Kilometers with Feet, Hands, Eyes and the Mind

Anyone who has spent time teaching others knows: one's own logic is not always obvious to someone on the outside. Sensing the explanation is not landing, you may shift strategy on the fly. And just when you think you have gotten through, after a slightly-too-long pause, a question comes out of nowhere - one that may catch you off guard, because you had never looked at the subject that way yourself.

"By teaching, we learn" ("Docendo discimus"), the Roman philosopher Seneca already acknowledged some 2,000 years ago - not only about the subject at hand, but about the world, about other people, and about ourselves. San Miguel-based artist Edgardo Kerlegand, born in Chiapas in 1964, can testify to that.

Edgardo Kerlegand surrounded by his art.

There's an ease with which Kerlegand sits in a chair in his centre studio in San Miguel de Allende, legs crossed, shirt sleeves rolled up, a smile on his lips that comes and goes, as he talks about his years as an arts teacher in Mexico, Argentina and Croatia. "I learned so much from my students," he says. "Through their questions, I came to understand myself more."

Teaching was, at first, just something Kerlegand did on the side. He gave his first classes in 1990 at the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City - the oldest art school in the Americas. When he left for Argentina two years later on an exchange, he was "more seduced by the desire to explore than by any enthusiasm to teach." That changed once he realized what the classroom offered him: a space to connect with people.

His next stop was just as unplanned. In 1994, he travelled to Croatia during the war of independence, where a teacher shortage had left many students without a place to go. "Their homes, their parents, everything else was there," Kerlegand recalls. He was hired by the National Arts School in Zagreb with a charming "How bad can a Mexican be?". So he taught there too, without speaking a word of Croatian. After all, it was art, not engineering.

Art, in its universality, was Kerlegand's companion. But he found a universality in teaching, too: the institution never really mattered. What counted was who stood in front of the students, and the relationship between them. "For a teacher to truly be a teacher, the student must come first," Kerlegand says. "It is the other person that matters."

A spontaneous sketch shows one of Kerlegand's many faces.

This year marks Kerlegand’s 20th anniversary in San Miguel. When he arrived in 2006, Fábrica La Aurora was just becoming an arts centre. "I loved the idea," he says - so he opened his studio there. While running it, he taught art at Instituto Allende for many years, always encouraging his students to pursue their own paths: "Rather than acting like I know what is right, I always wanted to give my students the ability to say: 'what he's saying makes sense - but I am going to think about it, analyze it, study it, and come up with my own answer'," he says. "The right way is something each person has to find for themselves."

This critical questioning also happened the other way round. "Sometimes I would tell my students things, and when they asked questions, what I told them was not necessarily what I actually did," he says. "When there was no coherence, that forced me to rethink either what I said or what I did."

Teaching, in other words, went both ways.

Inside "Estudio Kerlegand" in Fábrica La Aurora.

After more than 40 years of making art, there is a spark with which Kerlegand talks about being, now "fully in his 60s," free to paint and do what he wants. His studio still runs under his name at Fábrica La Aurora, and still shows his work - but he has handed it over to his students: "People who come to cooperate, to work, to share, so that we all benefit as a community. The only thing I ask of them is to work starting from the human figure. Humanism is what centers my work," Kerlegand says - his painting, as well as his teaching. At Fábrica La Aurora, mentioning his name to the colleague overseeing the gallery that day is enough to set off a stream of stories about art, friendship, and life.

"I always tell my students: if one day you get rich and famous and show in the best galleries, I will be very proud, and if you say I taught you, even better. But I prefer that you are happy," Kerlegand continues. "Personally, that's what art gives me: I feel happy everywhere."

The artist is currently considering a return to university, now that he feels he has "more to say." Decades of creating, teaching, and learning about art have shaped his own philosophy for studying the subject - one that, in some form, applies to other professions too.

His advice: walk kilometers with the feet, the hands, the eyes and the mind.

"With your feet, because you have to go be with art in person, at museums and galleries. With your hands, because you have to draw every day, even if only for a while; set a goal, it does not matter how you get there, you simply have to start walking. Where you look for that goal is deeply personal, whether in your roots, your family, your sexuality, your relationships, society, or politics. With your eyes, because you have to see what everyone has to say without taking any of it as absolute truth, so that you can build your own voice - and there is no way to get that wrong, because you are walking regardless. And finally, kilometers in your mind: read, listen to music, watch dance. Every art form can give us something. Nourishing ourselves matters. Sometimes a book can take you on a better trip than a plane."

In both of Kerlegand's studios, his own works share the space with those of his students.

There is a realness to Edgardo Kerlegand that you will not find on every corner. Visitors may come to his San Miguel studio to get to know his art, or stumble in by accident on their way to the center. But meeting the man himself, one will almost certainly leave with far more than that: an honest, genuine connection. Independent of age, gender, nationality, or any other category we assign ourselves, Kerlegand opens up space for exactly that. Maybe, after all, that is what makes him special - as an artist, a teacher, and most importantly, a human.

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Visit "Estudio Kerlegand" in Fábrica La Aurora or meet the artist in his second studio in the centre of San Miguel de Allende, where he is usually present on Fridays. 

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