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J Michael Walker

@jmichaelwalker1

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Hopeless romántico honoring people of the global majority - principally women - through drawing, painting, photography, and digital montage

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Drawing Lucinda,
from my neverending series "Unintended Consequences: Pages of a Bahia Diary" -
Portraits of the Afro-Brazilian women of Bahia
and their sacred Orishas,
over the folio-size pages of the 1940 edition
of "Historia do Brasil" by Gaspar Barleu,
a history of the colonial Dutch empire of Brazil,
as these women emerge from, contest, and take ownership of their history....
#itaparica #bahia #orisha #orixa #sacatar #talkback #talkingback taken in Ilha de Itaparica, Bahia by @jmichaelwalker1

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2 months ago

by @jmichaelwalker1

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2 months ago

Gathering fallen loquat leaves, I was startled to see a giant black "X" drift eastward across our fish pond. Rounding the bend and finding the creature hanging from a branch I saw that it was a pair of giant swallowtail butterflies locked in their mating ritual, something that can last a pretty good hour or so (and why not, say I, given that it's the only mating of their all-too-short butterfly lives?).

Using my phone's close-up lens I kept a respectful distance. Still, the lovers - either perturbed or seeking new inspiration - floated off across the fence, heading southeast, where the neighbors might be playing Juanga or boleros.... or who knows, maybe some Miles "In a Silent Way"....

#loveintheafternoon
#swallowtailbutterflies
#giantswallowtailbutterfly by @jmichaelwalker1

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2 months ago

taken in Sierra Tarahumara by @jmichaelwalker1

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3 months ago

by @jmichaelwalker1

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3 months ago

Seven years ago tonight, and just three days after our anniversary, was the opening reception for my solo show of large-scale painted portraits at the Mexican Consulate, in MacArthur Park, just west of Downtown LA.

I exhibited 13 of these paintings of elders from our home back in la Sierra Tarahumara of northern Mexico, where Mimi is from, where we met and married, and where I was culturally and spiritually reborn.

As 2019 was "The Year of Indigenous Languages", Mimí appropriately recited poetry in Rarámuri, the native language of the original (and still present) people of la Sierra.
I was thrilled that so many good friends and fellow artists made it out to the opening (and found parking!). It was quite the honor. Gracias!

Note: the works are all painted with acrylic washes on polypropylene paper and measure roughly 60” high by 60-84” wide, save for the tall portrait in the welcoming lobby which measures 80”high x 60” wide.

#honoringourelders
#paintedportrait
#acryliconpolypropolene taken in Consulado General de México en Los Ángeles by @jmichaelwalker1

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3 months ago

It’s time once again for a fairy tale that’s actually true –
Once upon a time – a hard-to-believe 49 years ago this afternoon – under an enormous blue sky flecked with lolly-gagging white clouds, high up in México's beautiful Sierra Tarahumara, accompanied by pretty much every villager the tiny pueblo of Bocoyna, Chihuahua could muster, as well as truckloads of neighbors from various outlying hinterlands, a dazed and fairly innocent young fellow from up Arkansas way and the most drop-dead gorgeously sweet, intelligent, and kind young lady he'd ever had the undeserved privilege to lay blue-green eyes upon were blessedly wed in the young lady's hometown's 19th-century stone church.
The only person within shouting distance in possession of a camera at the time (then-Jesuit-brother Gilberto Alvarado) took a handful of black and white photographs of the ceremony, the dinner, the dance, and this gem: the two of us standing between Mimi’s angelic parents, Don Carlos and Doña Adelina, under the centuries-old bells of the village church where we’d just been wed by the bishop, with guitar accompaniment by our dear friend (and priest) Javier Avila.
While Don Carlos and Doña Adelina are sadly gone on home, those cast iron bells, most of the church building, and our vows still hold fast, lo all these ridiculous, amazing years afterwards.
And on this otherwise fairly unremarkable date (apart from it being the birthdate, in 1606, of Rembrandt) I continue to count myself deeply blessed and privileged.... taken in Bocoyna Sierra De Chihuahua by @jmichaelwalker1

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3 months ago

From the afternoon I met her, a few short weeks after I met (and was dazzled by) her daughter Mimí, Doña Adelina generously welcomed me into her home and essentially into her family as a sort of lost nephew.

