Guatemalan Painter Manuel Reanda

Manuel Reanda is a self -taught Tzutujil painter who lives in Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala.  Manuel was born in 1948 and, though he was orphaned at six years of age, he had already begun drawing on the walls of his home with pieces of charcoal each day before going to school.

Manuel committed himself to a lifelong pursuit after finishing elementary school.  During this formative period of his life, he apprenticed for five years under the city's first "master" painter, Juan Sisay.  As an adult he studied mural painting in Mexico City with Juan O’Gorman, a student of the famous Mexican muralist Diego Rivera.  In the years since, he has passed on his knowledge of painting to many students of various ages.

Manuel's artistic subjects include portraits, customs, reliefs, traditions, flowers, still lifes, landscapes (real or imaginary) and commissions.

Manuel states that his parents were "gospel pioneers in Santiago and I was blessed to be born in a Christian home."  Some of his paintings reflect his deep evangelical faith.  The Lord’s Supper or The Apostles of the Lake is typical of his style, depicting traditional Guatemalan dress and surroundings (a second version of this painting can be seen here).  Professor and author Dr. Edgar Cajas writes:

Every Indian village around Atitlan Lake bears the name of one of the apostles. When the Spaniards colonized Guatemala they added Christian names to Indian villages, for example, Santiago-Atitlan, San Lucas-Toliman, San Pedro-La Laguna, San Andres-Semetabaj, etc...  Jesus is painted as a local, wearing the native costume of Manuel’s native town: Santiago Atitlan. 

His purpose for this painting was to convey a visual message to his own people. He wanted to show that the apostles were ordinary people like the peasants from Santiago. 

Manuel describes this painting in the following terms: 

“..In the background we see a sunset at the lake, each apostle has a native costume of the 12 Indian villages around the lake. On the table there is a typical shawl worn by women from Santiago, and represents the feminine presence in the life of Jesus….” 

“…when Jesus came to this world, he was born from a woman, that’s why I think it is important to show the presence of the woman in the painting. The colors in the shawl represent the blood (red) and  death (black).According to the bible the apostles were humble men, without academic studies, they were plain workers, exactly like our Indian people. That was the reason I painted work tools used by our Indian peasants on the walls in the painting: azadon (grub hoe) machete, morral (a typical bag) and tecomates (gourds used by Indians to keep cool water).” 

The main message of the panting, according to Manuel is that Jesus loves the indigenous people of Guatemala and that’s why Christians love Jesus as well.

Another of Manuel's religious paintings is El Sacrificio del Atitlaneco (The sacrifice of the man from Atitlan).  Christ is shown wearing the traditional men’s costume of Santiago Atitlan.  Daily village scenes are depicted in the background on the cross.

Manuel has won a variety of art competitions, and has been published in UNESCO’s Arte Naive.  His work has exhibited work in Latin America, Europe and Australia.  Manuel has been interviewed by local and international TV channels.

Manuel hopes to disseminate the rich culture and traditions of his Tzutujil heritage and share his Christian faith through his paintings.  In the photo at the beginning of this post, Manuel poses with his wife Dolores Sapalu de Reanda in their garden.  Dolores Sapalu is one of Guatemala's finest living weavers and wove the clothing that each of them wear.

For more examples of paintings by other Tzutujil artists, click here.  And a special thanks to Dr. Edgar Cajas for the information that he provided for this post.

A Brief History of Visual Contextualization in India Part 4: Saint Thomas Christians

For this installment in my series "A Brief History of Visual Contextualization in India," I'll be discussing India's first Christian community, the Saint Thomas Christians (or "Nasrani").  Saint Thomas Christians traditionally live in the southwestern coastal state of Kerala and descend from a union of the local Indian population with a Jewish diaspora community, who had become Christians in the earliest days of the faith.  The Saint Thomas denominations use a Syriac liturgy in their church services and trace their spiritual heritage back to the arrival of the Apostle Thomas ("Doubting Thomas") in southern India in 52 A.D.  In the third century, Nestorian Christian missionaries from the Church of the East in Persia began to settle in Kerala and organize the churches there according to their beliefs and liturgy.  Later in 1665, due to religious pressure from Portugese Catholics, the Saint Thomas Christians began to split into various factions along Catholic/Nestorian lines.  Today, this schism has resulted in several different Saint Thomas denominations, including Nestorian, Catholic, Orthodox, and even (since 1961) Evangelical!

Headstone with Lotus and Cross

While I'm slowwwwly writing the next post on my series A Brief History of Visual Contextualization in India, here's a cool image from the USF Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History that I came across showing a beautiful Christian headstone from China.  It dates from the Yuan dynasty (1272—1368) and is now located in the Quanzhou Maritime Museum.  The caption reads:

Headstone showing a cross on a lotus flower and a cloud design set within a plain border following a curved outline. This basic design is repeated extensively in the Christian monuments dated to this period, although its iconographic import is unknown.

Mehindi Job Training in South Asia Uses Bible Stories

I recently came across this blog entry by a Christian worker in South Asia, Lucy Chilton (not her real name).  She describes her use of henna/mehindi designs inspired by the Bible while giving job training to local women at a beauty salon school and sewing center.  If you are a lady who is interested in this art form, and wonder how it could be used to communicate the Gospel in South Asia or anywhere in North Africa or the Middle East, I suggest you read on.  For the rest of you, please read on anyway and rejoice that God is using cultural art forms to draw his children to Himself!

You can also check out my earlier post on the use of some of these same henna/mehindi designs by another missionary here.

Here is Lucy's post:

Engelbert Mveng: A Theology of Life Expressed in Art

Eighth Station of the Cross

Engelbert Mveng was born in 1930 near Yaoundé, Cameroon, to Presbyterian parents. He eventually became a Jesuit priest, as well as a historian, poet, artist, philosopher, and theologian. ArtWay.eu, a website that seeks to open up the world of the visual arts to interested Christians, writes that “Father Mveng studied the aesthetics of African arts and published his findings in numerous books and articles. ... His teaching was based on what he called the universal rules of African art. As a historian and theologian he made a great contribution to the study of African culture and history, especially in the realms of cultural and religious anthropology and iconology.”

Cherubim as Winged Protectors

Raanan Eichler, a Ph.D. researcher and occasional instructor in the Department of Bible at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has written an illustrated article on the biblical cherubim in Tarbiz, the leading Jewish studies journal in the world.  In it he compares the descriptions of the cherubim on the Ark of the Covenant and Temple with similar beings in Egyptian-Canaanite iconography, as well as Egyptian parallels to the Ark itself.

A Brief History of Visual Contextualization in India: Mughal Art

Christ as Salvator Mundi, 17th century.

Continuing with my series on visual contextualization in Indian art, I'll now turn to a another chapter in India's art history: Mughal Art.  The Mughal Empire was an Islamic ruling power in India from 1526-1858, although its "classic period" lasted from 1556-1707.  At its height, it controlled most of India, and parts of Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan.  Besides trusty Wikipedia, I also will also be referring to Crossing Cultural Frontiers: Biblical Themes in Mughal Paintings by Som Prakash Verma (or more information about the book, see Amazon).