Heritage Festival: Carnival of Culture
by
Samantha Bares
M.F.A. University of Colorado Boulder, 2021
A thesis submitted to the
Faculty of the Graduate School of the
University of Colorado in partial fulfillment
of the requirement for the degree of
Master of Fine Arts
Department of Art & Art History
2021
i This thesis entitled: Heritage Festival: Carnival of Culture written by Samantha Bares has been approved for the Department of Art and Art History
Date______
______(Melanie Yazzie)
______(Matt Christie)
______(Hanna Rose Shell)
1 ABSTRACT
Bares, Samantha (M.F.A. Department of Art and Art History) Heritage Festival: Carnival of Culture, Thesis directed by Professor Melanie Yazzie
Within my thesis, I sought to expand an environment established within my previous work in order to explore my own identity and culture. The work I have created for this thesis is a series of eight drawings on paper, each occupying the setting of the annual Nederland Heritage Festival in my hometown of Nederland, Texas. Within the text, I address how the medium of drawing is a tool for me to take control of my anxiety and organize my thoughts. The drawings themselves are presented as vignettes that all take place within the same reality; each one draws upon imagery from my wide array of influences and interests. In this text, I address the characteristics that people attribute to categories like industry, gender, ethnicity, religion, and mental illness in order to gain a better understanding of the constructed culture that I associate with where I grew up. I seek to communicate personal narratives using the language of storytelling. Many of these pieces directly reference fairy tales and folklore as a tool to help discuss difficult topics. The text also references the young female characters found in stories from The
Brothers Grimm, Leonora Carrington, and Flannery O’Connor. While using pre-existing tales to pave the way for me to include stories from my own past, I also consider the visual artists who directly influenced the work, such as Paula Rego and Natalie Frank.
2 TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION 4
STYLISTIC CHOICES 9
THE OUTHOUSE QUEEN 16
MY SKIN, DONKEY SKIN 20
AFTER THE BEHEADING OF FALADA 26
TORMENT AND TENDERNESS 30
EVERYONE’S A WINNER 36
SUSPENDED IN THE VEIL 41
A TEMPLE OF THE HOLY GHOST 44
NAVIGATING FORTUNE THROUGH THE PREVIOUS GENERATION 48
CONCLUSION 49
SKETCHES 52
BIBLIOGRAPHY 60
3 INTRODUCTION
My work brings in fragments of imagery from my own lived experience, the experiences of my family, dreams, and folklore to construct representational narratives. I am interested in constructing environments that contain a complex amalgamation of emotions brought on by the actions of the figures that inhabit it.
Currently, I have been doing research to inform the question which guides my thesis: What is heritage? The work that I have been creating based on this question relates to my own identity as well as to what I view as a culture. The main environment I have chosen to serve as a source of imagery to build my scenes upon is that of the annual carnival-like celebration, The Nederland Heritage Festival, located in my hometown of Nederland, Texas. It is upon these fairgrounds that I will explore what makes up the heritage of where I come from. I am interested in the idea of a constructed culture, and the characteristics that people attribute to categories like industry, gender, ethnicity, religion, and mental illness.
This series of drawings consist of eight pieces altogether, with five pieces sized at 8 x 11 inches, two pieces sized at 10 x 16 inches, and one piece sized at 16 x 22 inches. The idea for my thesis grew out of a smaller series I had created in 2019, titled
Absorption and Assimilation, Nature and Nurture (Fig. 1). In that series, I similarly used my hometown as a setting, and the figures depicted were my family as well. The drawings were made in order to expand upon research regarding epigenetics, which is the study of inheritable changes caused by the modification of gene expression.
4 Figure 1, Samantha Bares, Absorption and Assimilation, Nature and Nurture series 1, 2, & 3, 2019, Black pencil and watercolor on paper
5 The creation process for this body of work involved reflecting on my own family's experiences and traumas, both physiologically and environmentally caused. Once completed, I desired to expand upon the world that was created in that series and to share more about where I am from. This was done by using the Nederland Heritage
Festival as a microcosmic representation of the place I grew up and of the people who impacted my life, while also incorporating my interest in folklore.
Folklore is defined as the traditional beliefs, customs, and stories relating to a particular place, activity, or group of people. The passing of these tales have oral origination, with examples of verbal lore including fairy tales, myths, legends, and epic poetry. I am interested in stories that have been around for a while, tales that are more or less universally known in Western society, and how they can be adapted and reinterpreted to make them more personal to both creator and consumer. The majority of the stories that I am drawn to deal with some elements of the fantastic, such as the tales of the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson, and even Dante Alighieri. These stories are constantly remade and retold through visual art and literature. Artists are using them to talk about a variety of themes such as sexuality, gender, feminism, power dynamics, politics, and identity in general. I am building upon the tradition of artists interpreting fairytales and folklore by creating narratives through personal and geographic mythos. The psychological study of fairy tales is largely based on interpreting symbols and archetypes in order to better understand the cultures in which the tales have originated, with some of the earliest text about the subject originating from Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Freud was interested in fairy tales' connection to
6 dreams. The second edition of The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales describes this as,
“...both fairy tales and dreams [using] symbols to express the conflicts, anxieties, and forbidden desires that had been repressed into the unconscious.”1 From Freud’s studies, his disciple Carl Jung developed his own analysis of the subject matter, described as “...the symbolic language of myths, dreams, and fairy tales [being] composed of these timeless symbolic forms, which he called archetypes.”2 By being able to better understand the background of these stories through analyzing the symbols and the archetypes, one can then compare and contrast it to their own culture.
This is why artists are able to recognize that these tales have a specific origin and a purpose of exploring anxieties while still employing the subjective nature of the stories.
Fairy and folk tales have an appeal to both children and adults, and subjectivity comes into play when a person analyzes which concepts they identified with in their youth in contrast to what they identify with as an adult. When creating this work, I had to recognize the psychological aspect that was present when exploring some of these existing tales and within the process of constructing my own.
