Ramón Medina Silva was a mara'akáme of the Huichol people who also recorded his visions in yarn paintings: indeed, arguably he was the inventor of the visionary yarn painting genre. It was while gazing deeply into a book featuring his artworks and myth narratives one winter evening whilst living in Japan in 1997, that I made the momentous decision to become an artist. I therefore have a profound gratitude for Ramón, his life and his work: his style and vision inspires me to this day. It seems appropriate, then, at the outset of this Archaic Visions venture to express that gratitude in a short essay through which, I hope, Ramón Medina Silva's amazing legacy can become more widely known.

Huichol yarn paintings are justly famous in the world of anthropology and visionary art, expressing as they do the shamanic realities of peyote visions, and the sacred pilgrimages and myth cycles of the Huichol people. There are several notable modern yarn painters, the most celebrated perhaps being José Benítez Sánchez, an initiated shaman whose shimmering and detailed images have been exhibited in America and Europe and whose work is sometimes considered representative of the artform in its full expression of the sacred complexes underlying the peyote vision and the Huichol perceptual cosmos.

However, Ramón Medina Silva lived a generation before this widening celebration of Huichol art had come to pass, and he along with his wife Guadalupe de la Cruz Ríos (known as Lupe) were key innovators of Huichol folk arts into the narrative and visionary artforms well-known today.

The Classic Maya city of Yaxchilan is one of several archaeological sites located in close proximity to the Usumacinta River along the border between Guatemala and the Mexican state of Chiapas. It sits just on the Mexican side in a meander of the river, likely a vital spot since the river passed through the city and allowed the rulers to control – and perhaps impose duties upon – the trade and river traffic moving from the mountains towards lowland cities such as Palenque.

Anciently known as Pa' Chan ('Broken Sky') or Siyaj Chan ('Born from the Sky'), Yaxchilan's documented history begins around the mid 4th century AD but the city flourished in the Late Classic period (6th-9th centuries AD), dominating nearby Bonampak and the Usumacinta corridor, as well as establishing rivalries with both Piedras Negras and Palenque downstream.