ALTERNATIVE  WORK

Lucia Maya

Along my artistic path I have entered in diverse forms of art to include graphic and neographic. 

At the beginning of the eighties I produced my first intention and my first series of graphic art of which I did a derivation of the original drawings, transferring it to an electronic media that was utilized by architects, a type of graphic art called sepia copy.

The sepia copy was made from an original drawing, after this, a translucent copy , and after,

a heliography in different shade of sepias that then facilitates in the adding of color with greasy pencils.

In those years in Guadalajara not many workshops existed.  During this period many artists learned this technique that permitted us to obtain the multiplication of images. Out of this process

I was only able to produce three images worked with different colors and certain variations which finally made the piece become more like an original.

In 1984 I worked in Mexico City, a series of lithography’s that were a homage to Frida Kahlo. 

At that time Frida was not the personage in which she has been converted to now. 

My interest in her began by knowing an artist that opened her feminine side to the world without sparing her sincerity and with such harshness that encouraged many of us women to speak fully

of our personal history and feelings.

In March of 2007, the series of titled lithography’s, related Hearts was exposed in the Metro Pino Suarez of Mexico City.

In 1985 I began my graphic/engraving career in the workshop of Alejandro Eheremberg in Naucalpan State of Mexico.  That workshop was my school in this marvelous technique, that in

my opinion, is one of the most difficult and complicated in the Fine Arts,  and the most complex

of them all.

The workshop had an excellent quality and its technicians were the best teachers in the practice

of engraving.  You could alternate and learn from the most important artists as Leonora Carrington, José Luis Cuevas, Vicente Rojo.

In 1991, the death of one of my best friends, Marco Antonio Arteaga, awoke in me a great anxiety the need to create after one year, the installation Pictorial Martyrs of Paradise in the Museum of the Chopo of Mexico City.

In 1993, my first voluntary exile and my experimental anxiety carried me to enter in a type of neográfica by using photocopies or Xerox copies, while I was in exile at my friend's home Dr. Susan Darley in Princeton New Jersey.

There I devised a series of more than ninety images titled Nocturnal Litanies, where through the velocity of my hand on the photocopier and without much conscience of awareness, created the histories of a rider, some bride and groom and the hand, series that exhibited that same year at

the gallery of the Teatro Peon Contreras of Mérida Yucatan.

That is the same year I carried out my first Action Art, titled "Jaculatorias Profanas" in the Teatro Degollado of Guadalajara.

The opera singers,  María Luisa Tamez, Carlos Serrano and Rose María Partida,

participated and were living characters of my imageniery .

"The girl of the hours", Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City.  "Three ladies on the lake", was

an aquatic installation on the Riviera de Chapala, with three ships that were set on fire recalling

the arrival of Christopher Columbus.

On this occasion I invited to participate with me a Cuban artist Ulises Gonzalez and Venezuelan artist Jesus Matheus with the Black Ship.  The Sta.  María and The Nińa were left to my charge.

The  american photographer Jill Fessenden carried out an installation of stairs submerged in a Lake of fireworks.

In 1996 I began to experiment with the cybernetics, utilizing the programs of Photoshop, Illustrator, and PageMaker.

From 1998 I began to work digitally intervening my own pictorial images and utilizing also the photography as a new medium of expression.

Using this medium has given me the ability to undertake themes and forms that I would not be

able to undertake through other traditional techniques.

It seems difficult for many to understand that this technique and medium also has its own merit

and creativity with emotion.  This is also expressed and declared through the digital art.  Painting

is a totally different type of form and different tools.

I have received naive comments since:  "The true soul is found only in the original works”, because according to this, there lays the true hand of the artist.  “Using a machine removes the warmth of the human touch".

Then we should infer that poets and writers that utilize the typewriter or the computer to express their ideas or emotions, deprive their poems or writings of a soul?.  I am to understand the soul is in the artist, the works of art are its reflection and the diversity of techniques increases the possibilities of expression.

It will never be the same thing, drawing, oil, digital painting, engraving on metal,  they are all diverse expressions and each one has its own charm and validity, but is impossible to try to clarify the use of this type of artistic resources in many cases, even to insist on what refers to the attitude of artists that do not yet use a computer, -I more than likely felt the same way until I learned this technique – This process gives us and allows us a much great spectrum of creative possibilities.

As pioneers of these new expressive possibilities, we will have to wait some years so that our

new technique can be understood by our peers.

In the recent years, as a perfect my abilities, I am combining the traditional graphic, the photography, the drawing and the painting with the printed digital image in many mediums to include cloth, achieving a stable and very interesting fusion.  After many years I again have taken up, the drawing in pencil and to the silver tip a Renaissance technique almost as extinct as the good sketchers.  The video, from the past three years, have served me to give movement to my images and to combine it with my texts and photographs.

 

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