Almost

I'm working on this diablita/o. (I've come to think of it as somewhat hermaphroditic, actually, as female as it is male.) I've been working on it for a while. I carved it in very early January, bisqued it, then let it sit on my shelf while I thought about how to move forward with it. I was going to pitch it in the soda kiln and let the kiln have its way with it (which is always exciting and often entirely not without disappointment), but the soda kiln is new (has only been fired once) and therefore even more unreliable than usual. I was going to wait then until after the kiln had been fired three or four times (which could take six months or more) before I offered it this piece.

Anyway, the piece looked like this just after I finished carving in January:

Truthfully, it scared me a bit. I thought it was funny (at the time, I thought it looked like a diablito's school picture), but it also scared me a little bit. I couldn't look at for too long after it was done, and I definitely couldn't look at the whole piece all at once. I had to look at it in little bits and pieces. I could look at the details of it (which is what I do when I'm carving anyway), but not at the whole piece for a long time.

Then last month, I finished another diablita plate:

I liked how she came out (this one was a female from the beginning), so I decided to use the same treatment on the other diablita/o plate. Which I did.

If you think I'm about to post a picture of a finished piece, you're seriously delusional. I finished glazing it yesterday and, with any luck, it'll be either three or ten days before it comes out of its final firing.

Instead, I'll tell you about the artist who inspired these carvings, a Mexican painter named Rufino Tamayo.

 Tamayo was a Zapotecan Indian born in 1899 in Oaxaca and educated in Mexico City. He moved in New York and lived there from 1937 to 1949. After leaving New York, he moved to Paris and lived there for ten years before finally returning to Oaxaca where he built an art museum. Another art museum, Museo Tamayo de Arte Contemporáneo, in Mexico City, is dedicated to the art collection he donated to Mexico.  Tamayo died in 1991.

But that doesn't tell you anything about his art, does it?

His paintings draw heavily on pre-Hispanic Mexican imagery, but are influenced by European modernism.

See?

(Sadly, I can find a picture of the painting that inspired my diablita/o. It's a painting called "El Diablo" and it is very, very moving in a not entirely pleasant way.)