#30: El Sol (The Sun) 2008

Marina Pallares made this small woodcut titled #30: El Sol, sometime after she was born in 1980. I imagine her hand moving deliberately, guided by intuition, carving out the image from the block of wood. The contrast between the black ink and the white of the paper creates such drama, doesn't it? And the sun-headed figure with that guitar! Pallares could be thinking about her cultural identity, or maybe just riffing on old stories about music and the cosmos. I think that she is playing with the conventions of folk art, pushing against its boundaries, finding her own voice within that tradition. You can see echos of Jose Guadalupe Posada or even some of those early German Expressionist woodcuts here. Artists are always talking to each other, even across centuries, their ideas bouncing off each other, making something new. And that's the fun of art, right? It's not about answers, it's about the conversation.