out. But strangely enough, by denying the human form it always seems to be present in the work. I was trained using the figure, I still think it is the best way to train the eye and to to learn to see form. In most museums we are confronted with depictions mostly of faces, and heads, portraits of important people or not so important people. Or there are nude bodies engaged in heroic or mythical events. My paintings are in some way a response or perhaps even a rejection of these obvious historical hierarchies, which define portrait and figure painting as lofty and landscape and still life and lowly genres.

 

My still life paintings are a way of representing the world through a very limited set of principles and ideas that are based more on drawing, design and the formal elements of painting. I would like people to look beyond the surface of my paintings. The viewer might say, ‘It is so real’, but in fact it is not. I am interested in that duality or ambiguity. As Schklovsky said, art should cause us to see the familiar as though we had never seen it before, as though it was strange. Many years ago I read a book called A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. In it the main character, a young girl, talks about the “first time and the last time” of anything. I never forgot that. I believe we should try to live our lives as though we were doing things for the first time, or the last time. I try to incorporate that into my paintings. It connects back to Schklovsky, to see something again, as experienced. Experience itself should become meaningful and the only way to bring meaning to experience is to be present, to be present with all of your being. That’s what painting should trigger. That’s what poetry should trigger. Of course, you can’t do all of these things intentionally. Art does not come to us that way. You can’t say I’m going to be an abstract painter or I’m going to be objective, now I’m going to express sorrow, now I’m going to express joy.

 

This is not possible but what you can do is to have a creative process such as painting or drawing along with some ideas and principles that guide you and which open the way for something to actually happen. Perhaps then joy and sorrow will be made manifest through abstract or realist means. The viewer will then receive the work in the same direct and spontaneous manner, if he is open. Works that are didactic and hit you like an axe have an immediate impact but often the effect quickly dissipates. They are trying to drive home an agenda and art shouldn’t do that. My idea of great art is Vermeer’s paintings. There is a woman in a room reading a letter. Apparently not much is really is happening. It is a moment in time but when you get into that little painting, it becomes a world. You begin to dream with her about the letter. The light coming in the window, every object in the room becomes a sensual, emotional encounter that triggers a personal narrative for the viewer. Never mind what Vermeer was thinking. That’s not important. Through the process of making something he has you engaged in your own personal relationship with this woman from the 17th century.” One can spend hours looking at one of his paintings as if reality had somehow been transcended or made more mysterious, here we were seeing as if for the first time.

 

I feel the remembered presence of a friend as Edgar speaks about one of the things he loves most and I recall the first time we met. It was in this same studio at the top of a steep hill at the end of Calle San Francisco where Edgar paints in a courtyard surrounded by three hundred year old stonewalls. He is a warm, intelligent man who clearly loves to discuss art and art history. Before I could turn on my tape recorder we were deep in conversation about the differences between artists in San Miguel today and those who came here in the past.

 

“Artists who came to San Miguel fifty or sixty years ago understood and accepted that art was not something through which one becomes rich or famous in fact there was really no chance of that at all. These artists perhaps approached their endeavors in a monastic way. They knew the financial rewards would be small. They came to San Miguel to live a life that allowed them to paint without being consumed by the system. The art world has changed over the years and the proliferation of art institutions and degree programs has certainly affected all of the Arts. The Arts became a career. But even before the advent of the art careers track, the seeds had already been planted with the likes of art personalities such as Pollock and Warhol in the United States, and I think to some degree before them, maybe with Picasso. Artists became a kind of celebrity, ‘les enfants terribles’ who were world famous. In today’s art world, the media, television, the Internet definitely play a big part in the creation of an art star or an icon. Manufacturing a persona who is supposed to embody an entire generation is a distortion. It creates monsters whose role is to lead us into yet another bright, utopian future in art. The cult of personality is what I am talking about.”

 

“The truth is, art evolves gradually. It takes time to cultivate, like the word ‘culture’, like a plant, art needs the proper light and circumstances. Nowadays a young person leaves art school and immediately wants a show, expecting a part in this world of fame, glamour. It is not so much how talented that person is but how they play the game, how they market themselves. Do they say the right thing at the right moment? The dealers are behind it, and now the museums as well. Museums, dealers, and curators act as a triad. They run the show not unlike that of the Fashion world, what’s in what’s out for the season?

