A Balance of Life, Work and Food
Lake Atitlan is dense with great outdoor wall graphics. Everyone seems to paint their own murals, logos, and signage on the weathered stone, adobe and concrete walls and the work really looks beautiful. I love meandering through the narrow passageways of the lake’s villages looking at these colorful and skillfully rendered graphics. These days the art of sign painting seems to be lost in most places, but here it remains strong. Check it out! More to Come…..
I have become fascinated with Mayan Arts and Crafts in the Lake Atitlan region of Guatemala where we are living. There is a rich culture of Mayan women who weave beautiful textiles using the backstrap loom method and painters, mostly men, who paint in vibrant colors in a unique primitive style. There are also various crafts using found objects and recycled materials.
Most of the painting in Lake Atitlan is done in the town of San Juan La Laguna near the popular town of San Pedro. Here are a few examples of some of the paintings we really like. They are hanging in our house in San Marcos. The owner, an American writer named Joyce Maynard, obviously has excellent taste!
We really like the artist Diego Isaias Hernandez who works in a highly expressive narrative style.
Another style of painting we like is called vista del pajaro and was popularized by the artist Juan Fermin Gonzalez. The painting below is unsigned but it is a good example of this style.
Finally, I love the many styles of hand carved flutes they sell all in most tourist areas.
So you can see that Guatemala is full of really beautiful arts and crafts. From intricate textiles to colorful vibrant paintings, most of the objects created here could be called folk art and depict the rich lives surrounding the artists in the villages of Lake Atitlan.