Hollister – Carla Almanza-de Quant doesn’t believe in
coincidences. It’s just too hard to believe everything that’s
happened to her over the past 18 years has been the result of
random chance.
Hollister – Carla Almanza-de Quant doesn’t believe in coincidences. It’s just too hard to believe everything that’s happened to her over the past 18 years has been the result of random chance.
“I think everything in life is meant to be,” explained Almanza-de Quant, who at the age of 20 accidentally stumbled upon an event, a mentor and an art that would change her life forever.
Born into an artistic Mexican family in 1967, Almanza-de Quant left her family at 20 years old to study the Italian language, art and culture in Venice. As luck – or fate – would have it, Almanza-de Quant soon found herself in the middle of the world-famous Venetian Carnivale, surrounded by throngs of party-goers in elaborate classical masks.
In the midst of the city-wide celebration, Almanza-de Quant was drawn to the 16th century music coming out of nearby art studio. She followed the music and found Agostino Dessi inside. Definitely more than a coincidence, she said: In Mexico, each day of the year is a different saint’s day. Almanza-de Quant’s birthday, of course, is the day of St. Agostino.
Today, Dessi is a world-renowned mask artist with his own school, a recently-opened Italian hotel and enough renown that a British publisher recently printed a full-color coffee table book on his work. But when Almanza-de Quant met Dessi 18 years ago, he was a man relatively unknown outside of artistic circles, but hailed within them as possibly the finest classical mask-maker in the world.
Almanza-de Quant introduced herself to Dessi, who quickly picked up on her Mexican accent though she spoke fluent Italian. Dessi asked her where she was from, then told her he had studied Aztec and Mayan mask-making in Mexico himself. The two became fast friends, and when he asked her if she would be interested in learning the age-old art of traditional mask-making, Almanza-de Quant was thrilled.
“I just became hooked on masks,” said Almanza-de Quant. “Classical masks, the masks of the commedia dell’ arte… it became an obsession. I would go to the supermarket and go up to people and ask them if I could make a mask of their face because they had such beautiful features.”
Almanza-de Quant spent the next two years in Italy studying under Dessi with three other students he had also hand-chosen.
“Ago is like an angel to me; basically my life changed when I met him because I got hooked on masks,” said Almanza-de Quant, who still talks to her mentor regularly on the phone and took her family to visit him in Italy last September.
Dessi taught his students how to use clay and papier-mâche to create realistic replicas of models’ faces, how to reconstruct the delicate and often damaged nose of a mask on a clay mold, how to project an element of fantasy onto the blank canvasses once the masks dried. He encouraged Almanza-de Quant to use any materials she could think of to decorate her masks: Rocks, fabric, glazes and paints, jewels, even classical sheet music, anything that could transform the life-like human faces into representations of a wildly fantastic and mysterious world, instruments of anonymity with personal flair.
“That’s one of the things with the mask,” said Almanza-de Quant. “The mask becomes part of your personality. It’s fantasy, but it’s real.”
Almost 20 years after meeting her mentor, Almanza-de Quant may be the only artist in the United States making classical Italian masks in the traditional style. Working out of her Hollister garage, she carefully crafts masks of unicorns with jewel-spiralled horns, harlequins with crackled pink faces and bars of music scrolled beneath their eyes, Cyrano de Bergerac-like masks with beakish noses and elaborate head dresses in red and gold and blue.
Everything is done by hand, from the original sketches of the masks’ shapes to the sculpting of the molds. Almanza-de Quant even makes her own paper for the hard shell of the masks, forming pulpy sheets of wool and animal hair to concoct the thick paper only available for sale from Italy or France.
“We had a pet rabbit for a while,” Almanza-de Quant said with a laugh. “So I was always collecting its loose fur.”
When the paper is ready and the mask mold is dry, Almanza-de Quant, sometimes with the help of her 5-year-old son, tears the paper into uneven pieces that she can patch together like a jigsaw puzzle.
“You don’t want any seams,” she explained as she sprayed the swatches with water and lay them down in a unicorn mold.
Once a layer dries, she brushes it with glue, repeating the steps two or three times until she has a thin, cast-like shell that will pop right out of the mold when dry. Her son helps her paint over the masks with a white base-coat before she decorates them, then carefully wraps each for storage, saving some of the best to display in her home.
Almanza-de Quant’s house is like a gallery for her work. The walls are scattered with masks complementing the color scheme of each room, the tables covered with ribbons and carnivale-style pieces. Though she sometimes brings potential clients into her home to view her collections, several local businesses have started carrying her work and getting it out to a wider audience.
Pietra Santa winery sells miniature masks every bit as detailed as their wearable counterparts that hang from the necks of wine bottles. And recently Almanza-de Quant began fashioning the tiny masks into napkin rings that customers can buy in sets for their dining rooms. For a recent carnivale event the winery held, owner Deanna Gimelli asked Patrice Davis, the owner of Heatherfields in downtown Hollister, to open on a Sunday to sell the masks to party-goers. Davis thought Almanza-de Quant’s work was so beautiful she began carrying the masks in her home decor store, hanging them on walls, placing them on tables and using them to tie back draperies.
“They’re just so beautiful,” Davis said. “To me, they’re almost like jewelry.”
Jessica Quandt covers politics for the Free Lance. Reach her at 831-637-5566 ext. 330 or at jq*****@fr***********.com.