 

The gallery owner today whether in New York or in San Miguel, is no longer investing in artists.

 

Years ago, artists often worked with one dealer who bought work from them outright. Dealers came to your studio, looked at your work and if they liked what they saw, they promoted the work; they made a commitment because they believed in what they saw and the person making it. They printed catalogues, had shows, place the work in in reputable collections and so on. They made a commitment. Now galleries take artists’ work on consignment. They display it, they might give you a show, they may or may not make a catalogue and distribute it to those on their mailing list, but regardless of their stature in the art world, whether they are large or small, galleries will take 50% off the top on every sale and they won’t budge. It is insulting that a gallery who doesn’t represent the artist, publish catalogues, or promote his or her work with collectors and museums, can take five hundred dollars from every thousand dollars it charges for a painting. The art suffers and the artist who is trying to express something solid, is pushed more and more to the margin.”

 

“Artists nowadays have strategies. They come up with a theme; it could be political, religious, whatever. They package it, they put together twelve or fifteen works, put a price tag on them, and then try to get the dealers to jump on it. Younger artists do it but older artists are sometimes guilty as well, if they don’t see the public responding to the slow development of their skill, the honing of the eye, the refinement of what they are trying to say. So you see, not only have artists changed but also the system itself has changed. That is what has happened to the art world. It is reflected everywhere you go. In New York, what I am describing is a very sophisticated machine. I know because I lived in New York for twenty-eight years. I taught drawing and printmaking at Parsons for ten years.”

 

Parsons New School of Design, as it has been known since 2005, is an art school in New York city which was founded in 1898 and in spite of having gone through some structural changes over the decades, has always prided itself on being a leader in the field of design, particularly in the industrial arts. I ask Edgar to trace his journey from Cuba, where he was born, to New York and now to San Miguel.

 

What influenced you to become an artist?

 

“Two things. One, I was born in Cuba in 1962 when Cuba was in transition. The revolution had started in 1959 so I was born in the midst of all that. Many Cubans left in the sixties but we stayed on. Because they didn’t want to go into exile, my parents decided to stay and experiment with Castro’s dystopia for eleven years. Finally, in 1971 we left for Spain. From an early age I had shown ability in art. I had always been able to paint and draw. It was something that was part of my life. Not a family trait as far as I know, it was more of a genetic mutation. My circumstances growing up encouraged something that was natural in me. You can have a gift but if the environment doesn’t encourage its development, it will come to nothing. I think leaving Cuba was a shocking event for me. Painting and drawing helped me make sense of the world, helped me make a whole out of the pieces that resulted in our case, from being cast out. We were leaving and not coming back. People who are exiled are left with fragments of who they are, not only personally but the entire family is also affected. Art is a kind of refuge for the mind. It gave me something solid to hold onto. We went to Spain for three years and on to New York. I am thinking back as we talk. I was thinking about this a month ago. How did I get here? It is funny you ask me these questions now.” The second thing was visiting to the Prado Museum in Madrid as a boy, I remember walking those rooms filled with great paintings and being absolutely thrilled. It was the first time I had ever been in a museum, it was there were I first saw still life paintings, that memory has remained with me since.

 

Edgar indicates a collage that hangs on the wall behind us. “I used to do collages like this one about fifteen years ago before I began to paint still lifes. The collages were influenced by Schwitters and Picasso, and were a way of putting together the pieces. I called them my Cuban cubism. I was trying to interpret ideas and images I had when I was in art school. Later I moved to still lifes, which are my way of creating serenity, a stasis, symmetry and a balance. That’s what I look for in my work. There is a thread there, back to the circumstances of my growing up.”

