ACTIVITY
Jesús García Mainar took an interest in joinery and ceramics as of an early age. His desire to learn to weave from the last weaver of the province still using a loom in an annex to the Museum of Arts in Serralbo in El Puente… de Sabiñánigo led him to settle in that area. He built a loom with his partner and they worked as weavers alongside the master weaver Rufino Planas.
In 1986 he and others launched a project to rebuild and repopulate three publicly owned deserted villages that had been made over to the association Artiborain. The project is still going on today in the villages of Aineto, Solanilla, Ibort and Artosilla within the municipality of Sabiñánigo in Huesca province. One of the project’s key criteria was and remains rebuilding with respect for the area’s traditional building, maintaining the volumes and forms and the techniques and materials used of old. Another project criterion was and continues to be working with earth in a traditional, eco-friendly and natural way.
The features of folk construction in this area may be summed up as follows: bearing walls built with local stone using mud as mortar, solid timber floors and roof structures of wooden beams covered with boards or planks and then stone slabs, renders with lime mortars, lime sandstone for dividing walls and fireplaces, pebble paving indoors and in courtyards, local plaster finishes for interiors and exteriors, etc.
Worth noting is one feature distinctive of the area: stone-slab roofs. Stones for this purpose are extracted from old quarries and dressed by the builders themselves. They are then laid on roof slopes consisting of wooden boards secured with mud. Traditional builders complain that recent regulations require them to fit unnecessary waterproofing that undermines the building system, causing the slabs to slip.
TRAINING
At the age of 17 Jesús took a nine-month course in what was then known as Accelerated Vocational Training in cabinetmaking, leading him to make his first pieces of furniture.
Later he started teaching himself ceramics and pottery with a foot-operated or electric potter’s wheel following… inspiring visits to the last active potters in the provinces of Huesca, Zaragoza and Teruel. This prompted him to work for some years in a workshop which he shared with Juan Antonio Jiménez, a friend and an accomplished ceramist.
In building and construction, his school has been the village where he lives: Artosilla. His early masters were two elderly piquero stonemasons with whom he worked for a few months before they retired. He then learnt from working on his own, always experimenting and being adventurous. He also learnt from closely observing the ruined buildings in the local villages and their process of dereliction while also reading widely on these fields.
TEACHING
His children continue their father’s craft and he has taught at local trade schools and the Workshops on Traditional and Sustainable Building held at Graus in Huesca province.
SELECTED WORK
Over a decade, through the Amigos de Serrablo association, they restored the roofs of a set of Mozarabic and Romanesque churches, some dating from the 10th and 11th centuries, such as the Church of San Pedro in Lárrede, those of Satué and Ordovés and of… San Juan in Espierre, the Chapel of San Ramón in Belarra, the Church of Allué, etc. With the O Zoque association they also restored the Churches of San Ginés in Espín and of Yebra de Basa, the Chapel of Santa María and the Church of Santa Orosia del Puerto, the latter with over 600 m2 of slab roofing.
