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 This dreaming reality is a kind of cognitive faculty whose logic escapes most of us. It was as natural as seeing, drawing, singing and all the other intensities Reich lived.
Longfellow mocked the bells for their belonging to the past, but Don Reich loved the bells, the town and the sea, just as they were.
He made friends and learned Spanish by immersion. He lived in many other places in Mexico, including Mexico City, where he watched great pots of Aztec painters’ brilliant colors being excavated.
He explored the pre-Columbian cities and became acquainted with the work of Mexican muralists, ate guanabana.
But he did not paint Mexico.
He saw Mexican publications that reveled in imagery he hadn’t the stomach for -- grisly accident or murder scenes.
“It reminded me that I hadn’t been looking at my own country with an all-encompassing eye. I was just looking at its prettiness.”
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As a result, he began focusing on American advertising imagery and said, “I felt like a visitor from another country, seeing this for the first time. It was vividly apparent to me that this was a viable source that other artists were ignoring.”
He felt encouraged by the ferocity of Mexico’s artists -- Posada, Rivera, Orozco -- to find his own country’s calaveras.
Years later he recalled that time and connected it with his experience teaching prison inmates: “The muralists and their pre-Columbian ancestors urge within me an American expressionism.”
He said he found solitude in the language barrier. “There is nothing to do but be introspective.”
Drawings, more often than paintings, came out of that introspection.
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