Mario González Chavajay
By Joseph Johnston
Mario is probably the hardest-working of the Tz’utujil Maya
artists. He starts painting early in the morning and seldom stops
until it is dark. He paints every day. One of Pedro Rafaé González
Chavajay’s younger brothers, Mario learned to paint on his own, with
little help from his older brother. As a result, their styles of
painting are very different. Mario is one of the first five artists
to whom Vicente Cumes introduced me. At that time Mario had several
tiny paintings in his studio which he had painted to sell to the
galleries in Santiago Atitlán. I did not really like any of them
very much, but he seemed so desperate to sell me one that I bought
the least objectionable one. He received 25 quetzals for it, a sum
which at that time would be equivalent to about five U.S. dollars.
Twenty years later he told me that my purchase was a life-changing
experience for him. For the first time he had sold a painting to a
tourist and had received about five times what the galleries would
have paid him. With the money, he bought oranges in the market for
his mother, a rare treat for a landless campesino family.
I continued to visit Mario every time I came to San Pedro.
He always seemed to be in a desperate situation financially complaining
that no one bought his paintings. I occasionally bought a painting from
him even though I did not like his colors, which seemed muddy. Mario did
not pay the same attention to detail as the three Hermanos González Chavajay did.
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Mario González Chavajay with his wife. Through hard work and persistence
Mario has become known as one of the best artists in San Pedro.
On a visit in 1999, I noticed that his colors were stronger and purer, and
the people were more carefully painted. Mario had been churning out paintings
for the galleries in Santiago Atitlán for about ten years. He could paint about
one 9” x 11” painting a day. The galleries paid him more for his paintings
than they did to other artists because his paintings sold better to tourists.
Mario complained to me, however, that this was a dead end street. It bored him
turning out endless versions of the same ten or so themes that the galleries
wanted to have constantly replenished. When he painted an original theme, it
would take him three days to do a painting instead of one, and he would
receive no more from the galleries for this painting. Worse still was the
fact that the next time he visited Santiago Atitlán, he would see copies of
his painting done by the other artists. I therefore asked him to paint me two
original themes, and I would buy them at a fair price for his work and time.
Pleased with the resulting paintings we started working closely together.
In one of Mario’s large paintings, a particularly beautiful depiction of sugar
cane leaves inspired me to suggest that he feature more foliage in his paintings.
I thought that the leaves and flowers of many Guatemala plants would seem exotic to
people who did not live in the tropics. Mario jumped at the idea and began painting
scenes of Maya people in forests and jungles. Previously, most of Mario’s paintings
were night markets or interiors in which women were cooking or weaving. This new
direction in Mario’s painting, coupled with his improvement in color and detail,
suddenly set his work apart from other Tz’utujil artists. After years of struggling,
Mario had found his own style, however, a style still within the Tz’utujil style painting.
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