For a few years my dearest friend was a young man from Oxkutzcab, Yucatan, by the name of Andres Mena. We are still friends these many years later, but I hardly ever see him now. His cousin, Edgar Pacheco, is still my roommate after 16 years (which certainly wouldn't have been possible without my preexisting friendship with Andres,) and he, also, rarely speaks with him. Andres's two children are rapidly growing up and he's obsessed with his amateur baseball league (as Edgar is with his futbol) and he only gets in touch with us if he needs a favor. I think the favors he asks of us are really excuses for seeing us and not the other way around, because what he asks of us is usually something someone else could do better or doesn't really need to be done.
The images I've chosen here are not necessarily my best portraits of Andres; rather, each is a photo of him posing in front of a mural I painted; that is, except for the very first image, which is a portrait I painted of him as a character in my Briar Rose mural, where he portrays the young prince who wakes the Sleeping Beauty after her hundred years of sleep.
This final photo is a study for a portrait of Andres and his then fiancé and now wife, Miriam; and it was used as the basis for two figures of the central figures in the final mural I painted for The Cheap Art Store.
No comments:
Post a Comment