Hello everyone. It’s June 19, about mid-year, and it’s our 31st anniversary. That’s right, Hope and I were married on Juneteenth, which back in 1993, we didn’t really know anything about even though we were living in Texas.
Fast forward 31 years, and we now live in Colorado, Juneteenth is a national holiday, and I spent this morning wiring up some fencing to keep our chickens from Steve McQueening over into our neighbor’s backyard to become dog snacks.
From an art perspective, 2024 has been incredible for me, personally. Last year was all about undergoing an apprenticeship of sorts. I spent about 3 months each on four different areas of art-making: abstracts, landscapes, critters, and faces/figures. From the very beginning of my attempt at painting faces & figures, I wanted to paint indigenous faces.
Why? Because on both sides of my family run long lines of indigenous folks. My mother’s ancestors were the Ngäbe-Bugle, the mesoamerican tribe that ended Columbus’ fourth (and final voyage) to the New World. They greeted him with arrows, burned his forts, and caused him to flee. Then they mounted a 400-year guerrilla war and never ceded their mountain redoubts.
On my father’s side are the mighty Haudenosaunee (you would know them as the Iroquois, which is a bit of a slur — it’s the Algonquin word that means “snakes in the grass” but we refer to ourselves as “People of the Long House”), Cayuga, specifically, with their long history of military power, strong cultural roots, and all the rest.
For most of my life, my indigineity has been the source of both pride and shame. The latter is so hard for me to talk about and admit, but I remember when I started attending schools in the predominantly American schools of the Panama Canal Zone and for the first time in my life was surrounded by pale-skinned little blonde-haired kids, who immediately gave me the nickname Indio. I have to admit that I did the best I could to fit in as a kid, and never talked about my mestizo and indio cousins as they would certainly be deemed as totally backward campesinos.
When I first moved to San Antonio TX to attend college, I started growing my hair out, to the point when I first met my wife, it was seriously long, like down my back. I later cut that hair after college to land a job, as I was advised in the Texas of the early 90s that I needed to…you guessed it…fit in.
Well, now I’m 53 and I no longer want to fit in. The hair is coming in, I’ve repierced my ears, and I’m learning Cayuga (Gayogoho:no). Also, starting in Jan 2024, I began painting faces, critters, landscapes, and abstracts with a decidedly indigenous theme.
Some of the faces were realistic, others more abstract:
The landscapes use vivid colors, and are more symbolic:
And the abstracts are certainly that:
And I’ve been painting the same raven/crow figure (it came to me in a dream) for months now:
For many tribes, the raven or crow can be a messenger of death, or of prophesy. I’m aware that some natives who see these images aren’t necessarily thrilled, but I feel like I need to paint what comes to me.
I’ve also been painting a lot of bison, not surprising, being in Colorado. They either are center stage or get snuck in there, even if they’re bison-shaped clouds!
Horses too!
Finally, I’ve been super fascinated with Indigenous Futurism – a movement in literature, visual art, comics, video games, and other media that expresses Indigenous perspectives of the future, past, and present in the context of science fiction and related sub-genres. I’m really proud of these pieces as they generally get away from archaic or antiquarian representation.
Stylistically, I’m all over the map, certainly, but I’ve been striving to stay within a certain color palette, only using a handful of brushes, and painting mostly in a square format. Additionally I’ve been very purposeful in the use of motifs – a dominate sun, stylistic feathers, face paint using four lines.
Who knows where this will go? I’m having fun, and I’m getting great feedback from folks.