Part of the creative process of making this work includes a way for me to understand my own ethnic background. I am of Mexican-American and Cuban descent on my mother’s side. My father is an Anglo-Amereican, with roots in Louisiana. Because
I never learned Spanish, I have always felt a kind of disconnect to the Latinx community as a whole. My grade school was also predominantly other Anglo-American students, so my maternal grandmother and her family, the Garcia’s, were the only circle of
1 Zipes, Paragraph 3 2 Zipes, Paragraph 6
7 Mexican culture that I was familiar with for a long time. Even though I took part in certain
Latinx celebrations, such as having a quinceañera when I turned fifteen, there has always been a lingering feeling of unworthiness in regards to embracing this culture as a part of myself. Although this disconnect is present, I do have an extremely close relationship with my grandmother, Mary Llanes (Fig. 2).
Figure 2, My grandmother and I lounging together, 2016
A year ago, I participated in a printmaking portfolio exchange in which the participants were challenged to study, recreate, illustrate and interpret a told tale, myth, or legend of the Americas. I sought the help of my grandmother because I wanted to recreate a story that was not based in Anglo society. Instead, I learned that she never really grew up with any of the folklore of Mexico. She said she did not learn much of that until she got a teaching job with other Mexican-American people. During her adolescence, she frequently went on trips between Mexico and Texas with her family. Though she has
8 never mentioned any prejudices she has faced herself, my grandmother has told me that many of her siblings struggled to try to fit into an Anglo society. Perhaps it was this battle to exist between two different worlds that led my grandmother to begin to construct the culture of her and her family that I am most familiar with.
The constructed culture that I identify as my own, and the culture of my family, is based within the culture of stories. Because my grandmother did not grow up with the folklore of Mexico, I do not associate her with Mexican stories of La Llorona or Dia de los Muertos. Instead, I associate her with the stories she did preoccupy herself with.
She consumed many of these stories through film, examples being Jason and the
Argonauts, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and the giant monsters of atomic age cinema. These are the stories I would watch with her on the Friday nights of my childhood, as we ate Dairy Queen and pan fried beans. In the way that she used this media she grew up with to shape her own culture, I feel like my obsession with stories is the same in a sense - I am trying to use it to fill in, or to shape, this area that I notice within myself that I view as incomplete. It is this culture of stories that I see as a foundation that my interest in folklore and fairytales emerged from.
STYLISTIC CHOICES
Stylistically, my work is strongly influenced by Pop Surrealism, sometimes referred to as Lowbrow Art. Emerging out of the 1960s, this recent art movement has roots in aspects of counterculture such as underground comix and punk music, which has since branched off into more individual aesthetics. On the contemporary art
9 resource website Widewalls, I think Angie Kordic describes Pop Surrealism best as
“Highly polished imagery inspired by cartoon characters and scenery…”. Rather than recreating an existing photograph, I am more interested in constructing an environment where I am free to exaggerate objects, figures, and the situations they are connected to.
I have a deep appreciation for the detailed environments and exaggerated figures in
Pop Surrealist work by artists such as Mark Ryden. I recall this interest in Low Brow Art being partly fueled by my father. While he is a fine artist by trade, many of his adolescent influences were comic book artists and the artists who created the covers of old pulp magazines, which included work from illustrators like Frank Frazetta and Boris
Vallejo. My father eagerly shared his influences with me as he helped me to hone my artistic skills from an early age; he owns quite a few books of their art that he has passed on to me. I was always mesmerized by the dramatic forms of the figures as well as the dynamic compositions of the artwork as a whole. My artist education did not end at illustrative works, as my father also made sure to expose me to fine art by taking me on annual trips to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. The reason I believe that I identified with the Lowbrow artwork so strongly is because it is tangentially connected to some of what I have found to be conceptually interesting in my life, which is fantasy and horror fiction. My earliest exposure to fantasy and horror fiction came in the form of television media like The Twilight Zone along with the films of Alfred Hitchcock. As stated previously, I viewed this content while staying with my maternal grandmother during my parents’ date nights. In Pop Surrealist Art and comic or pulp magazine illustrations, the colors used are always bright and bold in order to attract the attention
10 of a viewer, or potential customer in this case. Stylistically, I have noticed that my art branches off into two directions depending on the medium that is used. When I am using a medium like relief or screen printing (Fig. 3), I know that I am limited in how detailed I can render a composition. The finished product from these mediums tend to adopt the bold lines, the heavy contrast of shadow to highlight, and the intense colors of comic and pulp magazine illustrations. In the case of the drawings I have made for my thesis, or when I am producing a lithographic print (Fig. 4), I strive for a softer image with highlights that are created from the white of the paper and with shadows that are intensified by the meticulous rendering of a pencil. My goal is to have an image that has the mysterious and illuminating quality of a black and white film still from an episode of
The Twilight Zone (Fig. 5) or from a Hitchcockian thriller.
Figure 3, Samantha Bares, Sandy Grave, 2017, Reductive woodblock relief
11 While creating these drawings, I try to render every part of the composition with the same amount of attention, detail, and thoughtfulness. I believe this reflects the anxiety that I must live with everyday. Living with anxiety, I tend to blow out of proportion simple problems and tasks, holding them to the same importance as more pressing concerns. My mind is often very busy warding off intrusive thoughts, and a way I found most effective in doing this is through drowning it out with noise. Not through the audio medium of music, because that still allows too many thoughts to gather at once, but through audio media like podcasts, audiobooks, or noise from the television. I attribute this to the household I grew up in, which was often loud and talkative. Relatives and friends were often dropping by for unannounced, but welcome visits. When creating art,
I feel like I am the most mindful and thoughtful when listening to the stories of others. It is then that I feel I am able to channel the busyness of my thoughts into my work, which in turn takes on an immerseful composition of its own.
