I only found her Instagram account a few days ago, but I’m already figuring out which corner in my house will belong to Carolina Rodríguez of ChepeArt.
San José is a marvelous city wrapped in a thick layer of crud. It frustrates me almost every day, and yet I feel more at home walking down Avenida Central in a crowd of people than in any other place on the planet. Yup, right about here.
Rodríguez’s images wipe away the worst struggles of the city and show off the iconic structures and places that make us proud to be josefinos. Somehow, the scrubbly look of her prints captures the imperfect nature of the scenes, such as this one featuring the public phones downtown that I used to search for a job during my first days in Costa Rica in 2004. (Yes. With a phone card. As my daughter says, “Those were days of yore.”) This was my office:
If you, too, love this city, follow Rodríguez on Facebook or Instagram – where you can also see the places where her work is displayed or for sale – and you’ll get a little happy boost of colorful Chepe whenever you need one.
I’m a writer in San José, Costa Rica, on a year-long quest to share daily posts on inspiring people, places and ideas from my adopted home as a kind of tonic during a rough time in the world. Sign up (top right of this page) to receive a little dose of inspiration every weekday in your mailbox; tell a friend; check out past posts; and please connect with me on Instagram or Facebook! You can also find me churning out small, square poems on any topic under the sun (here on the site, on Instagram or Twitter).
During Week 1, I threw down my first of what will probably be many challenges to myself during this year: to get to know the stories of Costa Rican artists and support their work at a time when art is a particularly important antidote or vehicle for change. Well, meet Raudyn. I’ve never met him in person, but his work makes me smile. Raised in the province of Heredia, he picked coffee as a child alongside his grandparents, as did so many Costa Ricans during that time, and has dedicated much of his artistic life to showcasing the unique role of the “golden grain” in the country’s life.
I love his paintings’ trademark shapes and spirals that cut the classic scenes into new patterns. I love the way he applied this same approach to Michael Jordan preparing for a dunk. I love the way he sees his art not as a throwback to a lost time, but as a reminder that the values that used to unite us – in this case, Costa Ricans – are still out there. As he said in an interview I edited while at The Tico Times, his work “applauds our ancestors, but I must also applaud today’s Costa Ricans. To the tico who still feels humble. The tico who… keeps working. There are still ticos like that and I applaud that.”
Insert your own nationality to the statement above: lather, rinse, repeat. Thank you, Raudyn. And if you share my desire to hang a piece of his work in your home one day, enter his raffle! Just visit his Instagram account.
Courtesy of Raudyn AlfaroCourtesy of Raudyn Alfaro
I’m a writer in San José, Costa Rica, on a year-long quest to share daily posts on inspiring people, places and ideas from my adopted home as a kind of tonic during a rough time in the world. Sign up (top right of this page) to receive a little dose of inspiration every weekday in your mailbox; tell a friend; check out past posts; and please connect with me on Instagram or Facebook!
Though school starts in February in Costa Rica, I still think of September with that back-to-school fondness, aided by the fact that this cool, rainy month does give me some autumn vibes. And what better place to celebrate back to school than a cozy independent bookstore?
If you’re reading this, you almost assuredly love bookstores. You might even own one, and if not, you’ve definitely imagined yourself owning one, probably in a picturesque fishing village where you would wear hand-knitted sweaters and gaze out at the storm-tossed sea in between customers (right? I’m not the only one, am I?). So I’m not convincing anyone here. But this is a love that had gotten away from me, and when I wandered into La Librería Andante for the first time in a long while – it’s a gorgeous, lovingly curated little bookstore in the university district near my house – I felt so many knots inside me come loose. In a world of noise, it’s a quiet place; in a fast world, it encourages you to move slowly and to browse, which is such a lovely, relaxing and somnolent word, browwwwse; in a world of technology, it is timeless; in a world of foolishness, it is an oasis of wisdom and beauty. As I wandered through its offerings, I set myself the second challenge of this year (the first being to get to know more artists): to visit all the local bookstores I can find, and to redirect as much of my shopping to them as I possibly can.
Why is the bookstore or the library more magical than being surrounded by our own bookshelves at home? I think it’s the sense of possibility. If books have altered the course of the life or the way you see the world in the past, then standing in a bookstore makes your nerves tingle, because you know that the next game-changer might be within your reach at this very moment. It could be behind that beautiful, glossy cover over there. It could be wedged into an undignified corner of the used book stacks. You might find it today – you might not. You might walk right past it, not knowing. But it’s there, and that’s such a comfort. As the poet Thomas Lovell Beddoes put it (oh yeah, I’m just nerding all the way out today – it’s that bookstore air), there’s “something holy in the darkness… and as rich moonlight may be to the blind, unconsciously consoling.”
If you can, go to a bookstore or a library this week and bask in that consolation, that knowledge that whether you read them today or this year or not, there are wise words waiting for us. There’s something holy in the darkness. Tucked away, bound and covered but ready to break free at any moment – there is light.
(If you’re a sucker for an incredible library story, check out “The Gift of a Public Library” by Deborah Fallows in The Atlantic, featuring beautiful libraries doing the impossible to keep their doors open in small towns including my mother’s: Eastport, Maine.)
Katherine Stanley Obando
I’m a writer in San José, Costa Rica, on a year-long quest to share daily posts on inspiring people, places and ideas from my adopted home as a kind of tonic during a rough time in the world. Sign up (top right of this page) to receive a little dose of inspiration every weekday in your mailbox; tell a friend; check out past posts; and please connect with me on Instagram or Facebook!
katherine stanley obando 