Picture in Focus: The Last Supper from La Semilla de Dios workshop

October 2, 2022

Picture in Focus: The Last Supper from La Semilla de Dios workshop

My survey of arts and crafts in the on-line Sacred Art Pilgrim collection has looked at folk art made with paper and leather. This week, we view the first of several pieces in my listings made from wood. We journey to La Palma, a town in the mountainous north of the Central American nation of El Salvador, famed since the 1970s for miniature folk art paintings on various wooden objects that bring to mind both Picasso abstracts and Mayan pictographs. This week's featured painting of the Last Supper with the distinctive La Palma look on a carved wood panel is the work of artisans in La Semille de Dios workshop, the first of what are now more than 80 folk art cooperatives, employing a majority of the local population in making craft pieces in wood that have come to represent Salvadoran contemporary art to the outside world. (John Kohan)