One summer when I traveled by bus and train to Bocoyna to visit Mimí for a couple of weeks, I learned upon arrival that she had just been offered a special opportunity to study in Guadalajara for most of my planned visit, so I stayed – quite contentedly, actually – with her Mamá and extended family until Mimí returned.

Indeed, when I asked Mimí’s hand in marriage after three years of courtship, her father Don Carlos readily agreed, while Doña Adelina asked, “Why don’t you just continue like this, coming to stay with us whenever you want?”

While I addressed Don Carlos respectfully as Don Carlos, Doña Adelina I addressed the same way her eight offspring did, as “mi Mamá.” And she alone called me “Michael” rather than “Miguel.”

Decades of hard work, raising eight children (and fussing over grandchildren) in a place and mostly at a time when there were no doctors, clinics, or medicine; just the herbs, ointments, and baths that women use to cure their loved ones – it all took its toll.

Several years ago she had a stroke, and although Mimí was at her bedside for weeks, getting her to breathe on her own, to speak clearly, and to regain use of her limbs, Doña Adelina essentially decided, now that she was in her 90s, she would settle into the wheelchair someone brought and let others do for her as she had done for others for o so many years.

Until sometime before dawn yesterday, when she drifted off and away, living (and leaving) her life on her own terms.

En paz descanse. taken in Bocoyna Sierra De Chihuahua by @jmichaelwalker1

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4 months ago

Yesterday was the Feast Day of Santa Rosa de Lima.
Back in 1993, while helping friends tend their booth at the Feria Internacional del Libro in Mexico City’s Palacio de Minería, I met and photographed several women whose visage eventually found their way into drawings, among them a young lady whose face, once I had drawn it at the upper center of an otherwise blank large sheet of Arches, struck me as resembling that of a mystic.

Checking my reference books for a female mystic (no internet in 1993), I learned of Santa Rosa de Lima, the first saint canonized in the Americas. I chose to portray this young woman as Rosa and bought a book about her to learn more (again: no internet).

Various details in the resulting drawing allude to Rosa’s writings and legend: when she was an infant, several people attested to seeing her face turn into a rose in full bloom, so I drew her emerging from one (by Belgian painter-botanist Redouté). I also drew debossed rose patterns all over her clothing. In her writing she describes divine love as, variously, the heart aflame and the heart struck by lightning; since, I theorized, mystics experience the spiritual and the quotidian as equally ‘real,’ I decided to draw real hearts in her outstretched hands. Rosa also experienced repeated nightmares where she was pursued by demons from which God would not deliver her; in counsel with her confidante San Martin de Porres, she came to understand that God was testing to see if she would love Him even if He did not deliver her – at which point the nightmares ceased. That’s why I have them tethered to little posts in the ground. And finally, I drew the cathedral of Lima from an old engraving and placed it amid “típico” Indian huts.
As usual, no sketching: I made this drawing up as I went along; what gave me most pause was learning the palette used by Latin American Virreinal painters (17th-18th centuries). Their colors are so toned down, I had to continually darken my colors, which emphasized the drama of the scene.

I learned a lot from this one, still one of my favorites that remain in my studio.
"Santa Rosa de Lima" color pencil, 50x38", 1994
#santarosa by @jmichaelwalker1

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5 months ago

Cuba is much in the news, as the Ugly Guy in the White House - possibly egged on by Marco Rubio - tightens the screws on that tiny country and its long-suffering yet resilient and creative people. For over 60 years the US has maintained one or another embargo or blockade against Cuba, all the while accusing it of being a “failed regime” – as if any country could withstand such endless punishment – even though the United Nations and Amnesty International have condemned repeated US embargoes.

The people I’ve met in Cuba during my visits over the past fifteen years have all been kind, friendly, and welcoming, whatever their economic situation. It’s one thing to let something fail: it’s another thing entirely to encourage or force it to fail.

This is a drawing I created around 2005:
“Wistful Lament (Lamento Nostalgico)” color pencil on rag paper, 50 x 38”

#cubalibre #elpueblounido #venceremos #che by @jmichaelwalker1

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5 months ago

"Ego Less / Less Ego: San Benito de Palermo”

This large drawing in color pencils was inspired by all the wonderful Romanesque art we reveled in when we spent a couple of weeks in beautiful Bacelona, back in 2010 or so.... taken in Barcelona, España by @jmichaelwalker1

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5 months ago

taken in Ernest E. Debs Regional Park by @jmichaelwalker1

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6 months ago