Figure 4, Samantha Bares, Decade Apart, 2018, Lithograph
12 Though many fairytales and folklore are consumed through text, writing out the stories to my visual narratives as an accompanying aspect never appealed to me. I think this is because while the stories surrounding my work have connections to preexisting tales, they are also quite personal. It somehow feels more thoughtful and authentic to share these stories orally, such as when my family has shared and discussed with me their own personal memories and experiences.
It is because I have constantly consumed stories throughout my life that I am compelled to recreate them through the medium of drawing. It has always been the most instantaneous way for me to transfer my thoughts from my own head and turn them into something tangible enough to hold in my hands. In my arms, I am able to cradle entire scenes that were, before, only able to exist in the depths of my mind. To this day, my mother laughs at my childhood habit of keeping my sketchbook underneath my pillow so that I was always prepared to illustrate the particularly compelling nighttime stories which I used to occupy myself with before slumber. Drawing has also presented itself as a kind of escape from my ongoing battle with mental illness; it keeps my hands busy so that I am not scratching at anxiety-induced eczema rashes or pulling out my hair as I search for old scabs to reopen on my scalp. The act of drawing out the narratives that occupy my mind allows me to create something beautiful rather than destroy my body. My own method of creating a fully realized drawing is heavily based on preparation and planning. Throughout the graduate program, I was encouraged to loosen up and to try to be more experimental with my creative process. However, the more I tried to make the work experimental or abstracted, the lazier I felt. If my artistic
13 practice doesn’t involve me agonizing over the best composition or creating several thumbnail sketches before beginning the final drawing, then the finished product will lack the thoughtfulness and respect that I have for the subject matter I want to deal with.
Because the drawings I have created for my thesis are so strongly connected to the personal life of myself and my family, it only feels right to approach these subjects in the most thoughtful and respectable way that I know I am capable of. If I was to create work that was to be so meaningful as to be worthy of being part of my thesis, then I had to channel the child who thought of drawing as so important that she had to keep her sketchbook underneath her pillow at night.
Figure 5, The Twilight Zone, “Stopover in a Quiet Town,” Season 5, Episode 30, 1964
14 Figure 6, Samantha Bares, The Outhouse Queen, 2020, Black pencil on paper
15 THE OUTHOUSE QUEEN
For the piece The Outhouse Queen (Fig. 6), I began by looking into traditions practiced at the Heritage Festival. On the Beaumont Enterprise website, I came across a small collection of photographs from the 1970s. One of the photos depicted a crowned pageant queen, her sash reading “Outhouse Queen,” (Fig. 7), while two other photos showed oxen pulling an outhouse (Fig. 8).
Unable to find any kind of descriptions of this specific tradition, I instead researched the history of outhouses. I learned that outhouses were commonly used in the United States of America well into the twentieth century. However, these structures were recognized as a possible public health issue, such as ground water pollution.
There also exists the age old practice of fertilizing fields with human excreta. Because oxen are connected to agricultural purposes, such as pulling plows in a field, in combination with the photo of the “Outhouse Queen” holding a bouquet of corn, I came to the conclusion that this tradition was focused around some kind of fertilization ritual of the land.
Neither the “Outhouse Queen'' pageant nor the oxen pulling were traditions practiced at the Nederland Heritage Festival during my youth. For my drawing, I knew I wanted it to have a connection to the beauty pageant, a practice that I know to have a strong association with the Southern United States. The South has the reputation of being more conservative than the rest of the country, therefore, it typically desires a woman that is more “traditional” and less progressive. The pageant tradition reminded
16 me of Leonora Carrintong’s short story, Debutante, in which a young girl gets a hyena to take her place at a debutante ball. Part of the hyena’s makeover is described as follows:
In my room, I took out the dress that I was supposed to wear that evening. It was a bit long and the hyena had trouble walking on the high heels of my shoes. Her hands were too hairy to look like mine so I found her some gloves. When the sun arrived in my room she walked all round it several times more or less straight. We were so preoccupied that my mother, who came to say good morning, almost opened the door before the hyena hid behind my bed. “There is a bad smell in your room,” said my mother as she opened the window, “take a bath perfumed with my new salts before this evening.” 3
Figure 7, Beaumont Enterprise, 1976, Archive photo
The concept of the hyena adorned in the girl’s debutante gown gave me the idea to dress the oxen in the Outhouse Queen’s crown and sash while they devour her corn bouquet. Seen behind the oxen is the outhouse and a pageant participant emerging from it. I imagine her to be the reluctant Outhouse Queen who has literally stripped herself from this title, instead bequeathing it to animals. Like Carrington’s protagonist,
3 Carrington 1
17 who sought to escape from attending the debutante ball, the Outhouse Queen seeks to hastily escape the fair unnoticed while the lights of a ferris wheel in the distance illuminate a dark, polluted sky. She does not desire the role that is being assigned to her, along with all the responsibilities that come with it, so she has decided to disappear into the night in order to discover her true nature. Unbeknownst to the girl, this is a task that will take an entire lifetime.
Figure 8, Image 1 & 2, Beaumont Enterprise, 1976, Archive photo
18 Figure 9, Samantha Bares, My Skin, Donkey Skin, 2020, Black pencil on paper
19 MY SKIN, DONKEY SKIN Over a span of three years, one of my major artistic influences, Natalie Frank, created a suite of drawings that illustrated thirty-six of the original, unsanitized versions from the Brothers Grimm fairy tales. Upon my most recent revisit of these drawings, I was particularly struck by those illustrating the story titled “All Fur,” also known as
“Donkey Skin.” The story focuses on a princess whose own father is pushing an enforced marriage between her and himself. After escaping from this fate, the princess continues to disguise herself in a gown made from fur of all kinds, or the skin of a donkey, depending on the version of the story. After analyzing the drawings and the story, I was prompted to reflect upon my own relationship with my parents, particularly my father (Fig. 9). Mental illness is extremely prevalent on my father’s side, and I ultimately inherited it as well.