 

“One also has to give credit to the teachers that guided us. It was a high school teacher who recommended I attend Parsons. He also went out of his way and made all the phone calls necessary to get me an interview. I went there on a scholarship in 1983 and graduated in 1987. In 1992 I was called back to teach and I spent ten years on the staff there. Looking back now, I can’t help but see the events in my life have something of a unity. What did Socrates say? The unexamined life is not worth living. Self-reflection is important because it forces you to think about what you are doing and why. How did you get here? In all the things I have done, it seems like there was a plan. There was an unintended intention. What is guiding us is usually what is inside. If you are listening to who you are and you are doing what you want to do, the right things happen. I feel lucky to be doing what I was doing as a child. Most children are natural artists but it is hard to keep the child alive inside you. I am making collage and painting and drawing and it looks more serious but it is still a kind of play.”

 

“My work is not like the constantly changing experience that seems to dominate the art world today. It seems that now the only thing you can count on is change. Artists are constantly changing because that is what the market wants. A lot of what you see is not so accessible. As an experience, the viewer is not really sure what he is looking at. It has nothing to do with the old dichotomy of abstraction versus representation. There is no immediacy in a lot of what you see today, it has been all very well orchestrated and packaged it seems. An abstract painting A good painting is something that is very immediate. It is intelligible or not regardless of its style, technique or school. It either works for you or not but it reaches you on a one to one level. Art today seems to be mediated by something else and in order to get to it, you need to know what the artist is trying to convey. There is always something in between you and the art. There is a disconnect here and the viewer often feels stupid because the art isn’t accessible. As a painter, if you don’t speak the current language, if you don’t use the fashionable pattern, you are not wanted.” Edgar looks at the painting he is currently working on, a still life of fruit on a table. “A picture like this is based on value, tradition, drawing, skill. It is even academic. If you paint a picture like this, they don’t want to see you and simply deride the work as academic. They want something that stirs the pot. They are looking for novelty. This is passé. It has already happened. But as I often told my students why be a victim to ones own time? Why not paint something that would have communicated three hundred years ago and will still communicate three hundred years from now, as it communicates today? All great art is timeless one learns this lesson in the great museums.

 

I had students who could draw so beautifully but that skill was not valued, in a few years they had either dropped out of Art School or had joined the Duchampian ranks. It requires courage for a young person to follow through on their own terms or find a teacher who will encourage them to cultivate their individual talent. make their dream come true. This is especially true for a nineteen year old who is told in Art School, limit yourself communication to this prescribed language. Limit yourself to what is happening now. That person has to somehow search out a teacher or support system that will help them stay on the right path.”

 

“By all of this, do I mean that we have to return to the models of the past in a desperate attempt to erase the mistakes 20th Century Modernism and Art Education? The answer is obviously no; we can’t go back to the nineteenth century models or any other period for that matter. We must work from were we are and accept all of the great contributions of modernism. Are we all going to paint like Rembrandt or Courbet? No. The art school system has to go back to its foundations. Kandinsky, Picasso, Mondrian the most revolutionary artists of the 20th century were great because they understood and were trained in the Fundamentals of Art and Design. We have to go back to those fundamentals, teach the humanities, history. We need teachers who can draw and paint and can teach those skills. This is what we tried to do at Parsons in the 90’s. A student needs to be provided with the knowledge, guidance and appropriate tools. Given this training anything he or she makes will be modern or contemporary because he is living in the world as experienced today. If you are given the right tools and you are given encouragement, you will be modern. I guarantee it.”

 

“In 1996 I was awarded the Teaching Excellence Award at Parsons. That’s an award that is given by the students to one teacher in the entire university. To receive it was a great honor. I was working with students who were go-getters. They wanted to be artists and designers. I was in my thirties and at first my students thought I was too young to be teaching but once they connected to me, they saw me more like a friend than a parent figure. I was able to get them to do things that surprised them. The students had a synergy with what I was trying to teach them. That same year I met my wife Paulina.

 

Tell me about how you met.

 

Paulina was born and grew up in San Miguel. Her father was an American, Jim Hawkins, and her mother Carmen Masip an exile from the Spanish Civil War in 1948. Carmen devoted much of her life to the Cultural Center in San Miguel, called the Bellas Artes. When we met, Paulina was in New York to visit her friend, Victoria Roberts. Paulina and Victoria were childhood friends in San Miguel.where they went to school together. Victoria had come to San Miguel as a girl with her mother and grandmother, from Australia. She was a kind of child prodigy, already famous as a cartoonist. Victoria and I met in an etching studio in New York and we had become friends. She’s a cartoonist for the New Yorker, one of a small number of women on staff there. Victoria amongst other friends had talked about San Miguel many times but to me it was kind of a myth, like Shangri-La. I never thought I would ever go there but that year Victoria introduced me to Paulina and I came to visit for the first time in December of 1996.”

