Nicolás de Jesús is a native of Ameyaltepec, a small village that stands high above the Rio Balsas in the Mexican state of Guerrero. The region, called the Mezcala, is one of Mexico's main centers of indigenous Nahua-speaking people. It is also home to villages where many Nahua folk artists work. Their best known work is paintings and drawings on "amate, " or bark, paper, that is hand-made in a village in the state of Puebla. Today, Nicolás is one of the leading artists of the school of Ameyaltepec.

Nicolás comes from a family of distinguished artists who were the founders of the school. The story began in 1962 when folk art dealer Max Kerlow asked an itinerant artist from Ameyaltepec, Pedro de Jesús (Nicolás's uncle), to paint some wooden figures he had in the store. Merchants from this small village had been traveling up to Mexico City since the 1930s selling such wares as painted pottery and figurines made in the villages of the "Alto Balsas" region. The objects were carried over rough dirt roads on the backs of burros, with plenty of breakage en route. Painting styles were colorful, decorative, featuring fantasy animal figures, some non-realistic humans and plenty of floral and geometric designs.

Perhaps there was something better. Pedro did well, the pay was good, so he asked his village neighbor, Cristino Flores Medina to come and help. Both worked in the back of Kerlow's store for a while. That is when amate came onto the scene. It is bark paper, the technique for which dates to Pre-Columbian days. Once it had been used for codices, illustrated manuscripts of which a few remain, but over the years the craft had been lost ... save in one place. That was the village of San Pablito Pahuatlan in Puebla where Otomí people still made it. Amate is the bark of either the mulberry or fig trees, the first producing white paper, the latter a dark one. Making amate is a laborious process involving boiling the bark and pounding it with stones. Naturally, taking such labor implies that it was made into cutouts, used for ceremonial purposes, non-Christian ones at that. However, the modern Otomí, did not paint on it, unlike their ancestors. Artist Felipe Ehrenberg knew about the paper and its history. He suggested that Pablo and Cristino might try using it as a medium for painting. It proved to be the better way.

The artists of Ameyaltepec now claim Ehrenberg as the stimulus for their school. He taught Pedro and Pablo de Jesús (Nicolás's father), Cristino and others how to paint on bark paper. Later, Nicolás learned etching and other techniques from the same teacher. It was an instant success, and today there are hundreds of artists turning out amate paintings. The demand for bark paper is so great that many trees in San Pablito have been stripped, leading to a serious shortage. Many are not high quality, but the best artists, such as the gifted Nicolás, produce stunning work. Paintings range from personal dreams, folk rituals stemming from mixtures of European and Indian ideas, pastoral themes, political protest, and millenarian visions. And the styles have changed over time. Originally, the paintings resembled pottery painting with floating figures. By the mid and late 1960s styles had developed into landscapes, and village scenes that have become familiar. Soon the Ameyaltepec artists began teaching artists in surrounding villages, hence the many painters. Each village has evolved its own style, so that San Augustin Oapan, Maxele, Xalitla, and Ameyaltepec are distinctive. All are extremely interesting, deeply evocative of the lives of these villagers.

Nicolás de Jesús has been internationally known since the later 1980s with showings in museums and galleries across the United States and in Europe. He has travelled extensively and lived for several years in Chicago where he worked with other artists in a graphic arts collective. There, he perfected his own etching techniques and has produced several memorable series of lithographs about life in his home village and his experiences as a Nahua artists living in a large American city.