Lorenzo González Chavajay
By Joseph Johnston
Except from A Report from the San Francisco Craft and Folk Art Museum:
"Two Naive Painters of the Guatemalan Highlands: Lorenzo González
Chavajay and Victor Vasquez Temó." Vol. 13, No. 1/1995.
What good luck! The proprietor of a tiny San Francisco shop was
unpacking a box from his most recent trip to Guatemala just as I
arrived, and there among the Guatemalan weavings were two oil
paintings which were obviously from San Pedro la Laguna. But who
had painted them? The only clues were the artists initials, LGCH.
I had been visiting San Pedro since 1985 when I became interested
in the Mayan painters of the town, but surprisingly, I had never
seen any paintings like this. The work was very naive, strong, and
tropical, different in feeling from work of the other painters with
whom I was familiar.
The shopkeeper was delighted to fmd a potential buyer for these
paintings, but couldn’t shed any light on its creator; while visiting
Lake Atitlán he had bought them from the owner of one of the art galleries
in Santiago Atitlán. As I left the shop with the paintings tucked securely
under my arm, I was determined to find this artist who signed his paintings
“L.G.Ch.,” no matter how long it took.
When I returned to San Pedro six months later, my search was thrown off
track by misinformation supplied by a local artist I knew. He told me that
L.G.Ch. was the signature of his eight-year-old daughter whom he was encouraging
to paint. Pleased to know the identity of the mysterious artist, I bought all the
paintings of hers in the local gallery, and returned to San Francisco to tell my
friends about the talented child.
Only after my friend Vicente Cumes took me to the house of sixty-four-year-old
Lorenzo González Chavajay the following year did I realize, to my embarrassment,
that I had been fooled. It had taken me nearly two years to learn the truth. After
hearing me relate my story, Lorenzo laughed, but immediately re-signed all his
paintings with his full name to prevent future ambiguity.
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Lorenzo González Chavajay with his oldest daughter Maria, and his
grandson Hugo. Lorenzo was in the process of teaching Hugo how to paint when he died.
As a young man, Lorenzo González Chavajay was able to get a job with the San Pedro
city government because he could read and write Spanish, something that few men of
his father’s Tz’utuhil-speaking generation could do. After retiring at age fifty-five
from his job as municipal treasurer in San Pedro, he took up drawing in pencil to occupy
himself. With no concept of even the most basic conventions of drawing, his early drawings
are full of childlike mistakes. His drawings did not seem anything extraordinary, but
a friend convinced him it was worth the effort to paint in oil. With the change in
medium his drawings, as if by magic, took on a new life.
As so often happens, his art went unappreciated in his own town, especially among better-trained
artists. One artist told him that his paintings were good for nothing: “Su trabajo no sirve.”
He often gave his paintings away. When the Vicente Cumes first brought me to visit him, his
studio was full of unsold paintings. Excited by his work, I came back every few days to purchase
a few more paintings and talk with him, until by the time I left his walls were almost empty.
Having a foreigner, especially one from the United States, interested in his paintings enough to
buy them, brought Lorenzo, in his mind, the overdue artistic validation he had hoped for.
Thus encouraged, Lorenzo undertook larger canvases, revealing a power in his work that had
been less apparent in the smaller paintings. Unfortunately, just as he achieved a significant
level of proficiency and was really coming into his own as an artist, he contracted a liver
disease that proved to be chronic. Lorenzo died in March of 1996. He was 68 years old, and
had been painting for only seven years.
Lorenzo González Chavajay is notable for his naive style, the only Tz’utuhil painter who can be
truly classified as naive. Neither closely related to, nor influenced by, the paintings of the
other artists, Lorenzo is a true autodidact. His paintings are pure color, full of light,
and as brilliant as the traditional Guatemalan textiles. Despite his extremely naive drawing
style, Lorenzo’s attention to color and textile makes him perhaps the most deeply Guatemalan of
all the region’s painters. He patiently depicts his fellow Indians and makes the clothes of each
person different. Every Mayan town has a unique style of dress including distinctive patterns
and color combinations. Within the framework of her village’s tradition, each weaver makes subtle
variations in each piece she creates. Even though it takes more time, Lorenzo enjoys painting these
subtle differences in pattern and color. Since Lorenzo painted for himself, rather than to sell, it
did not matter to him that the varied traje took more time. In some of his paintings the traje of the
Pedrano men and women creates a wonderful effect, almost pointillist in nature.
