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San Miguel de Allende

The Legacies of Emiliano Zapata: Apparently, the Personal was NOT Political

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By Deborah Van Hoewyk—

Even if you don’t know much about Emiliano Zapata (1879-1919), you’ve probably heard of the Zapatista movement he inspired. Dedicated to the proposition that land should be returned to the people, Zapata, as commander of the Liberation Army of the South, is one of the best-known heroes of the Mexican Revolution (1910-20). When Francisco Madero successfully ousted the dictator Porfirio Díaz and made himself president in 1911, however, he failed to implement any of the land reforms Zapata and like-minded revolutionaries expected.

Zapata went home to Ayala in Morelos (south of Mexico City) and wrote his “Plan de Ayala,” castigating Madero and ensuring that the peasants of Morelos would benefit from land reform. The Plan de Ayala was instrumental to creating Article 27 of the 1917 Constitution, which establishes indigenous land rights in communal holdings (ejidos and comunidades agrarias); it is considered a fundamental text for the Zapatista movement.

The Mexican Revolution was marked by chaos: coups, assassinations, hostilities between northern and southern factions in what was basically a civil war within a civil war. Zapata was a thorn in the side of Mexico’s various presidents – none of whom implemented any meaningful land reform, despite the 1917 Constitution. The Constitution had been promoted by Venustiano Carranza, governor of the state of Coahuila; in the wake of the Constitution, Carranza became president of Mexico.

Once in office, he was determined to get rid of Zapata, who took his ragged peasant soldiers into battle whenever his demands were ignored. On April 10, 1919, Carranza’s military organized an elaborate ruse to get Zapata to a supposedly secret meeting at Hacienda Chinameca (about 18 km, or 11 miles, south of Ayala). He arrived on horseback and saluted the military lineup; they promptly murdered him in his saddle.

Zapata’s Political Legacy

Politically, Zapata left behind a peasant movement that lives on today, mostly in Chiapas. The lengthy dominant-party role of the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) left many people, especially younger people, feeling there was no political avenue open to them except Zapata-style resistance. As the Revolution faded (it took quite some time for the fighting to stop), the Zapatistas began a long and complicated history of representing the indigenous peoples of southern Mexico, often clashing with northern anti-government groups

Three events crystallized the Zapatista identity and firmly located it in the Lacandon jungle area of Chiapas as the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (National Zapatista Army of Liberation, or EZLN).

· In 1992, reforms to Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution fundamentally changed the country’s agrarian system, ending the longstanding process of land redistribution and allowing new forms of ownership and transfer of ejido land.

· On January 1, 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect, leading the EZLN to declare war on the Mexican government. The EZLN occupied four towns in Chiapas, including San Cristóbal de las Casas; after 11 days of bloody fighting, during which 300 people died, the Mexican government started negotiations with the EZLN. It took two years, but in 1996, the Mexican government and the EZLN signed the San Andrés Accords, granting autonomy, recognition, and rights to the indigenous peoples of Mexico. In other words, the Accords ostensibly restored some portions of Article 27 of the 1917 Constitution.

· Also in 1996, the EZLN convened an Intercontinental Meeting for Humanity and against Neoliberalism, becoming the de facto leader of leftist activists around the world.

As time has passed, the Zapatistas have had less impact on political issues; the EZLN still exists, and still fights for indigenous rights, but their activities are mostly confined to Chiapas. They are opposed to mega-infrastructure projects in the region and maintain ties with European activists. Drug cartels have used violence against local Zapatista governments, causing the EZLN to reorganize in more local collectives aligned with broader Assemblies of Collectives of Zapatista Autonomous Governments” (ACGAZ).

Zapata’s Personal Legacies: Men???
Zapata, an icon of machismo, had twenty or so kids with either 9 or 14 women (he only married one of them); he may also have been bisexual, a possibility that has recently been reexamined because of a painting.

A Controversial Painting.
On Tuesday, December 10, 2019, protesters stormed the usually staid and monumental Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City’s historic center. Many of the protesters were indigenous farmers – those for whom Zapata had fought. Their target was one particular painting in the exhibition Emiliano. Zapata Después de Zapata (Emiliano. Zapata after Zapata), held to mark the centennial of Zapata’s death.

It wasn’t this one …

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nor was it this one, odd as it may be.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was this one.

Note that the stilettos seem to be revolvers, Zapata’s sombrero is pink with painted flowers, and the horse is – um – aroused. The title is La Revolución.