 

“I loved San Miguel immediately because of the light and its Colonial architecture. The moment I walked into Paulina’s house on Insurgentes it. Entering these homes I felt transported back to my childhood days in Cuba. where I hadn’t been since I was nine. I thought here was a place where I could paint the pictures I wanted to paint. The subjects, the colour, it was all right here. I thought this would be a wonderful place. I was teaching at Parsons but I kept coming back to San Miguel during breaks. Even though I had a great apartment in Chelsea and a great job, it was 9/11 that ultimately made me decide to leave New York. It was a turning point for me, what I now recognize as part of my life’s plan. I also turned forty that year, it was time to move on. The writing was on the wall as they say. The first thing I had seen entering the New York harbour in 1973 was a crane on the top of one of the towers. They were finishing the towers when I arrived and they went down when I left. I remember the day it happened. That morning I got a call from my mother saying that one of the towers had been hit by a plane and it was going to fall. I said no, it can’t fall and I reprimanded her for watching television so early in the morning. After I calmed her down and said good-bye I turned on the tv myself and realized she was right, this was serious. By the time I got out into the street the first tower had collapsed. I tried to get downtown on my bike but they had closed all the streets. Just ambulances were going down and people were walking up. It was a sad day…The interesting thing was, twenty-four hours before, I had gone out on a bike ride with a camera that a friend had loaned me. At the end of one of the piers on the west side I turned and looked toward the towers and there was a perfect overlap like David Copperfield can make an island disappear, one tower covered the other. I took a shot of that and thought wow, one of the towers disappeared never thinking that a day later, both towers would be gone.”

 

“The day after the towers were hit, classes weren’t cancelled. The students came to the studio and there was absolute silence. I didn’t know what to say. I had hired a model and I think I told them the best thing we could do was draw. I said, ‘We are here. Let’s just draw the figure.’ I think I said something about World War II although never thinking this was an event the students most probably couldn’t relate to.WWII because they hadn’t lived through it. I didn’t know what was coming out of my mouth but I was trying to give them some hope. I reminded them that destruction takes place in an instant but making something worthwhile takes time. To do something constructive is a sign of hope. There was no way you could wrap your mind around the reality of what had happened. It was more like a dream. Reality is a kind of construct that floats around us. People are looking for something they can point to and identify with, something that is tangible in a meaningful way. I don’t mean it literally but people are looking for that experience. In the right hands, art can provide tangible meaning about reality. It doesn’t necessarily lead to realism. Abstraction can be a tangible reality that’s ephemeral while it holds itself in time and place.” I interject to say that Edgar’s paintings seem to be a depiction of a reality where time has come to a standstill yet the reality that is presented is not quite what it appears to be on first inspection, rather, it is moving toward becoming something else.

 

He continues. “That feeling is a kind of zeitgeist of the times we are in. San Miguel is an island. Here we are living in a protected bubble. When you live in a big city you start to feel there is something strange about the period we are living in. Reality itself has become more and more elusive it seems, “the center doesn’t hold” as they say or in effect there is no center at all. Time vanishes, that’s what I felt when I left New York in 2002. I still miss New York but I’m also glad to be out of the race. I felt the city was winning. I could see myself doing the same thing until I was old, time having run out and my energy sapped.” I felt my work was suffering. Being here is like a salvation.

 

Do you feel cut off here?