From a young age, I suffered from debilitating anxiety. My mother notes that she noticed this in me as early as age five, but she thought it would be something I would eventually grow out of. I was unable to be in crowds or around loud noises, as it resulted in panic attacks. Events like the Nederland Heritage Festival were quite overwhelming for me, and I eventually stopped attending it. Even simple activities like going to the movies or riding in a car became unthinkable to me. Sometimes I would confess my sins to my maternal grandmother, as I saw her as a kind of walkie-talkie to
God, in hopes that this would absolve my episodes of panic. The anxiety got to a point that I could barely eat or sleep, and was accompanied by depression. I developed some compulsive behaviors, like picking dead skin on my scalp to a point that it became
20 bloody and balding. After a brief struggle with self-harming behavior, I was able to get proper help from doctors and was put on medication, which I have continued to take since middle school. I am no longer dilapidated by my mental illness, but the skin picking, or dermatillomania, is an activity that I still do consciously and unconsciously in response to stress. My younger sister also struggles with mental illness, particularly mood disorder and learning disorders, and she also developed dermatillomania at a young age.
As the illness was emerging within me as a child, it would sometimes cause me to act unfavorably. If the act was offensive enough, physical punishment by way of spankings with a belt was endorsed, with my father being the enforcer. Physical discipline is not uncommon in South East Texas nor is my situation unique. When I was young, public schools even gave parents the choice to allow the school principal or vice principal to spank their children. Fortunately, I was only the subject of discipline to my own parental units rather than some stranger in school administration. My mother’s support for this type of discipline is not a surprise once reviewing the research published through the Child Trends Data Bank, which states “...[Latinx] women are more likely than are white women to agree or strongly agree that ‘a good hard spanking’ is sometimes necessary.” It should be noted that not all punishments by the hands of my father were linked to my episodes of panic in relation to my mental illness; spankings were also utilized if I threw the general unsavory, childish fit, or if my grades began to suffer. However, I have recently recognized that this kind of punishment in direct relation to my mental illness perhaps caused it to become worse rather than something that I
21 may have grown out of. I also believe these punishments are one of the culprits for my obsession with rules and failing. There is no active resentment between myself and my father linked to his discipline practice; I also recognize that this was a punishment he and his siblings grew up with as well, along with trying to navigate their own mental illnesses during a time when it was much less understood. Their own mother was committed to mental institutions several times before her death in 1977, though her own illnesses were never properly diagnosed.
Figure 10, From left to right: Me, my father Roy Bares, and my sister Isabel, 2019
That being said, I have struggled with anger and sadness towards my father’s refusal to treat his own mental illness with medication. My father and I are incredibly similar in many ways, as my mother has always pointed out. She has told me about early years in their marriage and the trips to the emergency room that were taken when he was convinced his episodes of panic were impending heart attacks. We are both
22 artists that are incredibly reliant on a set routine, which if upset then we must fight with the subsequent anxiety that follows. His anxiety usually turns into anger and irritation, which creates an uncomfortable atmosphere in our household at times. He has to keep himself constantly engaged in projects in order to fend off his illness, which then leads to him becoming frustrated that he does not have time to relax. As I get older, it is easier for me to recognize the depression he is going through; it is hard for me to watch him fight it all by himself when I know that the proper medication would offer him so much relief. In the past, many of his siblings had succumbed to drugs and alcohol as treatment for their own mental illnesses. Two years ago, his eldest brother took his own life, and this past year, another one of his brothers passed away due to liver complications. Though these deaths are incredibly tragic, I am thankful that my father has never struggled with substance abuse and addiction.
It may be interpreted that this form of punishment “worked” on me; I made good grades all throughout school and got along well with authority figures. However, once my sister came along, my parents realized that this type of punishment could not continue. My sister was what some may call a “repeat offender” and just never seemed to fear the belt like I did. My father retired the belt when she was very young, and instead, my parents more hastily began having her examined and treated for her own mental illness. In comparison to him and myself, my sister and my father have a closer relationship (Fig. 10). This may be because he and I are so incredibly similar, while my sister is more similar to my mother. Both are very good at engaging my father in conversation, while he and I often struggle to initiate dialogue with one another.
23 Within the Brothers Grimm story of “All Fur,” I admired the character of the princess for her courage to disobey her father’s wishes, and for the cleverness she used to avoid punishment. In my own drawing, I have depicted a young girl seeking comfort in a petting zoo, embracing a donkey and using the creature’s large body to hide. She smiles with a hint of mischief as a mature male figure runs around looking for her, belt in hand. The girl’s face is modeled after myself, but her conniving nature is based off of my sister, who constantly challenged my father with her lack of fear for repercussions. This piece is not only my own interpretation of the story, but it is also an example of how I seek to use fiction as a way to discuss uncomfortable topics.
24 Figure 11, Samantha Bares, After the Beheading of Falada and details, 2020, Black pencil on paper
25 AFTER THE BEHEADING OF FALADA
My largest piece (Fig. 11) in this series is based on the Brothers Grimm story titled “Goose Girl.” It tells the tale of a princess who is gifted with the ability to talk to her prized horse, Falada. A conniving and evil maid servant forces the princess to switch places with her, and subsequently orders that Falada be beheaded, which proceeded as follows:
“Then send for the knacker, and have the head of the horse on which I rode here cut off, for it vexed me on the way.” In reality, she was afraid that the horse might tell how she had behaved to the King’s daughter. Then she succeeded in making the King promise that it should be done, and the faithful Falada was to die; this came to the ears of the real princess, and she secretly promised to pay the knacker a piece of gold if he would perform a small service for her. There was a great dark-looking gateway in the town, through which morning and evening she had to pass with the geese: would he be so good as to nail up Falada’s head on it, so that she might see him again, more than once. The knacker’s man promised to do that, and cut off the head, and nailed it fast beneath the dark gateway.4
It is the role reversing aspect of this story that influenced me to make a piece about my sister (Fig. 12) and myself, as I have used her image interchangeably with that of mine in the past. While the princess and the maid servant grew up with different backgrounds that separated them, it is interesting to compare this dichotomy to two sisters who are separated by a large age gap but have more or less grown up under the same circumstances. I have depicted my sister and myself as being two parts of a whole; she rides on the back of Falada, joyful in her youth and the bright future ahead of her. Seated ahead of her on a bench is the representation of myself, with the head of
4 Grimm ch.89
26 Falada ominously raised to hide my face in a gesture of fear and shame. My sister atop this carousel animal harkins back to the rides upon her springed Wonder Horse, bouncing vigorously as my grandfather looked on and lovingly referred to her as his cowgirl. My younger sibling has always played a large role in my work as I am very interested in the differences and similarities of her adolescent experience in contrast to my own experiences I faced at her age. Often, the works in which I incorporate her as a figure are intended to be a kind of self-portrait by proxy.
