D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
May 2008
Driven to Create
Coming off the road after 25 years, artist and bookmobile driver M. Fred Barraza maps out his creative road ahead.
By Donna Clayton Lawder
Leading the way into the small building that is his Arenas Valley art studio, M. Fred Barraza gestures toward a collection of metal equipment just outside.
 |
Barraza with some of his work. (Photos
by Donna Clayton Lawder) |
"That's my foundry out there. I haven't been using it much lately," he allows, then throws open the door to his painting and printmaking space. "And this is the whole rest of it!" he says with his typically understated smile. "There's a lot in here, and I told you, it's a little chaotic. . . .We were going to enlarge it at one point, but we never did, so it's just really, well, full."
In one section of the split room stands a press where Barraza prints off the etchings and linocut prints for which he is well known. A many-drawered desk holds old plates, as-yet-virgin boards and paper, paper, paper. On the other side of the room, every available surface holds small buckets and trays with collections of pencils, brushes, paints. A test run of a litho print lies on a small tabletop, the pieces of masonite board arranged on the paper. Barraza fiddles with the pieces as with a jigsaw puzzle, demonstrating the series of color runs that bring his prints to life.
An easel in one corner holds a painting in progress — a landscape, like Barraza's painting on the cover of this month's Desert Exposure. His landscape paintings will also be the focus of a show that opens at the JW Art Gallery in Hurley on June 14, with a reception from 2-6 p.m.
"I told Joseph (Wade, artist and gallery owner) to call the show 'Visual Gratification.' It's a lot of landscapes," Barraza says. "For me, that's what it is. I grew up here. I love this landscape. And for me, this is very gratifying; to look upon this landscape in many different ways, from all angles. I love to capture and share the beauty here, all around us."
On another desk lies another masonite board, this one long and narrow, with a second landscape — a wholly different view — also in process. "I always work on two paintings at a time," Barraza explains. "That way, when I get bored with one, I can go work on the other one."
Perhaps a case of Artist ADD? No, Barraza is just used to juggling disciplines, he explains.
"I love all these different mediums — sculpture, prints, paints. Oh, drawing, too," he says, running his finger along the edge of a small bucket of pencils. "I've been asked what if I had to choose just one form of art, what would it be? It's so hard to choose. I guess. . . ," he trails off, his dark eyes fixed on a corner of the room. "No. Well, I don't know. Maybe just sculpture. But then I'd miss painting!" he adds with an explosive little laugh, rolling his eyes.
In a way, life itself has forced Barraza to choose from time to time. His day job — as a driver and the manager for the state's rural mobile library program — put him on the road each week. The job, he says, "took away my big blocks of time. That meant I didn't have the kind of time I needed for sculpture. Same with etching, because that takes a different kind of time — big blocks, you know? That's part of the reason I'm doing prints and painting these days."
Well, that, and because he loves those art forms, too.
Barraza's opening reception at the JW Art Gallery next month will double as a retirement celebration, acknowledging his 25 years of working with the mobile library program. He officially departs from the job June 27.
Back in his house, Barraza leads the way from room to room, giving something of a personal retrospective of his life as an artist. Examples of his work hang on nearly every wall; sculptures rest on tables and shelves, sit on the floor, adorn a corner in the entryway.
"I'm known for a sort of Asian feel to my work," he says, drawing attention to print after print. "I decided early on that I like a lot of lines, and that's become my style. I was in the Marines for four years after high school, and I spent time in Japan. I love Japanese art! And it has influenced me in this way. Even when it's a Southwest scene I'm doing, people comment on how there is an Asian feeling to the work."
Born and raised in Silver City, Barraza did his tour of duty overseas, spent a year working in Arizona, then returned to attend Western New Mexico University. There he took art course after art course, "with maybe two classes in other subjects, like English," he says with a laugh.
"I think eventually Cecil (Howard, WNMU art teacher) just wanted to get me out of there after a while. He said something like, 'I think we must have some kind of degree for you by now,' and so I got a Bachelor of Academic Studies and fine art, a BAS."
Barraza walks past a warm, red-brown wooden sculpture on a side table in the kitchen, gliding his hand over the surface as he passes. "This is one of my wood angels. My mother also has some of these. It's juniper," he says of the material. "Local wood. I just love juniper."
On the kitchen floor sits a large, white, carved stone piece. It's a woman's head, the feel sort of ancient and perhaps Grecian.
"It's volcanic stone," Barraza says. "I got it in the Bear Mountains. Boy, people really hate to go hiking with me, because I'm always finding stuff, heavy stuff like this, and asking them to help me haul it back to my truck!"
He shows where, on the bottom, the darker natural color of the outside of the stone still shows at the sculpture's base. "I think it's nice to leave a piece like that, so people can see what the stone looked like in its natural state before I carved it."
Hanging nearby is a colorful lino-cut print called "Viticulture Harmony," a winery scene with mountains in the background. Barraza explains that it is "a made-up scene," a combination of a pastoral vineyard — a California image — with rows of grapevines leading back to a southwestern mountain range in the distant background. It is hand-colored, with lush clusters of green and purple grapes in the foreground and hanging from a vine near the top of the print, framed by Barraza's trademark intricate multi-lined clouds.
He continues down a long hallway to a room where a variety of prints, drawings and paintings hang. One is a lino-cut print of a small boy reading a book in the woods. The image is all black lines, the leaves above the boy's head and grass beneath him intricate tapestries of feathery lines. Two prints of fish, one representational and the other abstract, hang together on a nearby wall. While most of Barraza's prints are in black and white, a slightly tinted paper providing the only touch of subtle color, the fish prints look like watercolor paintings with pen-and-ink line.