Antonio Medrano spoke for the protesters: “This isn’t freedom of expression, it is debauchery! It’s degrading. They can’t exhibit our history that way … they can’t permit this kind of mockery.” Perhaps the strongest protests came from Zapata’s descendants, who said they would sue to have the painting removed. Jorge Zapata Gonzalez, Zapata’s grandson, asserted that “We are not going to allow this! For us as relatives, this denigrates the figure of our general – depicting him as gay.”

The artist, Fabián Cháirez, says he was surprised by the cries to take it down, hide it away, or burn it. Cháirez, gay himself, shows a number of similar paintings on his website – La Revolución was painted in 2014. At the time of the exhibition, the artist told the BBC he conceived of the painting as a counterpoint to the predominant image of masculinity as a white fortachón (strongman – Zapata was called el caudillo del sur, another way to say “strongman”); he said he thought issues of sexuality “had already been overcome or [were] under control: inclusion, respect for diversity or difference. Issues such as machismo, misogyny, homophobia.” Those who disagree with the protesters see the painting as an exercise in artistic freedom, or as an effort to quell the negative Mexican attitude towards anything effeminate.

The Palacio de Bellas Artes continued to show the painting for the duration of the exhibition.

Any truth to the rumors? While academic historians say there’s nothing to the rumors about Zapata and other men, that all the evidence is second-hand, others believe that at least two instances of same-sex behavior are plausible.

In 1906, four years before the Mexican Revolution began, Zapata, 27, met Ignacio de la Torre y Mier (“Nachito”), 40, who had been married to Porfirio Díaz’s daughter Amada since 1888. Rumors of Nachito’s homosexuality had been circulating for years. In 1901, the Mexico City police had raided “The Dance of the 41,” a private ball for 41 men, 19 of them dressed in women’s clothes. Word had it that there were 42 men involved, and that Nachito was #42, but somehow the “son-in-law of the father-in-law” was not arrested. The event was described extensively in the Mexican press, leading to open discussions of homosexuality – and to the notion that the dissolute lifestyle of the elite classes represented a moral failing. Not a good look when Revolution is imminent (you can find the 2020 film Dance of the 41, which covers the political aspect of the raid, on Netflix).

Nachito met Zapata at the hacienda of San Carlos Borromeo in Cuernavaca, where Zapata was working in the stables. As the story goes, Nachito invited Zapata to his house on Plaza de Reforma in Mexico City, ostensibly to take care of his horses. Amada spent little time with Nachito, was well aware of his sexual preferences, and kept a diary. Therein she recorded that she found Nachito and Zapata “wallowing” together in the stables.

Zapata’s personal secretary, Manuel Palafox (“The Black Bird”), was a closeted gay; he made cryptic references in his records to behavior that indicated Zapata had other homosexual relationships.

Zapata’s Personal Legacies: Women and Children

Emiliano Zapata may well have had relationships with any number of women that did not produce children, but the record shows he did have children with 9 and maybe 10 women.

Some children died young – a boy of five was bitten by a rattlesnake, a girl of three succumbed to a scorpion sting, several died at birth or shortly after, and a girl of 16 died of meningitis. Of those who lived long lives, only Ana María Zapata Portillo (1915-2010) followed in her father’s footsteps by working for agrarian rights.

On August 20, 1911, after the fall of the Díaz regime, Zapata married one of the women with whom he had children, Josefa Espejo Merino (1879-1968). There is no evidence that he ever divorced her – she died in Ayala. He had successive relationships with the Zúñiga Benítez sisters, Gregoria and Luz, who were soldaderas in the Mexican Revolution.

The role of women, and their children, in Emiliano Zapata’s life is unclear. He was never without one (or more), and there certainly were a lot of them. That Mexicans are interested in his relationships with women as well as with men can be seen in a new play, Emiliano Zapata’s Women, which premiered at the National Museum of Mexican Art in June 2023. The play presents women in his life – a midwife, his mother and sister, a lover – building up or tearing down Zapata’s image by sharing their intimate thoughts about him.

Deborah Van Hoewyk wrote and copy edited for The Eye for over a decade. She passed away in 2025 and is greatly missed.

