Inspriation: Zapotec Designs

We spent Sat­ur­day with our friend Demetrio Bautista Lazo the weaver. In addi­tion to eat­ing too much. (Gra­cias, Mari­bel por la comida muy deli­cioso!) We went walk­ing around the town of Teotitlan.

That’s Demetrio show­ing me a tree of life rug that he’s work­ing on.

This the dome of the local church..

As was com­mon when con­struct­ing colo­nial churches the walls were built using the stone from the exist­ing Zapotec build­ings. Some parts of the plas­ter of the new walls has been removed and the designs on the old stones are visible.

I’ve fooled around with try­ing to com­plete some of the geo­met­ric designs. There’s usu­ally not enough of the pat­tern to be cer­tain of how the whole was put together. Though as I col­lect more exam­ples I think I will find enough frag­ments to recon­struct some of the lin­ear designs. (Click on the thumb­nails for larger versions.)

These two seem sim­i­lar and may be related enough to make a larger pat­tern out of:

Two wavy pat­tern that remind me of the snail pat­tern used in some of the rugs.

This sec­tion of the wall con­tains sev­eral small bits of pat­tern and the image of a bird­like crea­ture. The dia­mond pat­tern in the lower cen­ter is very com­mon in rugs. I’ll have to ask Demetrio if he knows who the bird is.

A final pic­ture of sev­eral very small frag­ments. I am sus­pi­cious of the flow­ery vine chunk in the upper left. It’s too nat­u­ral­is­tic to be Zap­totec, per­haps it is a bit of some ear­lier church or chapel., or bit of this church reused in mak­ing repairs.

edited 25.june.2008 to cor­rect image links