 

In some ways, I do. I still miss my job, working with young people. My parents and my brothers are in New York so I go back often. But at the same time, I am very happy here with my studio and my painting. I have some autonomy. I couldn’t replace this in New York where to have a studio and a place to live is so expensive it is prohibitive. I feel privileged to be here while at the same time, I feel disconnected. In a big urban centre like New York everything is available. It is kind of a soup. You swim through it and you find the experience you are looking for. It gives you all of the points of view about reality. What is a painting? What is music? What is the novel? What is the stock market? It depends where your head is at but what you realize later is that you have seen the very best and the worst of everything, it’s a life’s lesson. In a place like New York you can find the best people in your field, that which makes you thrive, from all the different viewpoints. I had the benefit of being surrounded by people who really knew about art- teachers, colleagues, students, the galleries, the access to culture, I had it all and it formed me. The Frick for example, has three Vermeers (The Met has five) two el Grecos, a Bellini, a Goya, two Rembrandts, twoTurners, Piero della Francesca, Gainsboroughs, several Chardins and they are all masterpieces! I can tell you the whole museum room by room. I have it in my head. It scares me that I don’t have access to it now but I have it in me. I have been to see it over and over. There are thirty-three Vermeers in the world and eight of them are in New York. It terrifies me that I don’t have that at my finger tips anymore but I go often and I breathe deeply and I tell myself, it’s ok, it’s ok. It is still here.”

 

“I am fortunate I can travel. Although I will never go back to Cuba to live, one day when Cuba is democratic, the country will open up and I will definitely go back and visit. I am Cuban by birth but I have been shaped by so many things. Now that I have lived here all these years, I am in some way Mexican as well.”

 

Do you think of yourself as Mexican?

 

Edgar laughs. “No, not yet. I’m still working on that. Mexican culture is rather complex, one can spend a whole lifetime learning these things. The culture is very complicated. Going back to the beginning of our conversation, the people who came in the fifties and early sixties came to San Miguel with a different outlook. Many were artists, writers perhaps wanting to escape the rigidity of American culture but they also had a genuine interest in the Mexican culture. They mingled and they fused with the culture. That generation was adventurers, in the Kerouac sense of the word. Many of them married Mexicans and today have Mexican grandchildren who are bi-cultural. The people that come to San Miguel now are looking for something else. Maybe some are escaping as well from a different set of circumstances. A more affordable way of life, a place to retire. In many ways they have fewer hardships, those that come to San Miguel now have all of the infrastructure in place. You don’t even have to speak Spanish. You get a realtor, you buy a house and they settle down.

 

It’s safe and the large community of foreigners makes it easy to navigate and remain in closed social circles. These comforts in effect make it more difficult for foreigners to integrate in to the Mexican culture. At the same time, people who would leave the States to come to Mexico are not really typical either. We have a lot of Mexican friends and I get tired of hearing them complain about Americans. I say, ‘Let me tell you something. The Americans you are meeting here are actually pretty open-minded.” We both laugh when he adds, “There are worse.”

 

I turn to look at two paintings that sit on easels near us. Both are of a religious nature and both are almost but not quite complete. Edgar explains. “According to the old woman who owns this building and is the caretaker of the church right next to us, the Calvario, the building was full of humidity. The whole chapel has had to be renovated. Here in San Miguel the Easter procession ends here at what is the last station of the cross. Not too long ago, the old woman who had obviously seen I am a painter took me in the church. She told me that on either side of the altar there had been an exvoto, painted on copper. They were old ones, framed and beautiful.”

 

The practice of making exvotos dates back to the 1500’s in Mexico. Most often they are personal expressions of gratitude for a recovery after an illness or accident. In Mexico today, they are painted on tin or wood, or embroidered on cloth and are valued as folk art. Edgar continues. “I don’t exactly know what happened but these two exvotos were taken, so she wanted something to replace them. She showed me two small postcards, one of the death of Jesus and one of the annunciation and she asked me if I could enlarge them photographically. I knew they wouldn’t look good so I told her I would think about it. I decided to ask my two students who are both Catholic, if they would copy these two pictures and they agreed. This one is a copy of The Annunciation by Fra Angelico in the San Marco convent in Florence and the other is the death of Christ. Both are in oil and as soon as the chapel is ready I will put them in these frames and they will decorate the church. The caretaker is ninety and she is the last in her family. She doesn’t have any children. She is the third generation of her family who has looked after the church, which dates back to 1730. On the back of those paintings I put a legend stating that these paintings were commissioned for the church and should not be removed. My students signed their names and one put the names of all her deceased family members. These pictures are a labour of love and devotion.”

