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SPRINGFIELD — After eight years, Jack Osbun still doesn't drink the water.

But the retired Wittenberg University art professor knows a thing or two about risk — he regularly drives his car into Mexico.

"Your insurance isn't any good," Osbun explained. "You have to buy Mexican insurance."

But drive he must — it's the only way to smuggle a minivan full of paintings from his home in Springfield to his studio in San Miguel de Allende and back.

Osbun started living and painting in Mexico part time when he retired from Witt in 2000.

South of the border, he's found a culture receptive to art.

"Part of it is the recognition that art is an important part of human activity," he said. "I discovered Mexicans are very supportive of artists in a way Americans aren't. If you're an artist in the United States, you're sort of sneered at."

Since being in Mexico, his work has become influenced by his surroundings, from the religion (a series of paintings inspired by the Virgin Mary) and the holidays (a study of skulls in honor of Day of the Dead) to folk art (a series devoted to mermaids, which appear frequently in Mexican folk art).

He also has started to paint landscapes based on what he sees on the short walk from his studio to his home in San Miguel.

"Some very strange things happen at dusk," he said, noting that San Miguel is 6,000 feet above sea level. "The colors change. The blues all of a sudden become purple.

"I came to realize I was seeing space differently. Homes are not built with yards around them."

For Osbun, who joined Wittenberg in 1966 and just turned 70, retiring to Mexico "seemed like the right thing to do.

"I really like the culture and the people," he said.

For starters, he married a Mexican woman, Magdalena, whom he met as a student.

In 1960, as an art student at Ohio State University, Osbun received a scholarship to conduct a year of graduate work at the Instituto Allende in San Miguel.

There, he met his future wife working at a lunch counter.

A childhood interest in archeology and ancient cultures led him to Mexico in the first place.

"I visited all of the sites I could, and absorbed as much of the culture I could," he said.

Nevermind the fact that he didn't speak Spanish.

His Spanish has only slightly improved.

"I can get along," he said. "I still have nightmares about standing in front of a Spanish-speaking audience and giving a lecture."

That shouldn't be a problem — admittedly, Osbun isn't a real social person, and his Mexican work has gone "largely unseen."

The work, however, will be exhibited locally at the Springfield Museum of Art in August 2009.

But dividing his time between the U.S. and Mexico has given Osbun a sense of the differences between the two countries.

Many Americans, he's found, don't understand the light-hearted holiday Dia de los Muertos — Day of the Dead — or his paintings of human skulls.

"To Mexicans, it's the recognition of death being just another passage," he said. "Americans can't relate to that. For Americans, the idea of death is a very negative thing."

And then there's the fear.

"I have one sister-in-law who says I dare not cross the border at Laredo because she hears all sorts of stories about kidnapping and murders, " he said.

But nobody ever said art was completely risk-free — and besides, he's got Mexican insurance.

Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0352 or amcginn@coxohio.com.

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