Tar Heads / Cabezas de Chapapote

True, this listing refers to work done in Mexico. Tar Heads, or Cabezas de Chapapote, is in the Mexican Years work, but shown in the Maine Years as the Medium Sal-Zar™ has made it possible for me to do this work.

Sal-Zar, the Mixed Media Medium™, is the key to doing this body of work. I have placed the images and text describing this process in the Maine Years so it will not be missed by anyone, who might not click on the Mexican Years.

Around 1999, a friend mentioned that she knew a Mexican artist who was doing some work using chapapote (tar). This interested me and I started experimenting with tar. I saw immediately that using the traditional mixture used by Mexican workers on tile floors in Mexico would not be satisfactory. It tended to lump. For several years I worked on adding resin to the tar mixture and applying this to the tile floors in our home in San Miguel. This mixture of traditional chapapote for floors and my Sal-Zar Medium™ made it possible for mop and water and soaps to be applied to the floor and for the chapapote to still adhere to the floor for a long period of time. The Sal-Zar™ enabled the chapapote to be semi-permanent. Water did not penetrate the admixture I had prepared for our floors.

I decided that this type of mix could be used on paper too. This led me to the Tar Head series of 1999 and following years. In 2002 in A Signature Year 2002 and the Convergence Series I concluded that I had developed a strikingly new way of applying a medium and that the nature of the chapaopte with Sal-Zar was ideal for the images I was then doing. As I could use oil pastels and graphite and spray enamels in the medium I was then on the road to creating a distinctive method of application that resulted in what I found to be striking new images on paper.

Some of the work done in 1999 and 2001 are shown here, as they suggest the achievement I have been able to have using chapapote in Sal-Zar.