Guardia del Segundo Barrio - El Indio
"El Indio, Guardia del Segundo Barrio" was created in 2016 for the HUE Mural festival. It began with ideas about energy flow and power and ended as a sort of totem to the energies that move throughout the city. Similar to the Olmec warrior statues that dominated the landscape I grew interested in creating a figure. My starting point led me to think of the many of the portraits I grew up seeing from the Renaissance. Those from the Medici family had become seared into my cerebral cortex. There was something palpable about their austere, unflinching, stoicism. I tapped into this feeling as I proceeded to work at the site and realized that the placement of the wall actually faced downtown. It evolved into a game of manipulating energy. I became conscious of the fact that there only about 4 or 5 entry points into the East End area. Realizing I could cast a kind of protective charm or totem, I set about imbuing it with a quality of watchfulness. I summoned into being a warrior head. One that looks dispassionately to the East and West, a watcher. It contained vestiges of an iconic shape. Perhaps a head on a coin or some type of currency. The work flowed freely, and I completed it in about 3 or 4 days. Realizing that this type of artwork is at risk of being damaged or destroyed, the mural has helped to draw in people to the site, a place rife with many murals called "graffiti park", (ironically a place that used to have more graffiti than murals). This spot has become a mecca for tourists and sightseers of every stripe.
