By David Sedat
I consider Henri Christopher Dunster to be one of the most accomplished artists to ever record ancient Maya architecture and sculpture. His decades of faithful devotion, many times in conditions of great physical privation and adversity, has allowed him to document many crucial Maya stelae that have since suffered erosion and erasure of their vital record of the ancient past. I think, however, that the real appeal of Henri Dunster’s extensive archive is that his exacting drawings are not the formalized, rigid, and lifeless renditions of ancient Maya art and hieroglyphic writing that appear in many academic publications, but extraordinary free hand pencil drawings that both evoke the true mystery and romance of the Maya, as well as being faithful renditions of many now obscured or lost hieroglyphic texts. In this regard, Henri Christopher Dunster perhaps follows in more than just the footsteps of the American artist Frederick Catherwood who traveled to the jungles of Central America over 150 years ago to make those masterful drawings of the ancient Maya cities lost in the jungles of Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras. When I first met Henri almost 40 years ago while I was excavating at the Maya ruins of Quirigua, Guatemala, I felt I was seeing the true spirit of Catherwood returning to evoke the grandeur and mystery of this ancient civilization. Now, with the approaching dawn of the next Great Era of the Maya Calendar on December 21, 2012 A.D., Henri’s accomplishment will be to remind us all of the timelessness of art and artists.
