Consuelo González Amézcua

1903-1975 · Del Rio, Texas, USA

She called her medium filigree art, a new Texas culture. It was a cheap ballpoint pen, a piece of cardboard, and more patience than most artists ever find.

The life

Born in Piedras Negras, Mexico, Chelo crossed with her family to Del Rio, Texas as a child. A scholarship to art school evaporated when her father died, so she worked shop counters, wrote poems, sang, and stayed. In her fifties she began the drawings, and by 1968 Texas museums were showing them.

The work

Dense filigree drawings in ballpoint and coloured pen on shirt cardboard, birds, hands, queens and Aztec princesses caught in ornamental line so fine it reads as lace or engraved silver. Poems, hers and borrowed, thread through many sheets. She drew freehand, no ruler, no sketch, the pattern growing from one corner outward.

Why we love them

Proof that the distance between a bic biro and a masterpiece is only attention. Her patience is the material.

Go deeper

• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

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