Huatulco, San Miguel de Allende

The Long Political Tradition of Murals in Mexico

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By Marcia Chaiken and Jan Chaiken—

When the word “art” is mentioned in the same sentence as “Mexico” our minds leap to our memories of outstanding “murals.” Whether in the largest cities of Ciudad de México or Guadalajara, or small special places such as San Miguel de Allende or Huatulco, during return visits we are drawn back to experience again the murals that are etched in our minds. And we are always astonished to see details that have eluded us and to learn more about the history that inspired them during our many decades of exploring them.

It seems that a blank wall stimulates human artistic creativity. Some of the walls of caves in the mountains of Europe are decorated with prehistoric drawings of animals that were hunted or perhaps worshipped in the past. And although we found these 50,000-year-old creations awe-inspiring, they did not prepare us for the breathtaking murals in Bonampak, deep in the jungle of the state of Chiapas. In bright colors and detailed drawings, each of the murals in three temple rooms open a window to the life the elite Maya lived there more than twelve centuries ago. Displaying wars, musical events and religious rites, the Bonampak murals also have a political intent that is innate to the best and most famous of Mexican murals through the centuries – in this case establishing the hereditary right to rule of the portrayed nobility.

Centuries later, after the Spanish invasion, Catholic orders also used murals to demonstrate their right to rule New Spain and subjugate the indigenous people. Using artists’ techniques developed in Europe during the Renaissance, including understanding of human anatomy and ability to portray visual perspectives, the murals often presented the lineage of specific Catholic orders in tree-like form, tracing the founders and current religious heads of that era back to Jesus. We frankly find these monochromatic murals adorning convents and other religious buildings in cities around central Mexico including Cuernavaca, San Agustín de Acolman, and Malinalco, less memorable and inspiring than earlier and later works. Rather than drawing on the creativity of the native muralists, they were copies of prints from Spain that were painted by people who had been enslaved by the religious orders.

The Mexican Revolution, which began in 1910, challenged the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz and helped inspire one of the most prolific periods of mural art in Mexico. But even before the upheaval in 1910, the writing was literally on the wall. In 1906, Gerardo Murillo, known as Dr. Atl, published a manifesto calling for a distinctly Mexican art inspired by the country’s Indigenous cultures rather than European models. Closely allied with President Porfirio Díaz, Treasury Minister Alberto Pani, and the revolutionary Venustiano Carranza, Dr. Atl became the hero and teacher of three major muralists after the revolution: Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros.

These “three greats”, although linked together by art school affiliation (San Carlos Academy), revolutionary ideology and chronology, had radically different backgrounds. Diego Rivera, born in 1886 in Guanajuato, was a child prodigy producing drawings as early as age 2, including sketches on the walls of his home. His parents encouraged his art studies in the San Carlos Academy in Mexico City and then in Europe. Rivera was part of the now well-known avant-garde group breaking traditional forms of art, including Pablo Picasso. Although he was immersed in the paintings of the Impressionists including Gauguin and Matisse, he developed a style that was much more rooted in Mexican indigenous art, using bright colors and flat perspectives.

Orozco, on the other hand, was born in Jalisco in 1883 and as a child moved to Mexico City where his parents struggled financially. They decided that José should become an agricultural engineer and sent him to study in a rural area. Orozco contracted rheumatic fever and returned home to Mexico City. Shortly after, his father died of typhus and, to help support his family, Orozco became a draftsman and then was commissioned to paint portraits of recently deceased people. His interest in art was sufficient to begin classes at the San Carlos Academy. But before he could establish himself as an artist, another tragedy occurred; while he was mixing chemicals for fireworks, an explosion greatly injured his left hand and arm. His left hand and wrist needed to be amputated after they became gangrenous. Orozco struggled on, taking menial artistic jobs – but he was forever sensitized to poverty and pain in the world around him. These are reflected in the grey and red murals he eventually produced.

Squeiros, the youngest in the triad, was born in Chihuahua in 1896 to a well-to-do family who supported his desire at age 12 to study art and architecture in Mexico City. The young Siqueiros was a firebrand and soon was part of the prerevolutionary activists who demanded social change – including a successful student strike at the San Carlos Academy. He joined the Mexican Revolution Army at age 18 and advanced rapidly through the ranks. His political activism continued long after the Revolution, and he later became an outspoken Communist whose convictions shaped both his art and his life. His military career continued in Spain during the Spanish civil war. As part of this career, Siqueiros developed a passion for new technology. His murals reflect both the horrors of wars and the influence of technology.