Even in the midst of great activity, the people Lorenzo paints look stiff, perhaps more so because
of his habit of drawing the figures first on paper and then cutting them out and tracing their outlines
on the canvas. He saved these cutouts, and sometimes used a person or group in more than one painting.
At all times his studio wall was alive with paintings, and as long as they were on his walls, he could
not help modifying them. He touched them continually to see if the paint has dried.
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Lorenzo González Chavajay working on his first large painting "Domingo de Ramos San Pedro
la Laguna" in 1994. His large paintings showed his power as a naíve artist. I commissioned him to
do twenty more large paintings because I believed that would make him famous. Sadly, he was able
to complete only four more paintings of comparable size before he died.
Lorenzo, being twice the age of most Tz’utuhil Maya artists, remembers from his own life the
vanishing traditions and puts memorable events from his life into his paintings. The cofradías as
part of the Catholic church, for example, disappeared from San Pedro before 1970. Of this Lorenzo
told me:
"In the past there were many customs in the town. The motor boat did not exist, there was
no bus. In those times there was nothing sold in town, not even sales of medicines. There
was no such thing as general stores or grocery stores, not eating places or guest houses,
there was nothing, nothing, nothing. When people came from outside the town, they had to sleep
on the porch of the school. Here the poor people came to rest, people who came from afar to sell
earthen jars, to sell garbanzos, to sell beans. They came all the way from Totonicapan just to sell.
Before, only canoes existed. One had to go by canoe to Panajachel, to Santiago Atitlán. On the
path from here to Quezaltenango, our ancestors carried heavy loads, like the load carried by pack
animals. They came from Quezaltenango, three or four days walk, but there wasn’t any road. Today
it is distinctly different, there are many roads. There weren’t a lot of people—very few. In the
past there were many customs in the cofradías. The customs were lovely, very lovely. In the Church
there were six cofradías which were the Sacrament, the Virgin Conception, Saint Nicolas, the
Holy Cross, Saint Anthony, and the Rosary. And each cofradía had its mayordomos (stewards), those
whom they call juez (judge), and those who you could say are secondary cofrades. There are many
things from before that I know, that I saw because my father was the one that did this job. All
the cofrades came over here to visit my father, who was the teacher, the teacher of the church
they called him. He worked many years before he died. He preserved all of the customs, he discharged
a lot of time in service of the Church. He also worked as much in the [traditional] municipal
hierarchy as in the Church. Therefore that is how I know the various customs. Yes, there were
a lot of customs before." |
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Lorenzo with two of the last paintings he finished.
He died in February of 1996 a few months after I took this
photograph. His energy was already diminishing, and he was jaundiced.
In refining his art, Lorenzo followed his own spirit, learning from his own
mistakes. Considering his inaccurate perspective, mistakes in the relative
size of objects, and the stiffness of his figures, one might dismiss his
small paintings as the work of just another minor artist. But Lorenzo’s larger
canvases, by allowing him to increase the scale and complexity of his unique tapestry
of patterns and colors, reveal the power of his compositions. Lorenzo’s experiences,
because of his father’s central position in the Tz’utuhil Maya traditions of San Pedro,
often emerge in his paintings and make the smallest details historically significant.
At the conclusion of the interview I had with him before his death, Lorenzo González
Chavajay said of his paintings: “I paint because the person who is dedicated to painting
leaves unforgettable memories of their life. These memories remain from my life. When one
dies people only remember ‘that was so and so.’ They remember these paintings were
done by Lorenzo, these paintings by other artists. They remember nothing of your life.
That is how it is.”
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