La Ruta Verde

One doesn’t think of Mexico as offering a green landscape. And this is true, as many areas are arid. During the rainy season and after the blessed rain, central Mexico can bloom, with the land turning a lush green.

The five paintings and one triptych in the show “The Passage Green” at Merrimack College developed from my many visits to Mexico City. There, you see many taxis, VW Beetles, believe it or not, in a flashy green. Then there are the mini-buses popularly known as “peseras”. Lately the “peseras” have been a favorite target for delinquents, and many crimes are committed on the mini-buses. Mexico has over 100 mini-buses routes, and in the hope of stopping crimes (day and night) the police will be riding the buses with shotgun in hand. Don’t know how they would ever get off a clean shot, if one of them wanted to, as the buses are so crowded during the rush hours, that you can’t fall down, as you are locked as one big body mass.

Well, this and my carry-over enthusiasm for the color green from the Maine series, “Mainely Green, Some Blue” made me pack up these paintings done in Mexico and ship them to my exhibition “The Passage Green” at Merrimack College. One painting is now in the Merrimack College permanent collection. In this body-of-work, La Ruta Verde, I used the color green as the dominant color but added chapapote (tar) and a resin in the mixture, to achieve its unique color. It also seemed of value to use tar: related to the urban world juxtaposed to the landscape paintings I showed in the Maine series “Mainly Green, Some Blue”.

La Ruta Verde therefore is carrying the message on, from Maine to México.