Artist Residency Quito Equador

Published on 13 November 2023 at 13:19

La Hespiria Mountain Cloud Forest Residency

This is an Introduction to the origin of my current art practice and how it is developing, and as a bonus every quarter, I will show available New Works available to purchase.

In Spring of 2014. I volunteered as a Tree planter and sign painter to promote, La Hesperia Ecological cloud forest preserve.

As one of the resident Artists at La Hesperia I was asked to help re paint the road sign with the La Hesperia Logo.

Using a very limited supply of house paint and worn out brushes, utilizing naturally found pigments from flowers sand, bamboo, tree branches broken house glass, and tarpaulin used to cover machinery  pure rain forest water, I managed to produce some very colorful images and objects.

I planted over 150 coffee bean seedlings, young saplings in total over a couple of weeks after that looked after livestock, planted

sweet-grass for animal feed and attended information workshops about cloud forest ecology and tree planting, we learnt how to survive cook prepare food tend to basic needs of the ecological cloud forest reserve and I managed in the weekends to continue with a new way of field-trip research on the top of a mountain in Ecuador.

One of the volunteers was British and South American, also an artist who understood that many South Americans Love decorating their homes with basic tribal marks and colors in the form of very simple symbols made into a variety of patterns.

They paint them onto windows doors and sticks.

As soon as I saw an example of those South American Symbols placed on my makeshift artist table under a grass roofed gazebo a painted stick i ran with this and it really inspired me, driving me forward into a new study topic.

 

During my art school tutorials and talks, I realized I had no self made consistent markings or even a recognizable art style, this was constantly on my mind, visiting mexico in the spring of 2013, feeling a kin ship with the Mexican people yet also a strange distance as if I had lost something in my ancient past to them, but with Daniel the shaman I stayed with for 5 weeks I was shown that symbols can be channeled on request from the environment, by placing stones in a circle and asking nature to inspire me, i inscribed a very simple language comprising of dots and lines.

 

 

 

 

 

 

This began a quest to start an art language using that principle….in Ecuador whilst at the cloud forest reserve, I continued this mode of living research by actively working upon the land, I managed to reconnect lovingly to the surroundings and creativity happened it flowed like I had never suffered from an artist block in my life, which was not true.

 

 

I was experiencing in my third year a massive mental block to my creative energy no artwork at all, plenty of reading and thinking, yet as soon as I got to the Cloud Forest I took off creative;y, London's heaviness lifted in days and it was if My mind was finally free to express-itself…….in the evenings it usually rained very hard but under the balcony we managed to play cards, drink our  ground coffee relax in hammocks until the early hours, I realized I could work rest and play here.

 

stick art by g.mendes.2015

 

At art school the separated  clean white spaces sitting at desks in silence, with very little to distract us,  was a living hell to me, that at least made me realize I need open space to help canalize my learning into doing, My art studio practice merged into nature within open air walking research field trips, company music, all need to inspire me into making artwork that became a hybrid research vehicle.

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