Still Lifes - Escolasticas 4

Note - This is the fourth in a series of my stories about the stone Carvers of Escolasticas in Central Mexico. I'm honored to say that on March 21, 2022, an edited consolidation of these stories was published in the New York Times in their section titled The World Through A Lens. I want to thank the New York Times for the opportunity to tell a worldwide audience about these wonderful people and their art.

To me, the small, central Mexican, stone carving town of Escolasticas feels like a bunch of complete sentences interrupted by a bunch of random thoughts. Juxtapositions of objects and circumstances appear out of nowhere and tell stories with no beginning or end. I don’t know how many times I’ve driven through or walked around this community of carvers and suddenly said “What on earth am I looking at here? In my life, I’ve never seen anything like this.” It’s not like you’re standing at the north rim of the Grand Canyon at sunset or across the Arno River from the Ponte Vecchio in Florence. In those places, you expect to get beat up visually, and at some point, you get punch drunk with it all - you mentally fall asleep and miss half of it out of the sheer exhaustive splendor of everything around you. Not so in Escolasticas. This is a needle-sharp and harsh Mexican desert. The sun wears you down and can force you to look away instead of toward, so the visuals come to you much slower here, like the pace of life in Mexico, and at first, they can be difficult to recognize, but if you slow down, look closely, and let them come to you, they can suddenly appear out of nothing and overwhelm you with their stories, questions, and riddles. A lot of riddles in Escolasticas. A lot of questions. Not a lot of answers. I suppose that's the nature of things. There are no answers. There just are.

I’ve already done some posts telling stories about the carvers and their art in Escolasticas, but I didn’t expect the still life’s. These are simple contrasts between objects in and around the workshops. I’ll be concentrating on a storyline or an interview or a photo subject of some sort, and suddenly there will be a random visual yanking me hard to one side. To stay focused on what I'm doing, I'll quickly grab an image of the still life and be done with it. But then the collection started to grow, and I just recently took a longer look at the whole group of images. It’s almost as though the viewer could make up their own caption for any single image, and each little story would be true because that’s the nature of truth - it’s a moving target - it's whatever you believe it is. I don’t know where this is headed, but it feels like it's time to start sharing a few still life's from Escolasticas. I've added some short captions, but that doesn't make them true. It makes them the first things that come to mind as I sit here with a glass of mezcal and some random thoughts/questions/captions. Maybe you see things differently. As usual, those views might be true as well.