Day of the Dead Murals VIII

The Murals of Jalatlaco.

Making my recent Sunday morning rounds with the camera, and having just taken some extra photos of murals VI and VII, I came to the corner of Hildalgo and Curtirudias and found a woman taking spray paint cans from a van and putting them inside a large double door. I was delighted to find yet another day of the dead mural in process. She, I later learned she is Sophia, she smiled and said hello and readily agreed that I could take some pictures. She said she would close the half opened door so that I could see the full image. I assumed she would count to ten and then reappear and I could get the full story of the mural...but the longer I waited the less likely it seemed that she was going to reappear. Thus I moved on and what I know about this place I have leaned from their Instagram page.

It seems Sophia and Ivan have renovated the interior of the building into a first class modern apartment..which is a rentable space. See the link below.

But back to the mural. The work here has been done by Dee who does other art work as well as tattoos...I suspect he knows the Spraykings...and this mural has a very soft edge quality to it not at all like the hard edge that Painter Moreno gets from similar cans of spray paint.

There are some immediately interesting components here. The first is that this facade is severely stressed...if not damaged...and that that been painted over, incorporating it into the design, and then that motif is used as a design component in other areas to create the image of a stressed surface in a tromp l’oeil finish.

Another is that while there are the standard marigolds, native to Mexico, that are used extensively in day of the day decorations, this features the red coxcomb, celosia, also native to Mexico, that is also widely used...but thus far not seem in any of these other murals.

This mural also incorporates some of the trappings of the church ...votive candles, sacred hearts...while the masks and Catrina are decidedly indigenous cultural references,. Day of the Dead is, lest we forget, a religious observance in which we remember departed friends, family, and loved ones with a sense of the joy of life. The French had a word for it...or two...or three.

https://www.instagram.com/mr.dee_455/?hl=en

https://www.instagram.com/aldeatuya.oaxaca/?hl=en