Illustration Friday - primitive

cotton fabric, linen and cotton thread, bamboo batting, acrylic ink, printed mulberry paper, stamped letters and acrylic paint on 6" x 6" stretched canvas

After a few weeks' hiatus from IF, I'm back -- it feels good to have time for art again. I used thread and my sewing machine to sketch a "chapulín" or grasshopper in the Toltec style. The Toltecs were the (perhaps mythical) ancestors of the Aztecs and a pre-Columbian civilization of Mesoamerica. A favorite author of my formative years, Carlos Castañeda, uses the term Toltec with a different, shamanistic meaning. The sculpture and paintings of the Toltecs (and Aztecs and Olmecs) are highly stylized and powerfully graphic.

There is a beautiful park in Mexico City called Bosque de Chapultepec. The word chapultepec is a combination of Spanish and Nahuatl and means Grasshopper Hill. The park is home to one of the best anthropologic museums in the world, a zoo (with pandas!), a museum of modern art, a natural history museum and the residence of the president of Mexico. My husband and I spent our honeymoon in Mexico City many years ago and stayed in a hotel on the edge of Chapultepec Park. Grasshoppers are a pretty ubiquitous symbol in the area.