Mario Sanchez

I was in the Key West Art and History Museum at the Old Custom House on Clinton Square and I determined that I wanted to enjoy certain pieces of art. For instance "The Old Neighborhood" below:

Sanchez  was self taught, drawing his pictures on brown paper bags and translating them into wood carvings. Pretty amazing:

As  you check out my rather angled photographs (it's not easy to adapt to the lighting and stream of cruise ship passengers!) you'll notice that Sanchez's "photographic memory" includes no street chickens. I was also checking out the Works Progress Administration watercolors from the 1930s and they too show no wandering chickens on the streets of Key West. Promoters of the fowl say they are a tradition. Not that I can see...

 Cigar making is also recorded by Sanchez:

Below you can see the reader keeping the makers of  cigars amused as they roll their leaves. Cigar making was a big deal in key West after socialist revolutionaries from Cuba failed to oust the Spanish and got ousted themselves. They came over in exile and got to work making cigars. However Key West's peculiar problems reasserted themselves  even in those days  and  the bosses found cheaper land in Tampa where they created Ybor City and made that the cigar capital of Florida.

Hot bollos are Cuban falafels if I can be so crude. Essentially they are spiced ground black beans deep fried and utterly delicious. Five Brothers make a good version but in Sanchez's art they were for sale on the streets. Happy days!

 In the picture above you can see the street car rails for the horse drawn carriages.

Sanchez also turned his hand in his outdoor studio to creating fish of which I photographed just one. Grunts were  a precious food during the Depression when they were  a staple in the impoverished city. 80% of Key West's workers were on Federal assistance at the time and the city went bankrupt. People ate grunts and grits and were happy to get them.

Key West changed quite a bit to accommodate the railroad in 1912 by building up the north shore where the train arrived and unload people while rolling freight cars into ferries bound for Havana. Since that earth removal things have stayed pretty much the same shape around the edges. The interior map changed with the construction of Sears shopping mall in the 1960s and the expansion of the population into New Town where people could have a garden and a ranch house with modern conveniences.

 Back in Sanchez's day there were stories to be told:

Which commentary refers to this:

I have read the newspapers discussing the arrival of the train in January 1912. There were lamentations that the service would wreck the Key West spirit, that of an isolated island. Many people had never seen a train before that fateful day. Flagler's railroad took all day to get to Miami with it's load of people and Cuban winter fruit and it never turned a profit till it was wrecked by a hurricane in 1935. Below the picture showing the arrival of the first train.

In those days it was possible to drive  a car to he mainland but there was a ferry from Big Pine to Matecumbe and another from key Largo. It was an epic journey made easy and comfortable by Flagler and his slow moving train (25 mph maximum speed on bridges). Sanchez provided an invaluable and beautiful record of those days.

" I know my modest art isn't good, but people like it hey?"

Mario Sanchez

In New York they titled the exhibit A Fisherman's Dream but here in Key West it's titled Grits and Grunts which has become the folkloric dish of the (first) Great Depression in Key West. Mario Sanchez has become the folk artist of the Southernmost City and his crude, vibrant wooden tablets are in demand world wide.

Sanchez did indeed paint memories of his home town, his pictures show street scenes and residents going about their daily lives. In part it is a record of how life was lived but it is also a record of the quirks and characters of those who lived in Key West particularly in the Depression Years.

The portraits of the past are fascinating and I watched with some interest as the cleaner dude studied the pictures. He was so intent I wondered if he remembered some of these scenes...

The entrance picture was of Ernest Hemingway, in the striped blouse handing out fish to passerby after an excessively successful fishing trip. The wrought iron balcony of his home is in evidence behind the men in the picture.

The stand out features of the exhibit are not only the quantity of the works on show but also the really extraordinary paper cartoons that he drew before he embarked on the wooden bas-Reliefs themselves. And they took up,to four months to complete - each!

Below we have a cigar maker's cottage, with industrious cigar rolling underway...

...and here is how the artist envisioned the scene:

Below we see in the upper part of the frame the unfinished work while below we see a completed picture with all details present and accounted for.

There is a video to accompany the exhibit and it brings to life the artist who died in 2005 at age 96. We see him working in his "Studio Under The Trees," which is how much of daily life is lived in this benign climate: outdoors.