Growing up, our existence in relationship to each other was that of polar opposites, and we were constantly reminded by family that she was the more outgoing sister and I was the more reserved sister. Even through our opposing personality traits, there is a comfort that we can only find within the other. It is difficult for us to have conversation since I have moved so far away, but when I visit home after long periods without seeing her, we are inseparable. As she grows older, I do have an underlying fear that we will continue to grow apart, but I try to reassure myself that there are parts of her only I understand as her sister. Unlike the title of maid or princess, the title of being a sister cannot be traded or stripped away. It is quite a special experience to be able to know someone since the day they entered the world.
27 Figure 12, my sister Isabel Bares, circa mid 2000s
The story of how she came to be is kind of like a fairy tale in itself. After a few years of dealing with fertility issues, my mother was told by her doctors that she would be unable to have more children. Not long after this revelation, at the age of forty, she found herself pregnant with my sister. I remember my father getting off the phone with her, and he shared the information with me in an excited but hushed way. We were told not to get too excited, as there was no guarantee that my mother would make it far into the high risk pregnancy. Yet nine months later, we were all feeling very blessed to have the new baby in our lives. She was a tiny baby and a tiny child, but she more than made up for her size in all the trouble and stress that she caused everyone. Those early years felt like God had sent us a mischievous sprite rather than a human child in the way that she bit us, screamed, climbed, and jumped from high places. Her wild nature sometimes resulted in the injury of herself or others, but her cuteness frequently made us overlook her roguish ways.
28 Figure 13, Samantha Bares, Torment and Tenderness, 2020, Black pencil on paper
29 TORMENT AND TENDERNESS
As the previous two pieces explored my feelings and thoughts towards my father and sister, this next piece was made as a reflection on my mother (Fig. 13). Many of her relatives considered her to be quite the handful when she was a child, much like my sister. She grew up in a Latinx household which upheld strict traditional values found within the culture (Fig. 14). If she could not act outside of these values in a sneaky way, she would sometimes resolve to acting out more impulsively. There is a story that my late grandfather would tell every chance he got about my mother as a very young child.
My grandfather raised rabbits throughout his children’s, and grandchildren’s, lives. In one of these instances, he had a lot of rabbits that all looked very similar. My mother wanted to be able to distinguish one of the rabbits as her very own, as her favorite one.
The solution that she came to was to bite a chunk out of the rabbit's ear. Because
English was not my grandfather’s first language, it sometimes made talking with him difficult. However, this story always seemed to be communicated so clearly to me. To illustrate how my mother had bit the rabbit, he would always make chomping gestures with his teeth. This story is important to me because both he and I shared in this delight toward my mother’s actions. He told the story quite frequently, perhaps because he noticed how similar my sister was in comparison to his own daughter. My rendering of the story places the character of my young mother under a carnival game tent, surrounded by white rabbits identical to the one she holds in her arms. The rabbit can be seen squirming as it’s ear sits between her teeth. Though not regularly practiced due
30 to ethical reasons, animals like rabbits and baby chicks could have been won as prizes in the past at some carnivals.
Painter and printmaker Paula Rego has served as a large influence on my work.
Her work interests me as it is often recreations of fairytales and folklore, taking the morality that exists within these existing stories and manipulating it to address feminist issues that the artist is passionate about. Much of her imagery includes women and girls that Rego often depicts as strong, sexually aggressive, predatory, even cruel. Rego’s untitled Girl and Dog series partly prompted my own drawing, as her suite of paintings depict torment and tenderness taking place in harmony by the hands of young girls onto dogs. I am interested in how this series challenges the viewer to question the ethics of what is being depicted in the artist’s scenes. The nature of these ethics are expounded upon by Sanda Miller in her Print Quarterly Publications text titled “Paula Rego's
‘Nursery Rhymes’”:
The Untitled Girl and Dog series of 1986 present variations on the same theme [of violence], but the brutality of the earlier animal drolleries is here replaced by a feeling of uncomfortable suspense in the recurring motif of the pubescent girl, lovingly tending a pet. But instead of tender nurturing, she seems about to inflict unspeakable acts upon the animal, ‘castrated’ into total passivity. Here ‘the dividing line between nurturing and harming — between love and murder — is always hair-thin, for the artist’s concern is not with good and evil at their extremes, but with the area between, the acts of cruelty with which love is shot’. (Miller 58)5
It may seem strange that my grandfather was always so tickled by the cruel action of my mother upon this creature, however, I understand his amusement toward
5 Miller 58
31 this situation because it is an interesting example of how the undeveloped child brain makes decisions. It is the strange morals and ethics that a child creates within their minds that draws me to use children as subjects within my work. The morally ambiguous actions of children harkins back to child characters in fairy tales like
Goldilocks or Hansel and Gretel, for example, who literally break into someone’s home and steal their food.
