When artist Everett Jackson and his young wife, Eileen, crossed the border from Mexico in 1927 after he had painted there for four years, they realized that Mexico had bewitched them. Never again would they see life quite the same way as the Americans around them, and never would they be able to stay out of Mexico for more than a few months at a time. Almost immediately upon settling in San Diego, where he would teach art and she would write a newspaper column, they began making painting trips back into Mexico. At first they explored the remote, unsettled areas in the border state of Baja California, but over the next fifty years they visited all parts of Mexico, seeing sites that few Americans have ever viewed and others which, though more popular, few have seen with Jackson’s clarity and sympathy.
The Jacksons took many roads south–meeting a man whose mule could pull their stuck car out of the sand as soon as they pulled the mule out of a well, revisiting old friends from Chapala and Ajijic, climbing pyramids with the descendants of their ancient builders, exploring the subtleties of the sculpture and architecture of Palenque, and walking contemplatively over the great, twenty-five-foot-tall Tlaloc of Coatlinchan as it reclined on site before it was moved to a museum in Mexico City. To the artist’s original goal of capturing the spirit of Mexico in his paintings, he added those of fathoming the use of space in pre-Columbian art and, eventually, of traveling the long and difficult, but picturesque and mysterious, road to the village of Comondu.
The understatedly fascinating adventures on these journeys are captivatingly illustrated by Jackson’s own distinctive drawings and told with an artist’s eye to detail and a gentle man’s warm humor. Artists and art historians will appreciate his reflections on the pre-Columbian art and colonial and Indian architecture he saw. People with an interest in Mexico will enjoy his accounts of the places and people he knew before development and tourism changed them forever. And those who want to love mankind will treasure the excuse his adroit observations provide for doing so.
