El cuadro trampa de los venados

The back is inscribed and signed: "El cuadro trampa de los venados hecho por Santos Motoaopohua de la Torre y familia" (The deer-trap picture, made by Santos Motoaopohua de la Torre and family).

Two deer and two candles are set around a disc at its center. In the Ruta Wixárika guide of Mexico's Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH), candles are "Elemento ritual básico. Representan la luz del Sol y la conexión con las deidades" (a basic ritual element. They represent the light of the Sun and the connection with the deities), and they are lit as offerings at the sacred sites.

Juan Negrín, who with Yvonne Negrín founded the Centro de Investigación Wixárika and worked with the Wixárika people from 1970, writes that the word nierika “viene del verbo ver, nieriya” (comes from the verb to see, nieriya), and that a nierika is “un punto focal donde nuestros antepasados concentran sus energías para revelarse e instruir al devoto” (a focal point where our ancestors gather their energies to reveal themselves and instruct the devotee). He counts the deer snare among them: “Un nierika primordial es la trampa de lazos, winiyeri, en la que el venado se sacrificaba al cazador disciplinado que lo tendía por su vereda entre unos árboles, cuando era más abundante” (a primordial nierika is the snare of cords, winiyeri, in which the deer sacrificed itself to the disciplined hunter who set it along its trail between some trees, when deer were more plentiful).

In The Shaman's Mirror (2012), Hope MacLean asked the artist and shaman Eligio Carrillo Vicente about a design of "one or two deer, either by themselves or facing a design of a circle or concentric circles with a toothed circle around it", and he said the painting was a promise to keep leaving "offerings of arrows, blood collected from sacrificed animals, candles, and sacred fire or copal incense." He called the design in the middle the deer's comedero (feeding trough): "It is a candle, a plate full of candles."