Projects
2025 · Osel Paints
San Miguel de Allende, Mexico
Edgar Sánchez offered me a place to stay, with no strings attached.
He had become a dear friend by then, and more importantly, an ongoing champion of the urban arts. His support continues to make numerous projects possible, including bucket paint supply for many SeaWalls activations throughout North America. His passion for public art runs very deep, expressed through a practical generosity that gets s**t done.
I spent nearly four months in an apartment beneath the Osel Paints store in San Miguel de Allende while rebuilding a website I had barely updated in a decade — a first substantial effort to give the stories behind my work somewhere to live.
The mural came later.
Chino and his brother Polar became part of my daily life.
We cooked and ate together. In the evenings, we walked through town with their big, easy humor, listening to mariachi in the central square. We spoke little of each other’s language, but there was plenty to talk about.
Chino taught me Spanish as though I were three years old. Often, that was about my level. He was a good teacher.
When gestures and our few shared words weren’t enough, we reached for our phones — sometimes those small screens carried conversations that mattered deeply.
We became family.
Travelling with the brothers to their hometown in the mountains of Michoacán remains one of the highlights of my life.
They welcomed me into a family home whose roof barely accommodated my height. Rough timber, mud and straw formed the walls, darkened by years of cooking fires. Outside was a well their great-grandfather had dug. Across the surrounding landscape, enormous stones fitted together without mortar marked boundaries whose histories I wanted to understand.
Much of the family worked in strawberry fields supplying the American market. They spoke of pesticide exposure and its toll on their health.
I was being welcomed into a family’s life: its hospitality, its generations of work, and circumstances very different from my own. There was much I could not fully understand, even as we found ways to become close.
The food…
Toward the end of my stay, I wanted to paint something for Edgar.
There was a wall available in the store courtyard, which had become thoroughly part of my life. Karen, Chino, Polar and Don Perro were familiar company.
I asked whether anyone knew an artist who might be down to collaborate. Karen had mentioned several times that her mother, Ana Laura Salazar Ponce, was an artist. Eventually, they took me to see her work.
Her workshop blew my mind. Meeting her there opened the way to a collaboration that became an essential part of the mural. Ana Laura contributed the intricate ornamental patterns woven through the painting, bringing her own work into conversation with mine.
At the centre of the mural, Saint Michael meets an axolotl-inspired salamander.
The pairing brought different cultural and spiritual references into the same space. Saint Michael’s familiar role as a vanquisher was present, but looking at the painting, I saw something else unfolding.
He seemed to be listening.
The salamander held its own presence before him. Their meeting left room for curiosity, for uncertainty, for something other than the familiar outcome of a conquered creature beneath the saint.
I keep returning to that tension, and to the axolotl’s capacity for regeneration. What can change in an encounter without either of us having to give up who we are?
By the time I began painting, we had already spent months finding ways to understand one another.
These friends knew I painted. Now they could watch decisions unfold, follow figures taking shape, and talk with me about what I was trying to express. The work gave us another language to share.
That’s real close to how I understand the relationship between the two figures. I had been a guest, a friend and frequently a beginner, dependent on the patience of people willing to help me find the words.
Edgar had offered me a place without asking for a painting. When I eventually made one, it carried something of the life his invitation had made possible.
El Encuentro.
© Jason Botkin