Bill Blair’s Mexicana
Danza de la tigresa / Dance of The Tigress hand-tinted photomontage by Bill Blair
Under the spell of Mardi Gras & Carnival events happening this month Rebecca (check out her recent post about Lentils Du Puy) created window displays featuring four surreal Mexicana photomontages (including Dance of The Tigress above) by local artist Bill Blair.
Bill and Shelora recently returned from a trip to Mexico - check-out Shelora’s blog postings about the amazing food they enjoyed there.
Bill recently designed the new website for singer Lila Downs www.liladowns.com - it is animated and many of the figures have a musical element to it. To listen to Lila Downs while you read the rest of this click here. A number of Bill’s Mexicana originals, in the collection of chef Rick Bayless, can be viewed at the Chicago restaurants Frontera Grill and Xoco, and six recently went to another collector and are at the Austin restaurant Fonda San Miguel.
Bill creates funny, playful images that are inspired by vintage “tall tale” postcards ubiquitous in the 50’s and 60’s in North America. His juxtaposition of imagery plays on themes of nostalgia and ideas of identity. Much of it fluctuates between themes of Canadiana and Mexicana - both real and imaginary. His work is influenced by magical realism and the surrealistic tendencies of the Oaxaca school of artists in Mexico.
Bill’s photomontages are created by digitally culling from a vast source of vintage imagery. He crops and reassembles images on his computer; starting with the background image, and composing the other elements on top of it. He then prints out the final image, and photographs it with black-and-white film. Then a single silver gelatin print (archivally processed) is developed in the darkroom. This unique print is then hand-tinted with transparent photo oils, in the tradition of early photographers Hugo Brehme and Luis Marquez in Mexico, and Roberto Eichenberger in Guatemala. Each “print” is an edition of one only. They are not duplicated, so each image has only one signed and numbered print ever available of it.
In addition to the four remarkable prints in the window we have a wonderful selection of his Mexicana photomontage cards.