A Mexican muralist will be transforming city walls at next Saturday's Street Art Festival. Enrique Minjares Padilla is a seasoned and well respected Mexican artist. He is here in Belize to showcase his style of art and also to teach and guide kids to find their own. He plans to paint a mural on the back wall of the Institute of Mexico and one on Albert Street. Now, we have featured a number of Mexican artists but Padilla brings a more modern and energetic flair to his craft. Today we caught up with him at a session organized with the SJC 3rd formers. Padilla told us more about his artistic background and what this visit means for him:
Enrique Minjares Padilla, Muralist
"I have been an artist since I was a child, I have been interested in representing stuff with drawings, I was a very encouraged kid to make art, I always wanted to be an artist, a painter, my grandmother was a painter, so I was always in touch with painting."
Courtney Weatherburne, 7News
"So that artistic spirit definitely runs in the family?"
Enrique Minjares Padilla, Muralist
"Yah, yah, even though I took it further as a career."
"Through time my style has been… well I'm a no style kind of guy. I have this weird thing about when I feel I have already nailed the tail to the donkey , it's time to change , time to go other ways so I could say my art is figurative , I haven't dealt with abstract art yet but that's… I paint about ordinary life."
"Currently the work at my studio, it's about city landscape at night from an aerial point of view so it's landscaping of Mexico City and at night, so it is a quest for urban space through illumination light but in the end it all works in a green way resembling the green, the night vision filters."
"Living in the border because I live near California, being raised there we… the society over there is very influenced by the United States."
"So a lot of the icons that I reach onto mentally have to do with that Pop culture, other projects that I have worked on, I have worked directly with 80's pop icons and that retro kind of thing when I got the pop way."
"The idea of coming here was most, instead of just coming here and bringing my sketches and doing my own stuff, I wanted to propose this workshop to the students but it basically means okay how does an artist start from zero to develop an idea when we have a chance to do something like in this case in a big space, in an institutional space and in that way I am looking for the students feedback, about many things, considering many things as ordinary life about I don't know - it can be the weather, politics, food, traditions but in a way, but another way I want to share that but mix it with my life experience as being a Mexican."
Diego Sapien, Cultural Attache
"This is the main objective, this is one of the objectives that we want to do, not just to bring artists for the opening or just to... but to being them here to share some of their knowledge, to bring some young professionals of the arts that so the youths can see that you don't have to be a master painter but you can be young and doing nice art."
Several SJC students will be working along with Padilla on the 2 murals. The Street Art Festival is set for next Saturday the 25h on Albert Street Belize City.
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