THE HOUSE OF ROSES
*A year ago, in 2016, I thought I wanted to start a shop on Etsy but my heart wasn’t in it and it never really got started. …2016 was a very difficult year for me….I guess challenging is what you’re supposed to say.
But now it seems the right time to begin this store, which I have named LA CASA DE ROSAS/THE HOUSE OF ROSES.
ART AND HOSPICE
Art has always been a part of my life—I drew all the time when I was little, took art history in high school and college, took college courses in oil painting and water color but I never really knew how to use art until I I began working with hospice patients in 1987.
I was hired by a hospice in Texas as an Occupational Therapy Assistant and since no one seemed to know what occupational therapists were supposed to do, I made up my own approach.
My approach was to find ways in which each of my patients could express themselves through different art forms, leaving something of themselves behind for family and friends. And this they did: making audiotapes, sometimes a video, often a drawing or a poem.
Sometimes too, I worked with parents of dying children or parents who had lost a child…
A few verses from a song written by a mother and her 9 year old son who was dying of cancer:
EVERMORE
“Where are you going my little one, little one?
Where are you going my little one, my son?
I’m going with God to the land of the light,
the light we all shine in our hearts.
And why are you going my little one, little one?
Why are you going without me my son?
I’m going with God to the land of the sun.
My time here on earth is all done”.
-from EVERMORE, a song by Shirley and Cory Enebrad
A few years later when I started my own hospice type organization, called AIDS Care and Assistance [Rites of Passage aca www.ritesofpassagejourney.org], I continued using the arts for healing and with the help of a few dedicated volunteers, formed an art class for our patients.
These AIDS patients, often came to the class in the last months of their lives and they made wonderful masks out of paper mache and created beautiful pottery which ultimately led to an exhibit of their work at The University of Texas-Austin.
EL NORTE/EVERYBODY IS AN ARTIST
About 7 years ago, I left Texas and moved to a small Hispanic community in northeastern New Mexico. The northern part of New Mexico called El Norte is made up of three primary cultures: Native American, Hispanic and Anglo and almost everyone it seems to me is an artist or craftsman.
Since my son and I have been making documentary films since 1989 www.poohandthebrownpiglet.com/our-films/ , the second year I was here I had a small home theater built by a local crew. One of the men on the crew-his name is Jody Armijo- began showing me some of his art. He had spent time in prison and had learned to do the handkerchief art called Paños, often made by the Hispanic inmates.
I saw that he had talent but no money to buy art supplies and so I began to buy him some paints and markers and his art evolved in a most amazing way. He went from making Paños to making beautiful crosses, to woodcarving and eventually to making altars or retablos.
For me, it was both fascinating and inspiring to watch someone emerge from a VERY difficult life, using art to heal, to become whole.
"I want to give back and to thank the Creator for my art that takes me to the secret place of life" ~Jody Armijo
The Altars & LA CASA DE ROSAS
“When the candles are lit, the altar becomes the center; it becomes a sacred place, a strikingly colorful, meaningful locus of power and source of light. It opens doors, it transforms ordinary space. An altar has a numinous, powerful presence. An altar to a dead person brings reconciliation, healing, consolation, comfort, it gives ritual expression to grief as it heals. It brings out the stories, the memories, the history, the continuity of life and the family. It unites".
-Taos Artist, Anita Rodriguez
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I think I first got interested in altars when I watched Robert Redford’s, THE MILAGRO BEANFIELD WAR. In this film, the oldest man in the town of Milagro often talks to angels [“they’re the only ones who get time to spare”] and in his humble little home, he has an altar that is central to his life.
About a year ago, Jody made his first altar, an altar to the Virgin of Guadalupe. I took this altar to a friend, Anita Rodriquez, a very well known artist in Taos and she was impressed. So I took some of the altars and crosses to an art exhibit and they sold.
Meanwhile Anita was teaching me more about the altars and how they should be used. “You have to feed them.” she said.
I think that this is the time, this time in an increasingly dark and troubled world to use altars as they’re meant to be used: to bring a focus of light, beauty, peace, inspiration and transcendence.
A friend I recently sent an altar to wrote this:
“I meditate at it daily. The altar is in a place where I walk by and stop numerous times a day and send positive thoughts.”
I named the shop La Casa de Rosas because nearly everything Jody makes whether a cross, a painted cow or elk skull or an altar includes roses..lots of them usually.
And La Casa de Rosas is an image I see in my mind, It’s a little adobe house where the turquoise door is always open and the roses are always blooming around it. It's a place of peace and beauty and it's where I want to be.
