Cocodrilos en aguas turbias (Crocodiles in troubled waters)

The painter and printmaker Isabel De Obaldía creates images reflecting the work of a long line of modern “primitive” painters—from Paul Gauguin to Diego Rivera—who explored the art of ancient and tribal cultures. Her paintings and glass sculptures incorporate symbols and ideas from ancient Panamanian, Colombian, and Costa Rican art. Colored with glass powders and engraved with raw cuts and gashes made with a large diamond saw, her large, totemic animals have a powerful, almost shamanic presence. De Obaldía’s first experiments with glass involved blown forms, but when the artist was introduced to sand casting, she focused exclusively on that technique. The first sculpture that she made was a sand-cast metate, a glass version of the traditional stone mortar used for grinding maize and other grains. Upon seeing it, De Obaldía realized that she had found a path in glass that was connected to her painting. The crocodile is a creature that lives in two worlds—above and below the water—and it is a symbol of the transition to the underworld. Cocodrilos en aguas turbias takes the form of a four-legged rectangular metate with the head of a crocodile at each end. The metate evokes images of partly submerged crocodiles swimming in a swamp, the suggestion of water reinforced by the surface bubbles in the glass. Published: Oldknow (39), pp. 58–59; and Lowery Stokes Sims and Dicey Taylor, Isabel De Obaldía: Metates, New York: Mary-Anne Martin Fine Art, 2013, pp. 28–29 and 46. For more information, see http://www.isabeldeobaldia.com.