Often in fairy tales, the character in the role of the mother, or the stepmother as they are referred to in most variants, is often depicted as an adversary to a story’s female protagonist. This may be seen in the Grimm stories of Cinderella and Snow
White, for example. In contrast to this common archetype, my mother and I have an extremely close relationship. She often reminisces on how this relationship was cultivated when I was very small. As I have mentioned, I have always been a quiet person, but my mother insisted on conversation with me during after school car rides by drilling me with a lot of questions, asking for the details of my day at daycare and grade school. Because of this, she has always been the easiest person for me to talk to. She has held on to the tenacious nature of her childhood, and she always shares her honest opinion whether I want to hear it or not. I have always felt encouraged by her, and I am appreciative by how she let me indulge in my unique interests. For example, as an adolescent I became captivated with a book titled Geek Love, which is about a family that works at a freakshow. Even back then, I was interested in the world of carnivals and sideshow attractions. After telling my mom a little about the book, she too became interested and I then made it a habit to update her on the story as I progressed through
32 it myself. Through my oral expositions, my mother remembers the story as clearly as if it was a film she had seen.
It is our close relationship that has allowed my mother to feel comfortable in disclosing to me the troublesome relationship she has had with men throughout her life.
From a young age, she had always preached to me that men were no good when it came to matters of the heart, and that in reality they were only after sex. Though she had never been taken advantage of sexually, the men she concerned herself with took full advantage of her emotionally with their constant unfaithfulness. Many of my mother’s preachings regarding men have been made in the hope that her young daughter may have enough confidence in herself to express agency and self care in a relationship rather than suffer from the reckless transgressions of a romantic partner.
On the subject of female dominance over the male figure, in Maria Manuel
Lisboa’s book Essays on Paula Rego: Smile When You Think about Hell, the author writes of Rego’s Girl and Dog series as follows:
Over the following two years she returned repeatedly to the theme, and what transpires is the beginning of a project still ongoing, whereby the political code is deciphered through the vocabulary of the personal, the familial, the amorous and the sexual, and in which, invariably, the return of the repressed, leading to anarchy, is rendered both anthropomorphically (dogs representing men) and in a gendered fashion (through the figures of dangerous young girls).6
While my drawing is an illustration of a family tale that was shared with me, it is also the imagining of my mother as the “dangerous young girl” who is taking her frustration out on a man, anthropomorphized as a rabbit, in an intimate yet painful way.
6 Lisboa 24
33 Even if the rabbit were to leave the ownership of the girl, it would still have a piece of it’s ear missing; the creature would still have the scar that tied it to it’s previous relationship and it would have to live with the constant reminder of what it had possibly done to deserve such a punishment.
Figure 14, From left to right: My mother Felicia Llanes, her father Fernando Llanes, her brother Fernando “Chico” Llanes II, and her mother Mary Llanes, circa 1980s
34 Figure 15, Samantha Bares, Everyone’s A Winner and details, 2020, Black pencil on paper
35 EVERYONE’S A WINNER
The piece Everyone’s A Winner (Fig. 15) explores the idea of industry as a culture. The industry of Nederland, Texas, and the surrounding coastal metropolitan areas like Port Arthur and Beaumont (Fig. 16), is that of oil and petrochemical refineries. Although this industry creates many jobs for the people, it is difficult not to think about the impacts these refineries are having on people’s health, as well as an even greater impact on the environment . In 2010, Port Arthur was the site of a large crude-oil spill. Oil spills continue to affect areas like Port Arthur and Nederland, as they are so close to the Gulf of Mexico. Imagery that comes to mind when thinking about the impact of the oil industries on coastal towns are those of the gulls that become overwhelmed by the dense oil-clogged water. Even more tragic, the birds ingest the oil when cleaning themselves, hurting themselves even further.
I think of these birds as a parallel representation to the people of the Beaumont-Port
Arthur metro area. They are overwhelmed with the capital of this oil industry and have become stuck in it. There are few opportunities of profit for the people of these areas and they continue to support the oil industry, even though it may hurt them and their families in the long run. In my piece, an arm comes from out of frame holding the many tickets that the young girl has given him so that in return she may win a prize. As she plucks the toy duck from the oil contaminated water, she leers in a mixture of disgust and disappointment at the true cost of being a winner in a game of luck. A dead gull floats among the lucky ducks, and more are strung up among the plush toy prizes.
36 Figure 16, Jefferson County, TX, Map data, 2021, Google INEGI
Figure 17, The Port Arthur Refinery, operated by Motiva Enterprise, 2018, Photographed by Jon Shapley
The Motiva refinery (Fig. 17) is the largest oil refinery in North America, located in the city of Port Arthur, Texas, which is only a short car ride away from Nederland.
Much of the affordable housing in Port Arthur is built closest to the refineries, and many of the people who occupy this housing are those of the POC and BIPOC community, namely Latinx and Black people. With Black people alone making up 38.2% of the population of Port Arthur and Latinx people alone making up 34.5%, according to the
2019 Port Arthur census, it is clear that these minority communities are disproportionately suffering in comparison to the White, non-Latinx population of 18.7%.
The Executive Summary within a thirty-six page report titled Port Arthur,Texas: The End
37 of the Line for an Economic Myth by the Environmental Integrity Project briefly describes the health hazards that these communities have been affected by in the past:
From 2012-2016, there were 230 illegal air pollution “upset” events from industries in Port Arthur, and many of these incidents released toxic chemicals including benzene, a carcinogen, according to state records. The American Lung Association gives the local county a grade of F for air quality.7
My own family has roots in the oil and petrochemical industry. My late paternal grandfather worked in one of the neighboring refineries; his ancestors moved to South
East Texas to work in the oil industry as they left behind the lumber industry of
Louisiana. His son drove offshore oil workers to and from their job, as these kinds of workers were usually offshore for six to twelve months at a time. My uncle did this job until his recent death in 2020. My late maternal grandfather helped to weld the oil storage tanks that are speckled throughout the area. He came to the area from Cuba at the age of eighteen, and learned the trade of welding so that he may be able to support the family he wanted to build in America. The jobs within this industry are occupied by a diverse group of people who come from many different backgrounds. During the election in November of 2020, the people of South East Texas expressed an intense worry that President elect Joe Biden would shut down the jobs in the oil and petrochemical industry. It is hard for many of them to fathom a transition to a more renewable energy source that causes less harm to the planet. In response to Biden’s policies, the people’s worry manifests as an extreme anger and intolerance. It has been their way of life for so long, so I understand why they might fear change. At the same
7 Greene and Kelderman 2
38 time, it is frustrating when many of these people refuse to educate themselves so that they may eventually be able to understand the positive impacts that will come from the phasing out of oil and petrochemicals.
