June Journaling and Art Descriptions

My time here is coming to a close. I have two more weeks of language study, and then I will be flying home on the 23rd. I have learned and experienced much more than I had originally planned before I got to this country. My original hope was to spend perhaps a week or two with a women’s organization in Los Teques in winter quarter, and then spend spring quarter close to the beach and making art about what I had learned about women organizing in Venezuela. The original women’s organization did not work out because I could not get a hold of them, or the woman who gave me their contact info, but Winter quarter I went on a Global Exchange women’s delegation, and was able to see many organizations and make contact with the Coop of Moncar.
I have had many valuable experiences this quarter, visiting and speaking with people from a variety of places. My focus this quarter was on the work of women in community councils and cooperative businesses. My goals were to meet and learn from women working in their communities, and create a series of art pieces to process and share what I had leaned. This quarter I have visited community councils in the barrios of 23 de Enero. I have interviewed a young woman who has a community radio show that addresses women’s issues and current events. I interviewed a longtime community activist about her experiences working in her community, creating a community school, and about her work in her new community council.
My most valuable experiences this quarter were the week I spent with the CESOCESOLA Cooperative, and the two weeks with the rural salsa and jam Coop of Moncar. I learned about how CESOCESOLA operates and how they foster equality and community. My learning with them involved attending an international conference they hosted, attending their meetings, working in the grocery coop, and visiting many of their facilities and a few of their suppliers.
My time with the women of the Cooperative of Moncar was valuable because I was able to spend all day with the women as they worked, and attend their local community council meetings. This allowed me to understand the roles of women in this community, and the impacts they are making by working in coops and improving their community through organizing in the community councils. I was able to work alongside the women in the coop, and also create art pieces about their work, where they live, and the structure and values that they use in running their business collectively.

Saturday 6/2/06
This morning there are a few large marches and demonstrations planned, for both the opposition and the Chavistas. There will be two opposing demonstrations in two neiboring area, which will be very interesting and possibly could create conflict. The police have been very forceful, so perhapse the two demonstrations will stay separated.


Art Explanations

Cooperativismo Boats 1 and 2

The ideas for these paintings came from learning about cooperativ ism from CESOCESOLA and the Moncar Coop. My intention was to abstractly show movement of a group of bodies, progressing forward in a circle. I chose sail boats as the objects because they are simple, graceful vessels for movement. I chose the color palate based on the colors of the tropical fruit that the women work with, which think are very beautiful and work in a similar palate. I showed the sails as transparent, so that it could be seen that they are all in a circle, moving in an organized pattern, and are interconnected.
I first sketched my idea and painted a wash of water color to plan my painting. The Boat painting I did in acrylic, #1, did not end up as abstract as I had hoped, but I am still satisfied with it because in the process I decided to make the sails appear more transparent, which I had not originally planned on.
The second boat painting is in watercolors, which is a challenging medium for me. However, I wanted to paint this image a second time to see if I could improve it by creating pastel and transparent shapes. I ended up making the colors much darker than I had planned, which was the result of experimenting with a layering technique that made the shapes more interesting. Perhaps if I had started with the layering technique in beginning I could have achieved both the pastel shades and the layers.


Woman in Barrios
My intention for this painting was to show the very steep and crowded poor neighborhoods that make up a huge part of Caracas, and to show that women are at the center of these communities. I learned that women are the heads of the 60% of the households, and that they make up the majority in most community councils. The women in this painting comes from a photo I took of a woman who works in one of the government initiated factories. The government of Venezuela understands that women’s work is key to building a stronger economy, and so they are providing many programs for education and support for forming businesses.
This painting was challenging because I wanted to show the entire body of the woman, but the result was that she was small and therefore hard to paint. I would have been much more satisfied with the painting if the canvas had been three times as big and allowed me to paint the woman in a more stylistic manner, but traveling with canvases limits size.


Spring Quarter Art Descriptions

#1
Woman and Granddaughter in Mission Ribas

This painting comes from a photo I took of a woman who was attending classes in one of the government education missions. She is shown in the classroom, which is a lower school classroom during the week. I learned that the girl sitting with her was her granddaughter, who attends every class with her grandmother, even though the classes are high school level and the girl attends lower school.
I did not stray very far from what the photo provided. I used similar colors, and just tried to add more movement with interesting brush strokes. I felt that the woman's face was the most essential part, so I tried to show the warmth, kindness and openness that I felt when I met this woman, and that could be seen in the photo. The woman in the painting does not look as old as it should, I think it would have been more effective if I could have better represented her age, because it impressed me that she was coming back to study with so much enthusiasm after so much time.


#2
Coop of Moncar Circles
The process of this painting began when I arrived at the Coop of Moncar, a jam and salsa making business in the tiny agricultural town of Montecarmelo. I participated in peeling and cutting fruit with the women of the coop, and at other times I would sketch the women working and the foods they were preparing. The interlocking circles in this painting represent the non hierarchical structure of the cooperative, and how the different people and parts come together harmoniously and create something in the big cooking pot. I attended a conference on cooperatives put on by CESOCESOLA in Barquisimeto the week before visiting Moncar. In the power point presentations they used interlocking circles to show many different aspects of their cooperative structure, from the internal processes of the individual workers, to the various areas of production that cooperate and participate in CESOCESOLA.

#3
Candied peaches
In my first days at Moncar I helped with peeling and cooking little peaches for dulce de durazno, which is a popular creole sweet treat. The background is a view of the edge of the town, right before the road becomes dirt and starts to climb a steep hill. I painted this in watercolor, which worked for the peaches, but I was disappointed with the background.