Manuel Cruz Prudencio and the second signature
In January 2015 we visited the artisans we buy from and asked each of them who had done the painting on the woodcarvings. In San Agustín de las Juntas we asked Manuel Cruz Prudencio, then 25, and the answer was his wife, Rubí Martinez Fabián. We asked whether her name could go on the pieces next to his. He said yes, and every piece the two of them have made for us since has carried both names.
His father, Agustín Cruz Tinoco
Manuel was born on 7 February 1989 in San Juan Otzolotepec, a Mixe village in the wooded hills of the Sierra Sur. His father, Agustín Cruz Tinoco, farmed there until he moved the family down to the hot Central Valley at the southern edge of Oaxaca City, where he learned to carve by watching other men. Carving, Manuel writes, "did not have the value it has today." Agustín thought it might feed a family one day, entered competitions, won some, and taught his children the craft.
Agustín carves and his daughter Edilma paints. Edilma Cruz Prudencio has painted her father's carvings for most of her life, and it was her painting that made his work better known.
Six years of sandpaper
Manuel started learning at five years of age, not with a knife but with sandpaper, smoothing the figures his father had cut. Sanding, he says, is the first thing you learn if you want one day to be a complete artisan. He did it for six years.
At eleven Manuel was given the tools: machete, gouges, chisels of different sizes, knives, "dangerous objects." His first figures were, in his words, not pleasant to look at. After four months they were a little better. At fifteen he quit, angry with himself for not being the carver he wanted to be, and took other work.
At eighteen Manuel set up house with Rubí. He did not know, he writes, that she already painted woodcarvings. He went back to the bench, spent another four months getting the tools into his hands, liked what came off them this time, and has carved ever since. By 2014 the two of them were carving and painting religious images, nativities, animals, miniatures and "very fantastical things like cars," selling in Mexico, the United States and Europe, and showing at the International Folk Art Market in Santa Fe. In 2016 the Friends of Oaxacan Folk Art gave their young artists' first prize to a piece of his called Home from the Fields, an ox cart coming back at the end of the day. He has carved the subject again since, and one of those later carvings is in our collection.
The carving and the painting
Manuel does the carving. The animals are carved in a posture: a head tilted, a body turning. The monkey in Monkey with Ice Cream Cone stares at the cone, wide-eyed, and scratches its head with the other hand. The Golden Quail looks sideways, the way a quail looks for grain. Young Raccoon crouches and looks up, not quite sure of you.
Rubí does the painting. Her patterns are exact and minute, and they shade and run in perspective, so a band of pattern that is broad across a haunch narrows as it turns into a leg, as if it had been drawn on the animal rather than on the wood. The quail, for example, was carved plain with the intention to leave her more room to paint.
Larger pieces take time before either of them can start. A raccoon the size of Young Raccoon is cut from wood that has to dry before it is carved, and then dry again before it is painted.
Where they work
They live in San Agustín de las Juntas, just south of Oaxaca City, and away from the three carving villages, where, as we wrote in 2015, "carvers and painters look over their shoulders to see what the others are doing." In 2015 their house stood a few streets from his parents, and when we photographed the workshop that year, Rubí was painting at the table, Manuel was building a new door, and across the road his father's back door was open. Agustín has since moved away.
Five of their pieces are in the shop at the moment: Home from the Fields, Guajolote Pair, Monkey with Ice Cream Cone, The Golden Quail and Young Raccoon, each signed by both of them.