The abstract fish, in "Aguantar," is a rosy peach. It is comically tossed around in blue-green waves, under a golden sky. Spanish for "endure," aguantar, Barraza explains, describes the fish's tenacious nature. "He's a tough guy. He's hanging in there," he says with a laugh.
The other fish is more representational: a large-mouthed bass bursting up through the water's surface to try to catch a dragonfly. This print has a rich combination of blues and greens, and glimmers with a backlighting of golden-yellow and touches of red — the result of a multiple-pass block printing process, Barraza explains.
Back down a hall, he points out more lino-cut and etching prints. "This was for Weekend at the Galleries one year," he says of one black-and-white lino-cut print. "They (the Mimbres Region Arts Council) used it for their poster."
He's done quite a bit of work for the arts council, including three of its youth-mural projects: the "Salt of the Earth" mural in Bayard, the whiptail lizard on the Morning Star building at College and Bullard Streets in downtown Silver City, and a mural at the Viola Stone Park in Santa Clara.
Over the years, Barraza has done many prints and posters for organizations and special events, including "Wilderness Benefits Us All!" for the forest service, the commemorative print for the arts council's annual Blues Festival (see this issue's "40 Days and 40 Nights" section) and a poster for Silver City's Day of the Dead event.
Barraza gestures toward a humorous print, an image titled "Tales of the Bloated Goat." "That was for one of Dutch Salmon's books," he says, adding with a laugh, "It's pretty crazy." Barraza has produced cover art and inside illustrations for local author Salmon's books, as well as the illustrations for a colorful bilingual children's book, The Cactus Wren and the Cholla, by Valerie Chellew Garcia. Barraza speaks fondly of that project, and says he has plans for a children's book of his own.
Not surprisingly, Barraza has also created several posters for reading and literacy events over the years, a blending of his art and that colorful "day job" driving the bookmobile.
"I just needed a job when I got out of college, and a job with the bookmobile was open," Barraza recalls. "When I first started, I was a little skeptical. I wasn't all that social at that age. They must have thought I was doing a good job, though, because after three years, they made me the manager of the program."
Though he might have started out with little more than a road map and instructions — driving his 35-foot vehicle chockfull of some 3,500 books — Barraza says he must have gotten a smile on his face and developed some social graces pretty quickly as his patrons warmed to him.
"Oh, people bring me cookies. They look forward to seeing me. It's just been a wonderful experience," he says.
Though he says he's ready to retire after 25 years, he acknowledges some reluctance at leaving the post.
"Well, there are budget things," he says with a sad smile. "They are not going to replace my position as manager, so whereas I had a staff of two, now those two people will be the whole program. It was hard enough to get it all done with the three of us. I can't imagine it with just two."
He adds that the Silver City office will close after he leaves, and that he's been told several stops will be eliminated from the drivers' routes.
"I can't imagine what those poor folks are going to do," he says of the remote towns that have no library and will soon lose their bookmobile service.
Barraza reflects on his 25 years of visiting remote rural communities spread across six counties. New Mexico's mobile library program is unusual, he says, in that it covers the entire state. Most mobile library programs are only town and regional, he notes.
Some routes took only one day to cover, Barraza explains. Glenwood, for example, is only the stop in Catron County. But Otera County is a three-day run, with stops in eight towns along the way.
"We pull up to the post office or by a store or a community center, some public meeting place in that town," he says. "And we'd stay for an hour and a half up to three hours, depending."
Barraza and his wide-roaming bookmobile route recently caught the attention of the nationwide newspaper-supplement American Profile. The magazine featured Barraza as part of its ongoing celebration of rural life.
He acknowledges that it's been a uniquely fun way to make a living. And his connections over many years with the people along his route have made it a job with something more, the evidence of which is spread before him in the form of poignant pencil drawings, framed portraits propped up against the living room wall. These are just a few of the faces of the many people he's served over the years. These works were the subject of an exhibit at the Silver City Museum a few years back, Barraza says.
He points out a drawing of a woman reading to a small child, a baby toddling around by her feet. "She's a beautiful person," he says, smiling. "She homeschools her children and she got books from me every month. Her little boy liked to draw, and he knew I did, too, so he brought me some of his drawings."
Barraza remembers another family, regular patrons. The children in that family liked art, too, he says, and he made them drawing pads for Christmas gifts.
Another patron, a man, was also an artist. "He developed Parkinson's disease, and it got to the point where he couldn't do his art and he started giving me his tools and supplies," Barraza recalls. "It was sad, but so precious that he wanted to give them to me, another artist."
He indicates another framed portrait, propped up against the wall. "That's Meg. She was in this electric wheelchair. We had an access issue; she couldn't get it up on the bookmobile. So I asked her, 'What kinds of books do you like?' and then I'd go looking through what I had for stuff like that.
"It turned into me pulling out whole armloads of books, shoving them out the door and asking if she saw anything she wanted. Then I'd go get another armload." He pauses to remember, a smile on his face.
"Then one day we found a way to get her on. We got her and her chair up on the bus and she was able to roll around a bit and see all that we had. Afterward she said, OK, you can just throw me off of here now and I can die happy.' It was something else, I'll tell you. What a moment."
He looks again at the portrait of Meg, seated in her motorized wheelchair, hugging a huge stack of books to her chest. He smiles and says, "Yeah, moments like that are the ones I'll just never forget." k
An exhibit of M. Fred Barraza's work opens June 14 at the JW Art Gallery, 99 Cortez Ave., in Hurley, 537-0330, with an opening reception 2-6 p.m. For more on the artist and his work, see www.barrazaart.com, call 388-5620, or write PO Box 611, Silver City, NM 88062.
Donna Clayton Lawder is senior editor of Desert Exposure.