The Property and Gardens

The Prayer Arrow is something that you create with intention. You can either write a goal for yourself or a prayer for someone you know, or it can even be a thank you put out into the universe. Tim provides all the supplies to make the prayer arrow; a stick or branch, yarn, crystal, feathers, dried herbs and rice paper.

A great, great, grand-nephew of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Timothy Hinchliff was born an artist and poet with one foot in the wilds of nature and one foot in the garden. He began to follow a path that would train him to become a recognized Shaman-Artist in the Huichol yarn painting tradition. Timothy has guided guests at the Ranch for thirty years in creating their Prayer Arrows and Yarn Paintings on a weekly basis, enchanting each with magical stories of pathways that lead one to the doorway of personal discovery. All ages will experience the joy-filled world of imagination while creating their own yarn paintings.

We asked Mr. Castañeda how so many of his sculptures, most life-size or nearly so, came to reside at Rancho La Puerta.

“In the early ’90s,” he recalled, “Deborah and then-GM José Manuel Jasso came into my studio as I was working on Descuajaringada, a small version. Deborah looked at it very meticulously for almost half an hour. We then talked for a few minutes, and she told me that she liked it very much and wanted me to create the same one in a big-scale version (it’s the sculpture located next to the wooden swing).

“She also picked Eva and other sculptures from my gallery, and a few months later, I personally delivered them to The Ranch. That’s when I first saw this beautiful place, and it became a new source of inspiration, a before and after of my art.

“I received an invitation from Deborah to do several workshops at The Ranch and on one of those trips I felt very inspired and created one of my favorites—the sculpture Sarah. Once again, it will soon be my honor to go back to The Ranch and create a new sculpture that will complement my other pieces in the property.”

Deborah Szekely recalls that the first time she saw a Castañeda sculpture was in an estate hotel in Cuernavaca, while she and José Manuel were on a folk art buying trip throughout that region of Mexico

“We asked the hotel’s manager about these beautiful sculptures,” said Deborah, “and he told us that Mr. Castañeda lived just around the block. So—bright and early the next beautiful morning—we paid him a visit. He had dozens of maquettes on small pedestals and I knew at once we had found our man.”

From the moment you enter the front doors of The Ranch’s administration and front desk building, you touch and see Jim’s stained-glass work via a pair of “firebird” wings that share the magical dichotomy of all stained glass: beautifully worked but almost colorless on one side, and ablaze on the other. Jim was once commissioned to do a series of palace doors in Abu Dhabi—the project is considered a masterpiece of glass art—and The Ranch doors share this unbridled love of color and transformative light.

Jim’s architectural design work, drawing, painting, ironwork, and sculpture will also transport you.

His studio in the San Diego region’s mountains north of Tecate has been toured by many thousands of visitors at his annual open houses, his work featured in numerous one-man shows in museums and galleries, and his efforts to inspire understanding among Pacific Rim nations have earned international acclaim (see pacificrimparks.com).