In the decade following the revolution, all three of these artists received government grants to adorn much of the historic central area of Mexico City with their murals. These works are accessible today in the Palacio de Bellas Artes and other government buildings. The House of Tiles, (currently a restaurant and store owned by Sanborns) also has a fine example of a mural by Orozco. The intent of all these murals was less an appreciation of art than political propaganda – portraying the grandiloquence of both the Mexican and Russian revolutionaries. The murals pitted the excesses of capitalism (especially Rivera’s) and fascism (Siqueiros’) against the dream of the working class achieving independence. Both for Rivera and Siqueiros, fascination with new technology and its promise of freeing the masses from back-breaking labor became a staple topic in their work. For all three, documenting the pain and oppression of humanity under repressive regimes was paramount.

In Guadalajara, Orozco created monumental murals exploring Mexico’s history, from the struggle for independence to the violence, contradictions and aspirations of modern society. They are located in the Government Palace of Jalisco, the Museo Cabañas, and the Museum of Arts at the University of Guadalajara. As the fame of the three spread throughout the world, universities and philanthropists, especially in the US, commissioned murals – but for their artistic value and technological portrayal. Some of those who commissioned the murals had not done their homework and were aghast when the portraits of Russian revolutionaries appeared on their walls; in fact, Nelson Rockefeller ordered a mural by Rivera in Rockefeller Center covered up and then destroyed because it included a portrait of Lenin. But many murals are still accessible in major US cities and universities. Most of the art is still there as well as the political history.

Drs. Marcia and Jan Chaiken have been married for 62 years and have published many justice system research reports together.

Huatulco, San Miguel de Allende

When the Sign Becomes the Artwork

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By Jesús Rafael Arguelles Rangel—

A hand-painted sign does more than tell you where to buy tacos, get a haircut, repair a tire, or order a glass of agua fresca. In Mexico, the sign itself often becomes part of the place: letters lean, swell, cast shadows, turn gothic, or explode into color; a smiling pig may advertise carnitas, a fish may point toward a seafood stand, and a price can be painted with as much personality as a mural.

That visual language is easy to overlook precisely because it belongs to everyday commerce. Rotulismo grew as a practical trade, not as something made for museums. Sign painters learned to make a business visible from across a street, often working directly on walls, shutters, glass, metal, or food stalls. The result was advertising, but it was also authorship. Two shops selling the same thing could look completely different because the hand behind the brush was different.

Today that distinction matters more than it once did. Printed vinyl, digital templates, and standardized branding can make a sign cheaper, faster, and easier to reproduce. They can also make one neighborhood look more like another. A hand-painted sign carries small decisions that are difficult to standardize: how thick a shadow should be, which word deserves red, whether a letter should stretch to fill an awkward corner, whether a mascot should be funny, elegant, or slightly absurd.

Those choices have begun to receive formal cultural recognition. In late 2025, Mexico City’s Galería José María Velasco opened Los rótulos no deben morir, an exhibition that brought together nearly one hundred pieces and presented rotulismo as craft, visual language, and urban memory. In February 2026, the gallery also hosted Encuentro Rotulismo. Tepito, where sign painters, artists, researchers, and the public gathered around an art form long associated with neighborhood businesses rather than elite institutions.

The lettering itself tells stories. Researchers at UNAM have noted how gothic forms, for example, continue to appear on food stands, bakeries, wrestling-related businesses, product logos, and tattoos, where they can suggest tradition, age, prestige, or toughness. In a hand-painted commercial sign, typography is never only typography. It becomes a social signal: a promise about what kind of place you are entering and who it is speaking to.

That is why the old question – is it design or is it art? – may be too narrow. Rotulismo has always needed to work. It must identify, persuade, and survive weather, dust, grease, repainting, and changing businesses. But usefulness does not cancel expression. If anything, the constraint makes the creativity more visible. The painter has to make something memorable while obeying a wall, a budget, a deadline, and a client’s request.

A printed banner can do the job. A hand-painted sign can do the job and leave a trace of the person who made it. That trace is what turns a commercial object into part of a city’s visual memory. When the sign disappears, the business may still be there, but one small piece of the neighborhood’s voice is gone with it.

Jesús Rafael Arguelles Rangel is a Mexican writer and creator whose work explores culture, identity, and storytelling across literature and digital media.

