Published September 1, 2025

By Susan Page

Ceramic artist Ángel Ortiz Gabriel has been creating traditional ceramics for more than sixty years in the historic pottery town, Tonalá, Jalisco. His highly refined brushwork results in stunning works of art that retain and expand upon revered Tonalá designs. He values tradition and has revived ideas from the thirties that had actually disappeared from his village, such as a varied palette behind the scenes he paints, and different subject matter in his narrative works.

When Angel Ortiz was a teenager, he was determined to go to college and asked everyone in his family for financial aid. They all wanted to help, but no one could. One day his mother lovingly put a lump of clay in front of him and said, “This will be your education.” “It was the best thing she could have done,” he said. “I have never regretted taking her advice.”

Angel’s grandparents were traditional potters in Tonalá, Jalisco, where villagers had been creating pottery for thousands of years. Angel began working with them, learning his craft the same way most folk artists do, the skills and traditions being handed down from one generation to the next. Angel loved the work and was both ambitious and creative. He refined his skills for a time under the legendary potter, Jorge Wilmont, and began moving beyond the concept of the well-crafted functional work to creating decorative works of art.

Today, working in Tonala, Jalisco, he has been making pots for more than fifty years and is one of the most skilled potters working anywhere in Mexico. To his great delight, his own son, also named Angel, has learned from his father and is equally skilled and enthusiastic about clay.

When Angel senior began working in the sixties, most potters also owned land and spent half of their time working in the fields, so what they depicted in the paintings on their pots were scenes from their daily lives: farmers gathering fire wood, feeding chickens, riding burros, plowing fields, or taking a siesta under a cactus. Today, Tonala has expanded so much that there is no more land around the town, and potters work full time at their art. Said Angel junior: “I paint the scenes I learned from my father, but I have never lived the life that I paint.”

Since Galeria Atotonilco has been collecting Angel Ortiz pottery for twenty years, the gallery has possibly the finest selection of their work anywhere, even in Ortiz’s own studio, where, at any given time, they may have very few pieces on hand.

Galeria Atotonilco is widely considered to be the finest collection of Mexican Folk Art for sale in all of Mexico. The gallery is five miles north of town, open every day, 11 to 4. For directions: Galeriaatotonilco.com

Open 6 days 11am to 4pm. Closed Sunday

with no appointment necessary!

The Best Mexican Folk Art Available Today