¡Colores!; 305; Santero; Interview with Marie Romero Cash; Part 2

Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Just go a little bit. Yeah. I think it's our shadow. You want to start here? Yeah. Okay. It kind of gets a little weird when you start looking right to the camera. Of course. Yeah. Because it looks like you're playing towards the camera. So, when do you want me to start? You're starting right now. Okay. Okay. The project I'm working on right now are the 14 stations of the cross for St. Francis Cathedral in Santa Fe. Over years ago, there was a controversy about the main altar screen there. There was supposed to be San Teto Arch to introduce this type of art into the cathedral. Since it is so prevalent in Northern New Mexico.

However, they ultimately chose to do a sort of Byzantine icon representation on the main altar. And this past year, the Archbishop Shein decided that we should have stations of the cross by a San Teto and have some of the local art in the cathedral. So, consequently, they had a sort of competition to choose which artists they wanted to do all the representations. So, myself and three others submitted the 13th station of the cross, which is of sorts, Piata. And mine was chosen. And so, I was commissioned to do the stations of the cross for the cathedral. So, what I'm doing, I have painted, I have drawn the stations of the cross on paper and enlarged them to 32 by 48.

And then I will continue to paint on them until they're completed. One of the things I do first is to enlarge the piece onto the panel, onto the Jesuit panel, and then get it to the point where I'm comfortable with the hands and the faces. And then I commence painting. What I'm going to be doing probably is just painting most of the faces because the clothing I will do at the very end so that I can have the uniformity of color that's required. The cathedral requires a certain color scheme. It is done mostly in greens and stained glass and wallpaper and stencils and different things. So, everything has to kind of be pulled together. So, as of the moment, I'm going to be doing probably the 13th stations, just coloring in the parts that I need to match up such as the faces.

What I'm going to do is... Now, how did you go from here to here? Because it's like you go on another piece of paper and then you square it all up for it. I'm drawing and enlarge it to 32 by 42 and then transfer it onto the panel. And that way I get what I'm doing to a degree. These panels will be finished with curtains and all the background that I need. It is of this moment of concentrating primarily on figures, figures in color. So, it goes from this to this to the panel. And the grid on this paper matches the grid on this paper, which ultimately transfers on.

I've been here. If you want to keep going, that's fine. What I will do is set up this light. We've got a shadow on the painting and on your face. I'm just going to try to soften it up a little bit. Now, I'm going to use this light. I'm going to use this light. I'm going to use this light.

Is there another public over here somewhere that I could click on too? You can disconnect that cord, the orange cord. Yes, and plug into that. That's just my outdoor light. So, you can plug into the orange. All right, let's see if this will open up last you out there. Let me go about here. If you could talk to me a little bit about your way first got into this. What intrigued you? Did anyone influence you?

What were you influenced by art in general? Why are you doing what you do? Primarily, I began working in this field probably around 1975. My main interest was to get to doing something that had something to do with the culture, not necessarily art. My family is very creative. My parents are a median and I the Romero who are fairly well known around the nation as traditional tinsmiths. But I didn't want to do tin work because it involves a great deal of manual type of labor, physical strength. So, my sister Anita had just started painting retablos and carving and she encouraged me to do it and I thought,

ah, those are so primitive, I really don't want to do something like that. But once I got into it, I was hooked and at the time I was married and my husband provided a good living. It allowed me to kind of weed out the things I wanted to do and move away from working as a secretary for a living and be able to do the things I wanted to do. So, little by little, I started doing more and more work. The actual trend towards moving into doing church art started with Father Jerome Martinez, who was at the time at El Reto. He was remodeling a church there and wanted me to paint an altar screen for the dedication of the church. I think this was in 1982 and 1984 and I was really trying to pawn it off on someone else because I thought the job was just way too large and I just wasn't good enough.

