–Reflection of La Llorona, ink and watercolor © 2007 by ybonesy. All rights reserved.
-From Topic post, Water Wings.
El Agua Es La Vida
June 23, 2007 by ybonesy
Posted in Art, Books, Culture, Death, Doodling, Dreams, Love, Place, Spirituality, Topic Writing | Tagged Chicano culture, Chicano stories, ditch witch, ditches, images of La Llorona, La Llorona, Latino culture, mythology, New Mexico, New Mexico culture, superstitions, the crying woman, ybonesy doodles | 11 Comments
11 Responses
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Once again, stunning. The circular movement. The reflection of her face. And the clear roots under the water. The hands are also prominent, part of your style.
I was thinking about the drawing you did (was it 20 years ago?) in The Secret Life Of An Artist Wannabe (link).
It is beautiful, too, but so much tighter of line. Your drawings and paintings now are looser and more flowing.
Is that intentional? Or did it happen naturally over time? Can you talk about any changes in style between now and then.
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Yes, it’s quite stunning. I like all the misshapen objects in this — her, her hands, the roots of the tree, the nubby branches, even her reflection.
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Thank you. You’re right, QM, my style has changed.
There are traces of today’s style in my pieces 20 years ago. For example, My Mother’s Thighs. The exaggerated parts and sense of perspective. I also have a piece I did call “My Monster Eats Small Children” that features an ogre in different scenes. The similiarities come in that they are little scenes, and the ogre’s hands and feet are prominent. The difference is, the drawing is more controlled than what I do now. It took me a year to finish My Monster Eats Small Children; I labored over committing pen to paper. I also used pencil and color pencil, the most forgiving and noncommittal of instruments.
Now I finish a drawing in two or three hours of dedicated time and deal with the mistakes I make. I finish what I start whether I like it or not. (I wasn’t liking La Llorona – I wanted to show her feet, but the space was too small, and other things bothered me – but I finished her.)
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Ooooooh! Never mind the technical talk about drawing. The pure, strong purple color hit me first as the page loaded. Then the form. My first reaction was “Wow!”
Then I saw the “story” of the monk looking into the river at the reflection and delicious irony emerged. You’ve activated all sorts of Wild Mind fragments floating in my cerebral soup … an ex-monk cyber-friend floundering for a sense of place … A collegial acquaintance who strongly saluted my recent casual use of the term “spiritual abuse”… Miracles vs. neuroplasticity … Writing from the heart vs. the head…. what part of the body would I use to typify my role in life?
I love this piece of heArt. Thank you for posting it.
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ybonesy, I find the process with your art to be fascinating. Kind of like learning the technical, controlled pieces of writing, then learning writing practice and Wild Mind. On red Ravine you are doing art as practice.
How much of the change in your recent drawings do you attribute to your years of writing practice and sitting in the year-long writing Intensive last year? How has your opening up in writing practice affected your art?
My other thoughts are about your last paragraph in your comment:
Now I finish a drawing in two or three hours of dedicated time and deal with the mistakes I make. I finish what I start whether I like it or not. (I wasn’t liking La Llorona – I wanted to show her feet, but the space was too small, and other things bothered me – but I finished her.)
This sounds like writing practice, too. Deal with what comes up (Continue under all circumstances), but finish (don’t be tossed away), get it down on the paper.
The last thought I have is that La Llorona’s feet are not missed in the drawing at all – the roots of the tree become her feet. Anchored and grounded.
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Ritergal, I like your question:
Writing from the heart vs. the head…. what part of the body would I use to typify my role in life?
It’s so great that it was stimulated by ybonesy’s art. And it’s a great question. I wondered – what part of the body would you use to typify your role in life?
BTW, ybonesy, I just noticed when I looked at your drawing again, the knot in the tree. It’s the vortex I was talking about in the comments in the piece I posted, 15 Hours, 36 Minutes of Light (link).
I can’t remember the name for that shape (memory glitch) but it’s another archetype, like the Venus of Willendorf in your My Mothers Thighs (link) piece.
Everything is connected.
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Cool…I’m so glad reflections of la llorona stirred up so much. She is a complex person, you know, and a troubled legend.
She was a haughty Mexican woman who wanted to rise above her place, married a wealthy, more educated older man, a rancher. They had two children, but the husband was often away. Eventually he returned with a beautiful new woman riding in his carriage. He still loved his children but he left his wife to take on the new, more beautiful wife. And so out of grief and a sense of wanting to get back at him, she drowned their two children in the river. And as soon as she realized what she was doing, she tried to revive them. But it was too late. They were both dead. She now roams the banks of the river crying for her children.
When I think of water, and the Rio Grande in particular, I think of her. And how she represents all the negative characteristics that society attributes to women: haughty, wanting to move above her station in life, jealous, revengeful, impestuous, crazy, unfit, and finally pitiful. But for me she has become a haunting (literally) person. She embodies for me a side of darkness that every person posesses, but she, like anyone else, reflects on who she is. She is in the end aware of and at peace with who she is.
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OK, so having said all that, I would so love to hear more about some of these wild mind threads, ritergal: ex-monk cyber-friend, spiritual abuse, and miracles vs neuroplasticity, in particular. Wow, if you write on any, please let us know!
QM: I would attribute 80% of my changes in my art to not just writing practice but especially to the writing intensive we did last year. I took a course at Ghost Ranch last July with a santero, painting religious iconography, and still I was having some troubles letting go. It was when I had an epiphany about how practice was practice, whether writing or art, that something broke. My “style” had already formed (I know because I have so many partially finished pieces that I couldn’t compete because I was having monkey mind/artist’s block, and those pieces share the same qualities) but it was my ability to whip something out that changed.
The other thing is now I want to spend more time taking these small, fast pieces and working them into much more finished pieces. I tell you – it’s exactly the same as writing.
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Have you heard Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ version of La Llorona? I think she tells it well. There are so many ways to look at La Llorona. Sometimes I see her as a woman who killed off parts of herself, (her children) because of a man. Your painting evokes the haunting grief that La Llorona embodies.
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No, I don’t believe I’ve read that version. We have a couple of different books, one by local storyteller Joe Hayes and then another, but mostly I heard the story told by my dad. He or his brother (now I’m forgetting which one, so I’ll have to check) claimed to have seen La Llorona. I think it was his brother.
Which reminds me in one of those “small world” ways: Carolyn Flynn, who was a recent guest writer, shared with me a version written by a writer in NM. In that version, the children are saved from drowning. That La Llorona is beneficent. I guess it’s like there’s a New Testament Llorona and an Old Testament one, or something like that 😉
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ybonesy, your New Testament, Old Testament, reminds me of the Biblical version of Lilith as tempter and betrayer and the newer, stronger and more positive version that has emerged in the last 20 years, largely as a result of women redefining her.
I think women are often portrayed as both dark and light (look in popular culture at the virgin, the mother, the prostitute). And in mythology it is the nymph, maiden, crone.
It seems like La Llorona might be a version of the crone. I’m trying to think now, isn’t there a Bonewoman in Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ book? A keeper of the bones. I suppose she is different.
I’d love to hear your dad’s story. Perhaps you will some day write it down.
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