39 Figure 18, Samantha Bares, Suspended in the Veil, 2020, Black pencil on paper
40 SUSPENDED IN THE VEIL
The mask wearing couple against a smokey background in my next piece, titled
Suspended in the Veil (Fig. 18), also observes the polluted sky of Nederland. My desire for this piece was not only to continue extending this constructed universe that is connected by similar skylines, but also to create a piece that reflected the times in which the work was made. The masks reference both COVID as well as the underlying respiratory difficulties and illness that people develop in this area due to hazardous pollutants, placing them at a higher risk of catching the virus. It should be noted that this year's festival took place from March 10 to March 15, despite the rising concerns of
COVID-19 in the rest of the country.
My other goal for this piece was to portray a Latinx couple based on my mother’s parents, my grandparents. Often when I create characters to occupy my work that I view as adjacent to myself, I often ask myself how to communicate them to the viewer as
Latinx peoples without their appearance falling into negative stereotypes found in common media, such as portraying them as the one-dimensional, machismo man or the hyper-sexualised women. I’ve chosen to depict them as a couple, dressed semi-formally for their date. The Ferris Wheel is a ride with little elbow room, and the couple are reconsidering the awkward situation they have found themselves in. Suspended in air, the masks make it difficult to speak with each other, much less become more intimate.
They are fashioned in such a way as to be evocative of the 1950s, as this was the era in which birthed Atomic Age cinema, a genre of film that I enjoyed with my grandmother.
41 The relationship between my maternal grandparents, Fernando Llanes and Mary
Llanes (formerly Garcia), was often communicated to me by my mother as the kind of relationship I myself should strive for in life. Though it feels strange to describe their relationship as passionate, since passion is such a stereotypical word when it comes to the discussion of Latinx traits, I am not sure how else to illustrate their love for each other. In contrast to the Ferris Wheel couple who sit in silence, I have fond memories of my grandparents shouting loudly at each other in Spanish. A majority of the time, it sounded angry. As a child, when I expressed to my mother that I feared my grandparents may be on the brink of divorce, she answered me by laughing. She told me that the only time I should be worried about them seperating is when they were not shouting at each other. Apparently, they had always been that way. My grandfather’s death was the first instance I had witnessed someone truly losing the other half of themself. My grandmother went into a deep depression, to the point that she did not want to be around her family. At the time, I was living and going to school in Lafayette. I was dealing with an ex-boyfriend who was exhibiting stalker-like behavior. My grandmother came to Lafayette and stayed with me for a few months in my apartment, sharing my bed and bathroom. She did this not only to offer me some form of protection from my own distressing situation, but also so that she might get away from everything that reminded her of my grandfather’s absence.
42 Figure 19, Samantha Bares, A Temple of the Holy Ghost, 2020, Black pencil on paper
43 A TEMPLE OF THE HOLY GHOST
In the next piece (Fig. 19), a young girl is depicted inside a room filled with oddities, ranging from a jarred head and a stuffed dodo bird. In front of her is the jarred fetus of a two-headed bovine. Her gaze, however, is pointed up towards the ceiling, acknowledging God above. Her mouth is agape, in both awe at what He can create and in shock that He would create such things. Behind her, a priest stands in the doorway disapprovingly. When I was not fearing the possible repercussions of physical discipline,
I was worrying about the impending consequences for my mortal soul. There are a lot of rules within Catholicism, which were all laid out for me every Wednesday for eight years at Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, or CCD. CCD was an evening religious education class that was required of children if they wanted to be confirmed into the Church.
These teachings extended into my schooling when I decided to attend private school for the last three years of my highschool education. Early on, I recognized that some of my beliefs did not line up with what Catholicism illustrated as correct in the eyes of the Lord.
My parents were quite relaxed toward the religion, but there was an occasional religious fervor that was sometimes present in my father to an uncomfortable extent.
This piece was also influenced by my maternal grandmother, who introduced me to fantasy and horror fiction through television and film. We enjoyed media together such as The Fly (1958) and The Twilight Zone, while crucifixes and angels decorated her walls. In her home, the grotesque and religion could exist side by side. This relationship is also present in the Flannery O’Connor short story titled “A Temple of the
44 Holy Ghost,” in which a young girl is told by her cousins about their recent trip to the carnival, where they see a hermaphrodite. Unlike her cousins, the child does not regard the hermaphrodite as a “freak,” but rather, the child imagines the person to be holy in the way that they have made peace with their relationship with God. Because she was not present to witness this person herself, the girl imagines the kind of words that the hermaphrodite would preach:
She lay in bed trying to picture the tent with the freak walking from side to side but she was too sleepy to fgure it out. She was better able to see the faces of the country people watching, the men more solemn than they were in church, and the women stern and polite, with painted-looking eyes, standing as if they were waiting for the frst note of the piano to begin the hymn. She could hear the freak saying, “God made me thisaway and I don’t dispute hit,” and the people saying, “Amen. Amen.” “God done this to me and I praise Him.” “Amen. Amen.” “He could strike you thisaway.” “Amen. Amen.” “But he has not.” “Amen.” “Raise yourself up. A temple of the Holy Ghost. You! You are God’s temple, don’t you know? Don’t you know? God’s Spirit has a dwelling in you, don’t you know?” “Amen. Amen.” “If anybody desecrates the temple of God, God will bring him to ruin and if you laugh, He may strike you thisaway. A temple of God is a holy thing. Amen. Amen.” “I am a temple of the Holy Ghost.” “Amen.”8
In many of her stories, O’Connor is known to ridicule fundamentalist Christians for taking areas of the Bible so literally in order to support their conservative values. I found myself drawn to the writings of Flannery O’Connor not only because her stories
8 O’Connor 246
45 revolve around Catholicism in the South, but also because her stories overlap into a subgenre of fantasy and horror fction called weird fction. As much as I enjoy the story, it should be recognized that the display of human beings as freaks is an unethical practice. Instead of humans, I opted to display a two-headed cow fetus as a nod to the two oxen in the “Outhouse Queen” piece. It should also be noted that where I admire
O’Connor’s progressive views on religion, it has come to my attention that her stories regarding her views on racial issues are not and that she herself was close minded to the Civil Rights Movement.
