Polly Stark Ortega: Exuberant Mexico

By Polly Stark 

Polly Stark Ortega celebrates 50 years of life in Mexico by opening the doors of the family residence to unveil previously unseen work. She draws from elements of Mexico’s exuberant natural landscape, folk art, craft, and poignant personal memories. With a formal training in printmaking, painting, and surface design, overlapping and unexpected patinas of process and time are provided. The paintings pay homage to the color and bounce of Mexico’s palette. Paper pieces plunge into memories of childhood as an expat kid in a 70s San Miguel de Allende (very different from today’s city vibe) all while playing with fragments of stories and a young woman’s place in an exotic, often surreal surrounding.

Flowers, real or imagined, hark to a childhood surrounded by her mother’s crafting of crepe paper flowers for every occasion. There were always stashes of crepe paper in hot pink, orange, white, and purple—and more often than not Alice, her mother, was often to be found fashioning the larger-than-life blooms. They were festoons for celebration despite being so ephemeral. Meanwhile, up in the rooftop studio, paper patterns and designs were being hand painted by her father, Bill, along with his floral paintings for distribution back in New York City ahead of every season’s fashion reveal. 

Ortega attended the Cleveland Institute of Art and majored in printmaking and ceramics but returned to San Miguel before graduating. Her instructor, H. Caroll Cassill, in reviewing her portfolio asked, “Why are you here when you could be in Mexico? Everything you are creating is pointing you back south.” 

She returned to San Miguel and married. She and her musician husband Victorino Ortega raised their three children in San Miguel juggling babies while pursuing their respective creative careers. The house was a revolving door of neighborhood children, music rehearsals, painting, Legos, jacket fabric piecework, and pets. There was a point where the children contributed their own brushwork to some of Ortega’s oil paintings of that period because studio space was conjoined with their bedroom in their tiny shotgun Loreto rental. 

At this same time, she and her sister CC Stark launched their own wholesale line of zany tin lighting designs under the name Chaos Hecho. Working from the rooftop studio in the family home, they hatched and produced many designs that are now part of San Miguel’s infamous tin legacy.

The Ortegas also designed and painted the interiors of scads of homes through the 90s and early into the new millennium, embellishing them with decorative paintwork. During the bank fallout of 1998 and with the kids approaching college, they folded the paint business and she taught at the Victoria Robbins School. She has only this year stepped back from nearly two decades of teaching sciences, histories, and art.

An avid gardener herself, Ortega finds plants have a way of imposing their own personalities into her work. In Mexican folklore and craft, the plant kingdom is wildly present and more often than not both magical and whimsical. Her love for both Mexican lore and plants is evidenced in her paintings. 

Cats abound, of which there are three in the family, as do other creatures—toads, birds, and bugs. Each one is a player in her contemplative depictions.