[peaceful guitar music]
[chisel scraping]
- I never thought about being an artist as a child.
I wrote a paper when I was in third grade,
"What Do You Want to Be?
I Want to Be an Archaeologist."
What made me become an artist was I was invited in 1977
to work as an archaeologist for the village of Abiquiú.
They were excavating Santa Rosa de Lima,
the historic Spanish settlement built in 1734,
named after Saint Rose of Lima,
one of the first saints of the Americas.
We're facing almost due east, the Chama River down below,
and what I see down here and what we excavated and mapped
is there's an entire Spanish village.
As I was working there,
I was reading the Spanish colonial documents
and I became fascinated with the descriptions of the saints,
the santos that they had in the church.
I started doing research and then I thought,
"Well, I'm gonna paint one of these for myself."
1978 was the first one I ever painted.
And I started painting for people just out of pleasure,
and I had this kind of epiphany
that somebody should do something
about creating the original style of santos.
How did they make pigments, how did they make dyes,
how did they make varnish,
all these things that I saw in the old pieces,
but nobody had living memory of how it was done.
So literally, that's been my journey
for the last 32 or 33 years
is literally trying to find out how my ancestors
were making santos.
[peaceful cello music] [blade scraping]
There's two types of santos in New Mexico.
One is a bultos, this is a bultos,
a carving, a three-dimensional figure,
a sculpture, if you will,
and the other kind of a santo is a retablos,
and retablos are two dimensional, basically icons.
[upbeat string music] [pencil scratching]
When I was first starting to do this 31 years ago,
of course, I was using acrylics
because I didn't have all this knowledge,
and I soon realized within a couple years
that if I was really gonna be true
to the authenticity of New Mexican santos,
that somebody had to reinvent the wheel.
And I had a degree in archaeology,
but I was also forced, in a very wonderful way,
by my advisor to take a minor in biology and chemistry,
and more then anything else, it was a class in mineralogy
that really made me understand this.
[pestle grinding]
I'm painting with about 27 colors.
All the pigments I make, I start from scratch,
but most of the colors are straight from the earth.
[peaceful guitar music]
Knowledge unshared is knowledge that goes to the grave
and I always tell people,
"If I share this, somebody will learn it,
somebody will pass that to somebody else."
This is, you know, a majestic place,
it's been used for thousands of years by Native peoples.
Hispanics came down here to get this clay
and they used it to paint wainscotings on their walls.
And I discovered it makes the most beautiful flesh tone
and it matches exactly what they were using
in the Spanish colonial period.
[pick clinking]
[peaceful string music]
And I'm constantly learning,
I'm literally learning every day.
There's something I discover,
a new color that I've been looking for
that I've seen on an old santo
and I think, "Oh my gosh, how did I miss that?
There it is, it's been staring me in the face for years."
And now most of the santeros in New Mexico, the saint makers
that are making traditional New Mexican santos
have been my students at one point or another,
and they're learning all this.
I always tell them, "You need to have a foundation.
"If you have a base,
"understood what your ancestors were doing,
then you can move from there."
This is one of my favorite brushes.
I've had this brush for 30 years.
[gentle guitar music]
I always refer to myself as a Nuevomexicano
or Hispano-Nuevomexicano, Hispanic New Mexican.
What's important for people to realize
that don't know anything about Hispanic,
Hispano New Mexico is we've been here since 1598.
Long before the Hispanic people
or the Spanish arrived in the New World,
I had ancestors that were living here.
The Pueblo peoples over here, they run in my blood,
the Athabaskan peoples, Navajos and Apaches.
- In New Mexico, the Indian culture
and the Hispanic culture are intertwined,
there is no division.
It's very hard to separate the two.
[both praying in Spanish]
[peaceful music] [children playfully shouting]
- Felipe Estudillo Colón: What we think of
as New Mexico culture is a huge mixture of Spanish traditions,
of Pueblo traditions, of Athabaskan, Navajo,
and Apache traditions, of even later, Comanche traditions
that all came together, kind of in this one unique place.
