Pantaleon is an accomplished and widely exhibited painter who has shown his work in Oaxaca, Cancun, Mexico City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Portland, Oregon. He taught workshops in both the U.S. and Mexico. Pantaleon, who is bilingual, works in oil paint tinted with the same natural dyes he and his family uses to color the wool they weave with — cochineal, indigo, moss, wild marigolds. His painting techniques — the use of brushes, fingers, and sweeping strokes of the hand dipped in paint and beeswax — lend themselves very well to working with children and adults to learn to use paint as an expressive, artistic medium.
Newsflash:Pantaleon will be one of the people we will interview and film during the Documentary Filmmaking Workshop: Visual Storytelling, February 19-26, 2010. See the course description posted on this blog.
We have added a new class to our offerings of arts programs in the village of Teotitlan del Valle. Come for a studio painting class with Pantaleon or a weaving workshop with Federico Chavez Sosa. We can arrange customized programs for any time during the year that you can travel (with confirmation of availability of the instructors). These can be full days, half-days, and multiple days. We can offer you weaving, dyeing and painting workshops — half and half! Half day of weaving and half day of painting. I will work with you to price out the program that fits best within your schedule and budget.
Note: shorter workshops will be experiences and will not produce a completed piece, but only a ‘sampler’ for you to take away with you. Nevertheless, this will give you a hands-on opportunity to work with weaving and painting masters in an indigenous Zapotec village renown for its craftsmanship.
You can contact me at firstname.lastname@example.org with your requests and I will send you a proposal.
Biography: Pantaleon Ruiz Martinez ws born in 1974 to a family of weavers. His relatives taught him the art of weaving and he later developed his own designs. Later, he lived and worked for a time in the U.S. and discovered his calling as a painter. When he returned to Oaxaca, he had developed considerable artistic skill both as a painter and ceramic artist. His canvasas project the peacefulness of his sacred village of Teotitlan del Valle, but also a restless need to explore new territory. Pantaleon paints with a dual consciousness and expands his horizons of self-expression. Aware of his ancestral Zapotec origins, he places himself within a more vast and ancient tradition — that of human civilizations. His paintings and sculptures speak of that personal story constructed of two difference societies, two different environments that are part of a larger weaving culture. He is both pre-Hispanic and twentieth century in his approaches to painting. He moves from the abstract to figure painting with ease, and experiments so that he is not defined by a rigid style. He pulls from his historical influences of textile weaving and incorporates graphic designs to come out the other side with a new form of expression. he mixes conventional pigments with cochineal and othr dyes usually used by weavers, paints on exotic Nepalese paper or more popular bark paper, combines oil with ink and encaustic or synthetic resins or beeswax to produce texture. He has been featured in Architectural Digest magazine, Great Design Around The World, the Smithsonian Magazine, Old House magazine, and has received numerous awards.