May 14, 2015

Every year before the summer art shows begin I like to set up my booth and play around with the arrangement of the work I want to hang. By prearranging the work, and leaving the hooks in the panels, setting up does not take so long when I get to a show. It also helps me decide what extra work to carry along with me to replace what sells.

When I moved my studio into our new house in town, it left my old studio in my workshop at our mountain house mostly empty. Surprisingly (for me anyway–I seem to act like I abhor unfilled space) it has stayed way. The size of the studio gave me just enough space to set up the booth panels inside out of the rain and occasional spring snow.

You can tell what images have been selling best lately at these shows by the predominance of crow and ravens on the walls. There’s a good amount of other work as well though, but most of them are on a wall of panels just to the left of what can be seen in this photo.

Man in the Maze
Tucson, Arizona
2015

The man in the Man in the Maze symbol has a name, I’itoi. He is the creator god in the cosmology of the Tohono O’odham and Pima Indians and the image appears frequently in their crafts. Interestingly enough, the symbol in this particular image is on the wall of the Catholic Mission San Xavier del Bac.

It would seem that the story of I’itoi would represent a conflicting view of creation to that of the Catholic faith, but then the Catholic church has historically  been quite good at integrating into their own religion (at least locally) the existing religious symbols and ideas of the peoples who they convert to Christianity. (The Celtic Cross, for example, predates Christianity and had pagan myths attached to it long before it became integral to Catholicism in Ireland.)