 

Today, Edgar and I gaze out the open door of the Calvario church and along the street to the beautiful and ancient buildings that line Calle San Francisco down to the Jardin and to the hills beyond. We have come into the church to see the completed ex votos that Edgar’s students painted almost four years ago. The paintings are beautifully displayed in the Baroque frames that had been carefully guarded by the old woman who lived long enough to see the paintings hung on the walls of the small chapel. She died at the age of ninety-three, a couple of weeks after the pictures were hung. Edgar confides that he felt a sense of having fulfilled some greater purpose in overseeing the making and hanging of the paintings in the church and to ensure that they would not disappear, he made a formal gift of the paintings to the priest at the Parroquia. “Anyone with bad intentions would hesitate before stealing from the Catholic church, an act which would be a serious matter.” From where we stand in the narrow chapel, Edgar points to the holes that have been drilled in the walls to help alleviate the moisture problem plaguing the little church. Constant maintenance is required and although this is an important monument, he feels it is not sufficiently valued as such. “Because this church is in such a significant location at the top of this hill where the road turns, it would have been an important stop on the route to Mexico City. Travelling from the silver mines to the city was a dangerous journey in the 1700’s and 1800’s. Here was a chapel where travelers stopped to pray for a safe journey.”

 

I remind Edgar that last time we talked he had lightly referred to himself as a Mexican. I ask him if he feels more Mexican with the passage of these past few years. “I have always felt like an exile. My parents left Cuba, never dreaming that Castro would remain in power so long. It was equally difficult in Spain under Franco and so we moved to New York. Even though I lived in the United States for twenty-eight years, I have never felt I belonged anywhere really. Americans are so American, and I could never feel that allegiance to one country.

 

I do not feel an allegiance to any particular country, I’m Cuban by birth and also American, perhaps even a bit Mexican and at the same time none of these. I’m from nowhere and I’m from everywhere. As I grow older, I don’t feel it is so important to attach or define oneself to any particular place. At the age of forty-nine, I am beginning to feel complete in my own being.” “I can’t say that it is true but maybe when we are very old, looking back one can see more clearly the direction of our lives. Already we have been in San Miguel for almost ten years and a lot has happened in that time. San Miguel has changed. Our lives have changed. In 2008 Jim Hawkins, my wife’s father, passed away.

 

Has Jim’s death affected you?

 

It has affected our lives completely. We left our little house on Huertas and moved into his house. It took two years to fix the house and we are still living surrounded by boxes. That house was going to fall apart. These old houses need to be lived in, to be maintained. When Jim was alive, we had lunch with him every day. He might have been 82 but he had a youthful person. He thought like a young person. He was open minded, very interested in many things, so well read he could talk about any subject. People like that really leave a hole. Jim’s wife Carmen helped found the Chamber Music Festival and directed the Bellas Artes for more than thirty years. They also opened in 1959 The Academia Hispano Americana the oldest Spanish language school in town. They and many of the others that came here so long ago like Felipe Cossio de Pomar, Leonard Brooks, Sterling Dickinson just to name a few helped make this town the unique place it is today. They attracted painters, musicians, writers, creating the culture and reputation we often take for granted in San Miguel.”

 

Time has played a significant role in Soberon’s life and work. Like all of us, he has felt the urgency of time passing. He has been an exile in a world that continues to alter itself and has become, in some ways, almost unrecognizable as the world we once knew. For many of its residents San Miguel seems to have eluded the confines of time in the same way that Edgar Soberon’s still lifes, aptly named, still life. The beautiful images he paints are frozen moments on the canvas, the passage of time having become an illusion. We the viewers are held captive by the serenity of stasis, tranquility fully realized. But even as we look, we feel the pull of circumstances about to change. Regrettably, inevitably, as much as we might want to remain there in that perfect, sensual space, we are summoned by familiar routine, and time moves on. Thankfully, we can return if we choose, to experience again the euphoria that is occasioned by an encounter with the sublimely unfamiliar. That is San Miguel’s and Edgar Soberon’s gift.

 

1. Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Eds. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reiss. Lincoln: U. of Nebraska P, 1965. 3-24.

February 28, 2012.