He talks about how colorful Key West was when he was younger, aft his father a reader in the cigar factories, brought his family home from Tampa. The cigar factories owned by Cuban migrants mostly relocated Up North thanks to the cheaper land, a common theme of life in Key West even then.

A reader was a man who stood at a lectern in front of the cigar rollers and read newspapers and novels to keep the troops entertained. I suppose nowadays they would use television. While Sanchez worked in his studio his mother would frequently sit behind him and monitor his progress.

 

The art is these for all to see, full of color lively and detailed. Its the Key West we all want to remember, the intimate small village described in Hemingway's To Have and To Have Not, but it's the Key West we never saw and that has disappeared forever.

One of the things that bugs me about historic art is that if things appear which do not seem consonant with prevceived reality modern viewers tend to ascribe things seen in old,pictures as "artistic license." my wife noticed no wild chickens in any of these pictures. So, how old and established are these irritating modern wild chickens of Key West?

Dogs? Sure. Cats? Lots of them. But chickens? Not one. Is that artistic license or reality as it really was?

This young dude shown below was selling Spanish Limes, which are small round fruit with a tough skin and soft juicy pulp around a very large pit. In the Caribbean they call them christophenes.

The kite flyers are flying kits on the ends f real pieces of string embedded in the picture. Do you like the depth of detail?

Key West has a long tradition of being home to a strong Jewish community. Indeed the state's oldest synagogue still operates in Key West.

Mario Sanchez knew all about it and recorded it for posterity, this community in Key West.

 

Check out the detail on tis snapper:

The back of the fish shows the wood was recycled according to the note in front of the piece and here it is:

All this managed with these modest tools and a chisel:

 

 

 

Here is Killi Gray being pursued by the Old Bill:

And here is the crawfish man:

Sanchez liked to use clouds to carry messages over his paintings. Here is the Hemingway house and here are the clouds: for whom the bell tolls, the sun also rises and in the distance the old man and the sea. Neat huh?

And here is the original Hemingway giving away his surplus catch:

Mario Sanchez

The bald facts of Mario Sanchez's life are much like anyone else's who had the good fortune to be born in Key West, live a full life and die there. In this case 7th October 1908 till 28th April 2005. 96 years well spent.

Luckily for all concerned Sanchez devoted a large portion of his life to his art, which like all good art in my opinion started as a way to please himself and such was his pleasure it made a name for itself.

The Art and History Museum has an exhibit devoted to Sanchez and his particular way of recording his daily life in Key West. No pixels and web pages for Mario Sanchez. He worked with wood and chiseled out a record of town life through the 20th century. There is even a video of the young(er) artist discussing his work.

The intaglio art of Sanchez was recognized in 1996 by Folk Art magazine which is, according to the Gallery on Greene, quite the bee's knees. Check their website.

Also in the museum they have recreated his unique outdoor studio. The writer Hemingway's penchant for writing while standing is widely reporters by the guides at his former home. Back problems suck! But Sanchez's studio was in itself a perfect representation of that which we enjoy about the Florida Keys.

In a state devoted to all possible denial of the outdoors and the natural, the land of enclosed malls and "swamp" drainage we in the Keys have the chance to enjoy sea breezes and the smell of salt water and the silence of empty back streets. In a peninsula that encourages development over reflection, Sanchez's work and the manner in which it was produced is a reminder, in wood and color that a contemplative way of life is possible in Florida's southernmost islands.

Whimsy and animals, magic and then unexpected are part of Keys life, ably represented in Sanchez's work.

Part of the joy of the work is the ability of the observer to recognize parts of Key West. Like everything else in this constantly evolving town, memory is hip. The further back you can remember the more "street cred" you acquire. I find this need to prove oneself rather tedious but my earliest memories of Key West only go back to 1981, and not much do I remember of that first visit (by Vespa as it happens).

There's lots of Sanchez to see at the museum and it's website.

I leave you with an image of "la flaca" enjoying coconut ice cream. Such was her appetite she ended up "la gorda." Sanchez's observations were not trite or saccharine. They hint at the daily struggle of living in close quarters on a small island. Everyone knows your business. And some people appreciate it.

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