Anyway, he convinced me to do it for him and that's where I started doing major works for churches. After that, I painted altar screens in Ojo Caliente and in Espanola and in Oroio Ando and several in Colorado. And for the art's diocesan, the most recent one was that Santa Maria de La Paz here in Santa Fe, which is Father Jerome's parish, and I painted the altar screen for the Marian Chapel. So, I'm used to working big and I like to work big. Most of the years, in fact, all of the years that I've been doing this, I've participated in the annual Spanish Market on the Plaza. And I've been quite successful in those shows. And so now I primarily work for Spanish Market and I do a number of promotions. I try not to do too much gallery stuff because I can not always meet their demand, but I do work for the Maxwell Museum and a couple of other small galleries.

I think I'm going to have to get Chuckie to move a little bit. He's on a piece of thin. Maybe we can talk a little bit about the inspiration of what you like about doing the paintings, what the creative spirit part of it means to you. When I first received the commission to paint the stations of the cross, I think in my own mind I treated it just as just another commission. And so I said about doing the drawings, doing the research, everything I needed to do. But one day I was in the cathedral after Mass on 1st Friday in October. And I normally walk over to the conquistadora chapel and light a few candles for myself and my family and my work.

And when I was walking back to the exit, I stopped by the station of the cross that was hanging. This was the 13th station that I had done as a sample. And I saw a woman praying to the station. And I sat there and watched her for a little while. And I think that was when I realized the impact of this commission. These stations were actually going to be in this church probably for a long after all of us were gone. And the woman had felt the need to pray in front of this particular image. And it really touched me. And I then became aware of the magnitude of the project. And after that I began to more seriously.

It was always a serious project. But after that incident it just made me realize that the work had to be the very best I could do. And I came home and started the actual painting of the stations and decided that I would use holy water to paint them with. And that would add an additional spiritual dimension to the paintings. And so I went over to the caramelites and got another batch of holy water and started my paintings. And I've been quite pleased with the progress I'm making. It is a talent that comes to me from somewhere far into myself and far into my spirit. It is not something that I learned how to do that I took lessons for. It is something that just developed over a number of years and has finally come full circle from 20 years ago when I began.

I've been doing lots of it. The purpose of painting just the faces and the halos at the moment is to develop a certain amount of uniformity for the final product. I need to make sure that all the reds are the right red and all the images look like the previous one. And usually that's a difficulty in doing a project like this. The stations of the cross are not something that was normally done by the 18th and 19th centuries. So there is actually no prototype in the churches that one can fall back on and just use them as patterns. So it's a matter of putting the centennial style into the station difficult. So I have to make sure that the face of Christ is identical in all 14 images and as are the other saints who appear intermittently throughout the rest of the stations.

So whatever stage I get to I will then do all the colors for the clothing and then the final step will be to do the background which in the centennial art is generally some sort of curtains. There is rarely landscape art done in this type of work. So it has to be I'm trying to conform mostly to the art that's available to look at and hopefully I'll be able to get it done that way. See about the materials you're using for these.

So in kind of in the context of centauros making that of what you know, just the physical tactile materials such as the paint. The paint I'm using is watercolor and I chose watercolor specifically because it works best for me. There are a number of ways you can go about obtaining your color and one of them is to grind it yourself and do the natural pigments that the centennels used to use. I started off doing natural pigments. Actually I started off doing acrylics and then moving to natural pigments which meant that a number of the pigments were natural to the earth and you would have to crush them and grind them and mix them.

And at one point which was not too long into my process I decided that I could get the same effect from the watercolors I could from natural pigments. Let's talk a little bit about the symbolism. You're saying you're painting with holy water I find that very profound. Can I talk about the structure of placement of the figures, the style that this is in? Does that have symbolic meaning not only in the past but for in the future? One of the reasons I chose holy water was because I felt it would add...

We're going to have a dog and a... I don't know if we can pick that up on microphone or not. One of the reasons I chose holy water was because I wanted the effect to be pure to be affected by the holy water. In other words to make the color flow more easily to give me a better rounded color. I think it's symbolic that I should use something that is holy in order to do this project. At first I thought it might be a little trite. It might be a little going into having people feel that this was being done just to make some sort of statement.

It is holy water has been used for centuries to ward off everything from bad vibes to evil things. I wanted this project to emerge as being one that is totally pure in nature, not only in helping me to develop the figures but to get them on the boards canvas, if you will, in the purest way that it was going to ultimately be. Thank you very much.