Abiquiú as a settlement
certainly predates Spanish arrival.
Today, the Pueblo name stands for both
kind of a physical community, it stands for, certainly,
a confederation of the 19 Pueblo tribes
and also, it's become really a ubiquitous name
for the people themselves.
It's such a good day out here.
Charles Carrillo's Saints of the Pueblos exhibit
that we currently have exhibited here
at the Cultural Center really brings together
in a way that I really haven't seen in many other exhibits,
the interconnectedness that exists and certainly existed
between the Spaniards, between the Mestizos and the Pueblos.
[upbeat guitar music]
- So what I did here was I created 24 images,
18 of which are the current living Pueblos that exist today
and four Pueblos that are represented
as ancestral Pueblos.
This is one of my, really my favorite pieces in the show.
I love the story of Saint Dominic,
but more important than that, it's just the simplicity.
His colors are basically white and black,
and the border motif for the Pueblo Santo Domingo
is this is a classic border motif
with these tulip-like, flower-like design motifs.
Well, this is Saint Stephen of Acoma
or San Estévan de Acoma, and I love this piece
because this is a Acoma pottery design
that was based on a pot that was made sometime around 1910.
Of course, the blue that I mentioned earlier,
which is a celestial kinda color,
not the yellow that we typically associate with halos.
And lastly, this is an image of San Ildefonso,
San Ildefonso, Saint Ildefonsus in English,
is this is one of the truly Spanish saints,
but what's interesting about this border motif
is it's black on red,
unlike most of the Pueblo pottery we've seen,
but I love this color,
this color combination with the stark red and black,
and then this brightly colored saint in the center.
[upbeat jazz music]
The "Saints on Wheels"
is a tradition I started five years ago,
and I was asked by a gallery
to do something to contemporize saints.
I had to realize that some of this was tongue in cheek,
I was playing with putting saints
driving vintage automobiles, but doing it respectfully.
I'm always trying to find the right mix of vehicle and saint,
'cause the bottom line is the "Saints on Wheels"
tell the same stories as the retablos do.
They're made to tell stories,
so I have to have the attributes and the iconography correct,
but it's five years old now
and I've done close to 300 vehicles.
[upbeat music] [pencil scratching]
The last thing I actually paint on the santos is the eyes,
and the reason it's the last thing I paint
is once I paint their eyes on, they're staring back at me.
I've given them a soul, if you will.
Catholics practice in New Mexico,
the old Hispanic families and the Native Americans,
what I call Folk Platonic Catholicism.
I intellectually know he lives in heaven,
but in a very platonic way, I'm believing,
or I believe that his essence lives
in this image that I've created.
Again, the eyes are the last thing that are created,
and the eyes and the lips, because then he can talk back
and I don't want him talking back to me. [chuckles]
[peaceful guitar music] [chisel scraping]
- Felipe: Really, the art is important
because it is a way to talk about
what is often a difficult history.
Inroads is really made through the art.
Certainly for Charlie, it's a very important expression,
not only of the history of New Mexico,
kind of as a place and the history of the cultures,
but his own history.
When he recounts his own experiences,
his own life, his own culture,
both the Hispanic and the Pueblo people here in New Mexico
shares a lot of similar feeling,
and that's really built out, again,
of 400 years of history, of fighting and coming together
and becoming, really, New Mexico as we see it today.
- And I think the message in my work in general
is there's a story to be told.
If it's not just a story of the saints to be told,
as each saint has his or her story,
it's a story of my people and the peoples of New Mexico,
both the Hispanos and the Native peoples of New Mexico.
We don't have to have separate religions.
We can learn to really live together
and, hopefully, maybe beyond that message
is in the future is that
my children's children's children
will tell the same stories I'm trying to tell.
[peaceful guitar music] [birds chirping]