Roberto Matta (1911-2002) was a Chilean painter who shifted between surrealist and abstract painting like a ghost in one of his misty otherworldly landscapes. Early on he described his work as a series of ‘inscapes,’ where the paintings served ‘as visual analogies for the artist’s psyche.’ This expanded into reflections of our increasingly mechanized and war-torn world.

Matta effectively created a parallel world to ours, creating dread, cruelty, longing, passion and domination with shapes and colors minutely reminiscent of fists, teeth, masks, hips, knives, screens, meeting rooms and the structures of machines. We piece together a world in our minds from these shards and splotches, calling up emotions in this connection that we may not have been able to access directly.

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Isn’t this a great album cover? My attention was immediately completely consumed. Usually, band photography is the worst. The worst. A vacuum posing as a house cat.  And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The band, Oh No Ono, went all out in allowing the artist, Malene Mathiasson, to go all out. Her work is wonderfully out there and still developing, uneven but full of a weird energy that’s hard to find or pinpoint. It’s a bulldozer coming at you, blaring its horn and emitting this kind of horrible sulfuric odor. Amazing.

The original plan was to rent a motorcycle and ride around from the cloud forest north of Oaxaca city down to the beach coves along the Pacific. That proved impossible; there were no places to rent, only buy. So the unnamed point-and-shoot digital camera I brought as a safety precaution for the road (and not the Canon 5D Mark II or Contax 645) existed only to vex me. I’ll never shoot digital on a trip again.

Over 11 days, I traveled from Mexico City to Oaxaca City, spent four days hiking in the Sierra Norte north of Oaxaca, passing through Caujimoloyas, Benito Jaurez, Neveria, Latuvi, Amatlan, Yavesia, back to Oaxaca City, spent three days at beach cove Mazunte, tourist hole Puerto Escondido, mangrove lagoon Manialtapec, then back to Mexico City.

During an unfortunately brief visit to the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City, I became enthralled by the wondrous worlds created by Spanish-Mexican painter Remedios Varo in the 1950-60s.