Jorge Rojo grew up in Guadalajara, Jalisco, one of Mexico’s most beautiful and artistic cities. His mother Maria Teresa Orozco was a painter and introduced Jorge to the arts. He recalled that as a young child, his mother called on him to take notice of what she was painting. He credits his mother with teaching him how to observe.
Rojo’s family also encouraged him to visit Jalisco’s museums and learn about the Mexican historical painting tradition. Guadalajara, founded in the mid-1540s, is Mexico’s second-largest city with a metro population of nearly five million. Rojo reminded me that one of Mexico’s most famous painters, José Clemente Orozco, resided in Guadalajara for much of his life and today several of Orozco’s most famous frescoes are located in buildings around the city. [Rojo’s mother has a distant kinship to José Clemente Orozco]. A visit to the Guadalajara would not be complete without seeing Orozco’s famous fresco at the Cabana Hospice, a former 19th-century orphanage now a UNESCO World Heritage site and home to one of Orozco’s most famous murals, “Man of Fire.”