Huatulco

November in Huatulco

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By Britt Jarnryd—

By November, Huatulco is beginning to welcome back its winter visitors. Restaurants and beaches are getting busier, familiar faces are returning, and the town is settling into another season.

But at El Sueño Zapoteco/A.C. Bacaanda Foundation, our work continues year-round.

The beginning of the school year in August and September is always our busiest period. We welcome and train new community educators participating in our Smart Rural School program. Hundreds of iPads must be cleaned, updated and programmed. Equipment and internet connectivity are checked, and teachers receive training in technology and our Spanish, mathematics, reading and writing programs.

By November, the school year is well underway, and our focus shifts to supporting educators in their classrooms. Our team continues to visit rural communities, some more than three hours from Huatulco, providing teacher training and educational guidance. We also meet with parents because their involvement is essential to their children’s education.

Our Continuing My Dream scholarship program is also in full swing. This year, we are supporting 26 students from rural communities as they pursue their high school education. Each receives financial assistance for enrollment, uniforms, shoes, school supplies, an iPad, transportation and meals.

Beyond this practical support, students receive mentoring in mathematics, English, study habits, emotional and social development, community projects and spelling. Our goal is to help them develop the skills and confidence they need to navigate both academic and personal challenges.

Alongside our educational programs, we continue organizing fundraising events, welcoming volunteers and donors, and developing new projects.

While Huatulco prepares for another busy tourist season, we remain focused on ensuring that growing up in a rural community does not limit a child’s opportunities to learn, grow and build a better future.

But we cannot build this dream alone. Every donation, every volunteer and every person who shares our mission helps us reach more children and young people.

To those who have supported us over the years, thank you for walking alongside us. And to everyone returning to Huatulco this season, we welcome you back with open arms and a special invitation: come and be part of this dream.

San Miguel de Allende

ON! Gallery: Where Art, Culture, and Contemporary Life Converge

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By Gina Weber—

San Miguel de Allende is home to more than 60 art galleries, artist studios, and cultural centers. In a city celebrated for its art scene, what inspires someone to open another gallery? For ON! Gallery, the answer lies in reimagining what a gallery can be: not simply a place to view or purchase art, but a space where art inspires conversation, sparks curiosity, and becomes part of everyday life.

ON! Gallery was founded on January 23, 2026, by Juan Carlos Limón Buergo and Emmanuel Razo. “Our vision is to bring something new to the art scene in San Miguel de Allende, something that challenges convention and makes a difference,” Limón explains. “While the city has no shortage of art ecosystems, we are taking a different approach: dedicating each exhibition to a single artist and presenting a cohesive body of work that allows visitors to truly discover and connect with the artist’s vision.”

Recently, the gallery presented The Place After the Place by Benito Rangel de María, featuring his Brick project and paper collages informed by migration, memory, and material exploration. It also exhibited They Have Given Us the Land, a contemporary ceramic series by Dolores Hidalgo artist Julio César Espinosa, inspired by Juan Rulfo’s short story ‘Nos han dado la tierra’, from his collection El llano en llamas (1953). The work reflects on land as both a promise and a burden, revealing the tension between expectation and scarcity.

The exhibitions reflect ON!’s interest in contemporary art in dialogue with Mexico’s cultural heritage. The gallery connects contemporary practitioners with traditional makers, including ceramicists, mojiganga artisans, and textile artists, exploring how inherited techniques and cultural memory can inspire new forms of expression. Artist talks enrich the experience, allowing visitors to explore the ideas, processes, and stories behind the work.

Luca Bray: An Exploration of Color and Form
On November 7, 2026, ON! Gallery will open Yo, Luca Bray, an exhibition featuring oil paintings on canvas brought from Italy. Through his expressive approach to abstraction, Bray explores color, texture, and material, creating compositions that balance gesture, form, and personal expression.

olor is central to Bray’s practice. It defines shapes, establishes relationships, and constructs spaces that draw viewers into the work. Words and personal phrases frequently appear beneath layers of paint, adding an intimate narrative dimension to his compositions. Although best known for painting, Bray also explores sculpture and ceramics, extending his investigation of material and expression beyond the canvas.

In an interview with Hotbook magazine, Bray was asked about the significance of incorporating words and phrases into his work. His response was a single word: “Fear.” “I write whatever comes to mind, and it immediately breaks the blankness of the canvas, which helps me,” he explained. “It’s the first stage of the work, because afterward I begin applying colors over the words. The magic is that sometimes the original words emerge through the layers of paint, becoming part of the story. I create a written narrative, and at the same time, my mind begins working with color. The two intermingle, and in the end, they coexist.”

