The artist as teacher

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• Published on Tuesday, 06 December 2011 23:43
• By Barbara Morris

Reyes Gomez never intended to become an artist. He bends down to pluck a seedladen branch from an epazote plant in his overgrown compound a few blocks north of M. Bravo Street. Carefully, he places it in a plastic bag and hands it to his visitor. We share a love for the soil and for growing food. It’s June and he wants to get out before the rains come to the small plot he tills just south of town. He’ll need a few days, he says, to plant potatoes and sew papaya seeds and to “recharge the
batteries.”

Producing his art is a painstaking process. Reyes spends his nights alone in his workshop laboriously creating one or two prints from metal plates on a manual press.
He tries to catch some sleep in the mornings. By mid-afternoon he can be found in Plaza La Bastida not far from Santo Domingo Square with two boxes of his work to sell. Most are small etchings in indigo, red, brown and black. Behind him, he’s surrounded by stalls of colorfully embroidered huipiles and handwoven skirts. To both sides of him there are other artists with oil paintings and watercolors. He is quick to point out that he’s the only etcher there. “I may be the only etcher in the world who sells his work on the street,” he says. He’s been doing so since 2007, when he returned to Oaxaca after studying in Europe. “I’m the only one who’s written a book in Spanish and English explaining the etching process,” he adds, brandishing a slim blue volume with the title Flor y Canto. Maybe he’s also the only Oaxacan artist who intended to become a surgeon. In fact, Reyes hails from a long line of Mixe healers. His father was a shaman in Santa Maria Alotepec, where Reyes was born, a six-hour bus ride south of Oaxaca, as was his grandmother. Both of his sisters are nurses.

He used to practice making wood carvings in order to train himself to use a knife. And while he was enrolled in medical school in the city of Oaxaca, he wanted to prepare himself to become a reconstructive surgeon. So he took classes at the Rufino Tamayo Graphic Workshop in order to learn to draw the human body. “I was practicing with watercolor and making paintings and just throwing them in the trash,” he says. “One day I noticed my neighbor had collected all of them from the trash and had papered her walls with them.” She wasn’t the only one who noticed his talent. An Austrian professor who was teaching a histology course at the medical school watched him making watercolors of the human body. “You paint like Wolfgang Hutter,” he said. Hutter, a painter and printmaker and one of the founders of the Vienna school of fantastic realism, happened to be the professor’s childhood friend. He showed some of his paintings to Hutter, then a teacher of applied arts in Vienna.
Soon Reyes had a scholarship to study in Austria. But in the back of his mind, his purpose was still to use the art training to become a better surgeon. Europe changed him. He gained a new consciousness of race and ethnicity. “I discovered I was brown,” he says. “I discovered I could use art to show how great my country is and my country’s people.” He also gained a new calling.

“I wanted to share my knowledge,” he says. He returned to Mexico with a master’s in art education, began traveling around the country conducting workshops in print-making for children and founded Casa Cultural Condoy, a oneroom arts and crafts school for children in his hometown. It provides a way out of poverty. “They don’t have to wash dishes,” he says. “They can make masks or weave baskets or make pullovers. “I taught them the first time how to make prints in 1998. Now there’s a press,” he says. Selling his prints on the street has taught Reyes how to work economically. And how to make a living from art. Lessons he shares. “I teach people how to make a press for five dollars. I teach them how to produce dyes and how to make paper. They can produce something of high quality, but cheaply. They can create their own workshop.” Currently he is working on a new book, Alien Tales, about how to make woodblock prints, and hopes to have a video out soon. “All I do is teach people what I do,” he says.

“I have a reason to exist. I have a purpose in life. I will teach my brothers how to fish.” For more information about Reyes Gomez and to see samples of his work, visit his website www.reyesgomez.com