Mexican+Bark+Painting+(Amate)

=Mexican Bark Painting= =Mexican bark painting is a folk art in which artists use bright colors to paint scenes of everyday village life, colorful birds, flowers and other animals on paper made from bark. The art form is also used to illustrate scenes from traditional fables and stories. Bark paper or papal amate, is produced by hand using bark from the mulberry or fig trees. The bark is washed, boiled and laid in lines on a wooden board. The fibers are then beaten with stones until they fuse together. When synthetic pigment paints were introduced into rural areas in Mexico in the 1950’s, artists fell in love with the bright colors, which produce amazing contrast against the bark paper.= =**Amate paper** has been used since ancient times by the Mexican and other cultures. They used amate and other substrates like **animal skin** to record historical events (codices). Nowadays, artisans do **amate painting** using commercially available acrylic paints, and it is not rare to find that even the children of the artists have an active role in this beautiful tradition of producing their own artwork.= =[|See website]on Mexican Folk Art for beautiful examples.=