Limón is particularly pleased to present Italian-born artist Luca Bray, whom he has known for more than 20 years. “I want this gallery to help make San Miguel a destination not only for weddings and traditions, but also for discovering outstanding artists and their work,” Limón says.

ON! Gallery
Diezmo Viejo No. 5, Centro Histórico
San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico
Instagram: @on.gallery.art

Huatulco

Death: Muse of American Art

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By José Palacios y Román—

For the Indigenous civilizations of the Americas, death was not simply an ending but part of an eternal cycle connecting the living, their ancestors, and the spiritual world. This understanding found expression in stone carvings, codices, murals, ceramics, and ritual objects.

The Olmec, Maya, Zapotec, Mixtec, and Mexica, among others, developed artistic traditions that reflected their beliefs about life, death, and the cosmos. At Teotihuacan, the famous Tlalocan mural depicts a paradise associated with the rain god Tláloc, illustrating how art gave visual form to ideas about the afterlife.

Following the Spanish conquest, Indigenous beliefs encountered Catholic traditions, creating new forms of religious and artistic expression. Over centuries, these influences contributed to the imagery associated with Día de Muertos, including decorated altars, marigolds, candles, and offerings for departed loved ones.

Death also became a subject of humor and social commentary. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, printmakers Manuel Manilla and José Guadalupe Posada popularized images of skeletons and calaveras. Posada’s satirical figures reminded viewers that death makes no distinction between rich and poor. Later artists, including Diego Rivera, incorporated these images into their own work, helping establish the calavera as a recognizable symbol of Mexican identity.

Today, artists continue to explore mortality, memory, and cultural heritage through painting, sculpture, ceramics, printmaking, and mixed media. Traditional symbols are reinterpreted, connecting ancestral beliefs with contemporary artistic expression.

This November, Art Gallery Copalli and the collective La Magia del Color present México Is Memory, Color and Life, an exhibition of selected works from their 2026 painting competition.

The award ceremony and exhibition opening take place on November 2 at 6:30 p.m. in Tangolunda, Huatulco.

The exhibition continues through November 30, with free admission, offering visitors an opportunity to discover how contemporary artists interpret Mexico’s traditions of remembrance.

Huatulco

Editor’s Letter

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By Jane Bauer—

“Great art picks up where nature ends.”  ~Marc Chagall

I get very excited when I see a piece of art that resonates with me. And when I can afford to acquire it, I am besotted. Art that I love doesn’t just sit on the wall. I will sit and stare at it the way one watches the sky for birds.

I have no idea why some pieces affect me so profoundly, but I suspect it has something to do with the creative impulse we all begin life with. As children, our creativity was encouraged; to play an instrument, to paint, to draw, to write poems and stories, to nurture this creative force each of us has within. Up to a point. As we get older these pursuits are treated as childish rather than essential to life. Art has always presented itself as a contradiction.

What is it that causes us to make art? Dogs don’t appear to do it and they seem perfectly content. Birds may indeed consider their nests art; a collage of sticks and objets trouvés.

In the ocean, off of Seattle, in a patch of garbage it has been discovered that Giant Pacific octopuses are flourishing. These are not the small octopus we eat grilled for lunch, these are huge badass octopi whose arms can span 20 feet. They are creating all sorts of stuff with the things they find. One was found to have made a sort of apartment out of an old fridge and another had collected hundreds of golf balls and arranged them into interesting designs.

Some orb-weaving spiders add zigzags, crosses and other decorative silk patterns to their webs. Scientists still debate their precise functions, which may include attracting prey or warning larger animals away. Whatever the purpose, they produce something that looks remarkably like deliberate design. Maybe we aren’t the only species trying to find some order in this world.

Art is rarely a waste of time, even if it isn’t good art. Artistic expression is the moment when we sit with ourselves. It is not about finding perfection in a reproduction of what we see before us; it is about conveying some truth that lives within our soul.

Conveying is communication, and maybe that is all decent art is: something that transmits to the viewer an aspect of our collective experience. A painting might capture the light in a certain way or combine colors that remind us of a moment of loss. Someone else might see the same painting and remember something entirely different. That is the magic of art.

While art can be about beauty, I think good art is most often about truth.

See you next month,

Jane