On Assignment; 232; On Assignment Library Footage: Brown Pollution Over Albuquerque

Is it bad? Yeah, it is. Is it bad? Yeah. Bad, isn't it? It's so bad. I don't want to keep it alive, though. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

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I'm not sure if it was Santa Cruz or truches and he had quite a oh he did probably five or six alder screens two of which remained today. Most of the alder screens have been over-painted by people in the 1850s and freskeys was once thought to be a disciple of no one and that he was self-taught but my research has indicated that he was either a follower of Laguna or worked right

in with them because their work is very similar in content. You have some examples of each one of them don't you? We have a small collection of retablos which we've collected over the years which really assist me in my work and that's their basic purpose at the moment. It's to allow me to be able to see how these things are done first hand rather than needing books to to show you how they're done. The books don't give you anywhere near the idea that the actual retablo does. How much in your own work your own painting of the saints do you draw upon traditional styles and how much do you you know create for yourself new interpretations of how to depict those. I find that the bulk of my work is an actual depiction of the Santero's own creation. I find it very difficult not to

follow him exactly. It's the reason being is I prefer doing things the old way than trying to do something contemporary. I find it very difficult to paint a St. Francis for instance in a contemporary fashion. I would prefer to copy an old St. Francis that was done by a Santero years ago. And your techniques that you use in the types of paint that you use are they traditional too? I try to do the painting as traditionally as possible and therefore the from the beginning I like to start my entire project as it was done in the old days. I find no point in going out and gathering gypsum rocks and crushing them and sticking them in the oven for them to heat and then

grinding them again and and doing that. I find that task of Gesso actually two time consuming. When you already have Gesso that is sold as pure gypsum you buy pure gypsum that's already ground and it already has animal glue in it which is the way Gesso was done in in the olden days. So that's one of the things I don't do although I don't object to people doing that if they can obtain the same effect. The one thing I do enjoy doing is is taking some of the old pigments such as you can gather yellow ochre from the sides of the highways when you see the yellow sides of the mountains or red ochre and indigo is generally imported and the coach and Neil that I use in my work are the little bugs that are brought in for Mexico and all of these colors I just crush them in a what is that thing called mortar and pestle and then I just grind them as fine

as I can and mix them with water. It gives you a pure color. Most of the water colors that are sold today are pure colors so there's no point in trying to find vermilion for instance because vermilion is vermilion it's a mineral color so are many of the greens they're already in their pure and natural state so you can't really grind all the colors but the colors that are most important the reds and the blues and the ochres and are most dominant in your work those are the ones that are the best to use natural colors. And you're talking about those bugs that come from Mexico what color does that make? The cochineal bugs they're actually called cochineas and they're little bugs that are taken off the barks of certain trees and apparently dried and packaged and when you crush them and put water in them they start off being blue and they

turn into a kind of rich lavender color and so you have to mix the lavender with certain reds to get it to the deep reds that the sun terror used. They never used the the cochineal solid except maybe in dying material for weavings. The trinity was basically painted with all pure colors the cochineal and the indigo and the ochre were all pure natural colors and then they were varnished with what I call a sauntero varnish which is made in the old way from Ross and and so that whole project was basically from beginning to end probably more in the sauntero fashion than anything else I've done. Did I ask you already I think I did what your favorite images were you said

the trinity and in various depictions of Mary. Let's talk about how did you get into your conservationist actions. About a couple of years ago I was asked by the priest at Santa Cruz to assist Alan Vetter in the conservation of the altar screen and it was very interesting because the archbishop had decided he needed somebody who was Spanish to start learning these techniques so being that I had had so much exposure to all the priests and done quite a bit of work for him in the past I happened to be the likely subject so they asked me to participate in the conservation of Santa Cruz and I found it to be quite interesting in that it started out just to be a patch-up

job. The screen was going to be fixed where the cracks were and over-painted where it was necessary or in-painted actually and during the process of all this we kept looking at the screen and kept seeing different things appearing from below the main painting and as it turned out there were two other Santeros who had worked on the screen previously. Santa Cruz was an interesting project because it brought out the Santero fresquies and the Laguna Santero which were not known to have painted in our area so it was historically very important. The project itself I did not complete. I was, as I said in apprentice and Alan Vetter was the main guy on the job and I finally left the project about April because it was starting to become too extended and I needed to paint an altar screen for Raja Hondo. So

I did work in about 40% of the screen but that work itself was extremely interesting to me and it made me realize how, how very much I wanted to continue doing that type of work. I have several clients who bring their work to me to restore or to conserve a lot of the people bring old retablos that are dirty and gritty from years of being in rooms and underguest stoves and candles and some of them are just basically cleaning them up and giving them a new look. And a lot of them have cracks or have broken arms and heads that are broken off and they need to be just stabilized. Some of the crucifixes that are brought to me are generally either in pieces or the knees have broken off and I try to conserve as closely as possible to the

requirements of the conservators today. Some of the methods that have been used are considered antiquated and most of my training and I think it's important to know that there are people who don't have degrees who are capable of doing conservation. It's just a matter of using the correct methods. The bulk of my training started with Alan Vetter but it ended up with Malcolm Withers. She was from the University of Denver and she lives here in Santa Fe. She shared all her formulas with me and showed me the correct techniques of conservation and it's been really important to to meet people like her who were willing to share.