Art

Lake Atitlán oils, signed prints and carved dance masks:

three kinds of Guatemalan art that repay knowing what you are seeing. The Tz’utujil painters of San Pedro La Laguna, San Juan La Laguna and Santiago Atitlán work in oil on canvas, often looking straight down on a maize field, a market or a procession, the style known as the bird’s-eye view. It grew from painters such as Rafael González y González and Juan Sisay, and a few painting families from those towns now have names buyers ask for. A screenprint or lithograph made in an edition is an original, signed and numbered by hand in the margin; a poster of the same image is not, however well it is framed. Carlos Mérida is the Guatemalan name found most often on both. The painted wooden masks come from the mask workshops of Chichicastenango and San Cristóbal Totonicapán, which rent costumes for the dances and also carve masks for walls. Photography, canvas prints and sculpture in wood or stone make up the rest.

A canvas for the wall, the room and its light:

oil and acrylic stand up to a bright room far better than anything on paper, which needs a mat, glass and a wall the sun never reaches. Listed sizes usually mean the canvas alone, so ask for the size with the frame. A painting on its stretcher hangs as it is; one bought rolled at the lake has to be stretched first, and that framing is a real part of the cost. Over a sofa, a large canvas competes with a piece from mirrors: the mirror throws the room’s light back, while a painting needs light of its own, ideally from a lamp in lighting rather than the window. At the lake, a small original goes from around Q50 and large canvases by recognised painters reach about Q2,000. A used one from a hand nobody can name should sit well below the top of that, with a good frame accounting for part of the price.

Cracked oils, spotted paper and masks that were never danced:

turn every piece round before you agree a price. On a canvas, look for patches, tears and water marks at the back, paint lifting along cracks at the front, and canvas sagging on the stretcher. Popular lake styles get repainted by other hands, so a signature you cannot connect to a painter makes the piece decoration, priced as decoration. On paper, brown spots and a yellowed line where an old mat touched the sheet will not reverse. A print should carry a pencil signature and a number such as 45/100 in the margin, or P/A for an artist’s proof. A signature printed inside the image with nothing in pencil below it belongs to a reproduction, and a magnifying glass shows the dot pattern of an offset print against the flat layers of ink on a real screenprint. A mask that was danced is worth more than one carved for a wall, and it shows: wear and sweat staining inside where it met the face, layers of repainting, sometimes the workshop’s initials on the back. One aged for decoration is evenly dark all over, with clean edges round the eyes.

A painting, its back and its signature in the photos:

give the canvas size with and without the frame, the medium, the painter and their town, and where you bought it; for a print, the edition number and whether the signature is in pencil. Photograph the front square on in daylight, glass off or angled against glare, then the signature close up and the whole back, and mention damage before a buyer finds it. Someone coming from Quetzaltenango will ask whether the piece can travel rolled. A dry oil can, paint side out round a wide tube; a print framed under glass cannot. Much of this art comes from family houses, or from people leaving the country with more lake paintings than suitcases, and a set where each piece is measured and photographed on its own is far easier to judge than one group shot.