46 Figure 20, Samantha Bares, Navigating Fortune Through the Previous Generation, 2020, Black pencil on paper
47 NAVIGATING FORTUNE THROUGH THE PREVIOUS GENERATION
My maternal grandmother’s role as a caretaker and a spiritual example is why I wanted to dedicate an entire drawing to her, the fortune teller piece. In this drawing, titled Navigating Fortune Through the Previous Generation (Fig. 20), a child and an older woman walk along the outskirts of the carnival, where all the carnie workers’ tents and trailers are located. They look upon the table of a fortune teller, who is absent from the scene. The character of the fortune teller in history is usually associated with spiritualism, and they use mystical methods to give advice to those who seek them out.
The fortune teller’s absence reinforces the idea that it is my grandmother who fulfills the role of offering me, her granddaughter, guidance by utilizing her own spiritual connections.
Once again regarding religion, I have always been much more drawn to my grandmother’s relationship to it. It seemed less forced and extremist. While I recoiled at my church leader’s attempts to get children to feel a connection with God, I looked forward to days when my grandmother offered to perform la limpia on me, or the cleanse. It may be described as a kind of healing ritual, with origins in Central and
South America. She uses an oil that has been blessed and with her hands, she draws the sign of the cross all over my body while she says prayers in English and Spanish.
This cleansing is usually performed when I am having a rough time with my mental health. As recently as my visit back home this past winter break, she prayed over my body, which was suffering from a terrible eczema induced rash caused by my anxiety.
For several days in a row, she laid her hands over me while asking the Lord to watch
48 over me and protect my mind, body, and actions in life. It is this connection of
Catholicism to my grandmother’s Mexican heritage that I am unable to fully abandon the religion, even though I have not been to church since my grandfather died five years ago. In 2015, the death of my grandfather created a void not only within my family, but also within the practice of my own spirituality. Growing up, going to church was a family event that included my parents and grandparents; consciously making the decision to skip mass created a lot of guilt within me. After his passing, I began going to church less and less, to the point that I cannot even recall the last time I went. Physically going to this holy building to pray on a weekly basis always felt like something I did to make my family happy, rather than to find religious content myself. His death did not necessarily help me to forgive myself for my rejection of my family’s more openly devout practice. I coped with his passing by somewhat closing off my relationship with God, and as of now, I am not really sure if that is a good decision or not; I just know that I do not feel as guilty anymore.
CONCLUSION
My thesis seeks to communicate stories that I am familiar with using the language of storytelling. The narratives that occupy each of the works range from being invented to reinvented, while also being implied. My desire for my drawings is not to focus on conflicts in my upbringing and in my childhood environment contrasted to that of those who may be consuming this work, but rather, I want to highlight how many small towns and their surroundings are similar. I do not wish to separate my
49 experiences from that of others; instead, as psychoanalysts have recognized the many symbols and archetypes that are able to be dissected in fairy and folk tales, I hope that the viewer of my work may also find characteristics within the visual narratives that they may desire to examine and relate to their own culture.
While creating this body of work, I was tasked with the action of reflecting on certain relationships within my family, on my own connection to spirituality, as well as on inherited and environmentally caused illnesses. All of which proved to be more difficult than I had previously thought it would be. I had to contemplate what made up the culture of an individual, myself, while also acknowledging variance within the culture of the individual’s environment. Creating and writing about drawings that deal with this subject matter evoked some distressing feelings within myself. By setting these narratives on The Heritage Festival fairgrounds in conjunction with utilizing the concept of folk and fairy tales to anchor my own personal mythos, the body of work was then given a solid foundation so that I was efficiently able to communicate the constructed culture within South East Texas and within myself.
The body of work consists of vignettes that all take place within the same reality, similar to how episodes are presented in an anthological context like in The Twilight
Zone. I can easily imagine each drawing as a paused scene on a television screen, with a story that will carry on as soon as I hit the play button. Not only do the contents of the drawings evoke nostalgia through their display of the American-like setting of a small town fair that is several decades old; notalgia resonates in the drawings through their
50 illustrative quality that is a direct result of the fantasy and horror fiction that I grew up with.
51 SKETCHES
52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 BIBLIOGRAPHY
“Attitudes Toward Spanking .” Child Trends, 2013, www.childtrends.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/indicator0.22948900%2013697 07691.pdf.
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Greene, Mary, and Keene Kelderman. “Executive Summary.” PORT ARTHUR, TEXAS: The End of the Line for an Economic Myth, Aug. 2017, p. 2. environmentalintegrity.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Port-Arthur-Report.pdf.
Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm Grimm. “Household Tales by Brothers Grimm.” Http://Www.gutenberg.org, Project Gutenberg, Mar. 2004, www.gutenberg.org/files/5314/5314-h/5314-h.htm#chap89.
Lisboa, Maria Manuel “A Home Is Not a Home Without a Pet.” Essays on Paula Rego: Smile When You Think about Hell, Open Book Publishers, 2019, p. 24. Open Edition Books, books.openedition.org/obp/9751#tocfrom1n2.
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O'Connor, Flannery. “A Temple of the Holy Ghost.” The Complete Stories, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971, pp. 246. eBook Collection (archive.org).
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