Tuesday, November 25, 2003
Native American Artists Talk About Their Art. Scholder, Gorman, Bartow American Indian Artists Whose Work Will Last
NATIVE AMERICAN ARTISTS TALK ABOUT THEIR ART
Scholder, Bartow, Gorman, American Indians Whose Work Will Last
You have to be your own worst critic. Painting is very much a maturing process. This is nice, because at the end of your life you can be doing your best work. Hokusai, the great Japanese artist, on his death bed at 102, said: “If I could only have one more day, I could do a great painting. – Fritz Scholder
With luck, half a millennium from now art historians looking back at North American art made during the last half of the 20th Century, will still view the work of artists with Native American roots--painter/printmakers like Fritz Scholder, R.C..Cannon and Rick Bartow--with admiration.
Scholder and Cannon, born in the ‘30s, both died this year. Bartow, a prolific, highly regarded artist with Yurok ancestors, continues to work from his South Beach, Oregon studio near where his uncle and great-grandfather lived. The three are only a few of the “Native American artists” who have become known since 1950.
My enthusiasm for these artists may sound like the preaching of a wannabe (want-to-be-Indian) so I’ll try to explain simply why I admire their work. It boils down to their skill as artists and their strong connection to their own creativity and mine.
The eye, dedication and spirit of these three artists reminds me the monks who illumined mythological creatures for medieval religious manuscripts or the sculptor of a statue of a Venus in the days of Classical Greece. Their paintings and prints, although they are not making objects for use, also reminds me of the spirit and design skill of those thousands of anonymous craftsmen-artists who made baskets and masks regarded beyond and within tribes as treasured, beautiful objects.
As an outsider, I do not have the same connection to a dance mask as if I were the dancer or her granddaughter, but I can sense the vision of the maker and the beauty of the object. Many other Americans, whether members of tribes or not, feel a similar aesthetic connection to paintings, prints, and sculpture by artists of tribal descent, whether Navajo, Luiseno or Yurok. Indian teenagers, collectors, museum curators, all feel a connection.
I am not an artist or a collector, but a long time ago I picked up a book showing a selection of Scholder’s powerful, unromanticized prints of urban Indians. When I moved to Mexico six years ago, although I sold most of my books, I packed the Scholder book in my suitcase. I had worked in a reservation town in North Dakota and I was struck by his gaze and his prints, works of visual art that combine inner and outer vision. In 1996, Scholder who didn’t labels, told an interviewer:
Today, in our society, everyone has to contend with the media, in which they like to immediately pigeonhole you and say, “This is an expressionist, this is this type of artist, or dancer, or whatever. It’s a constant fight. All artists have to fight against what they become known for.”
I can hear you saying skeptically that maybe I kept the Scholder book as a souvenir of my experience. But I didn’t have that connection the night I went to the Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center in Portland, Oregon where Artist Rick Bartow was showing slides and talking about his work as an artist. You can find his similar explanation on the internet:
There a physicality to the paper, the sound of pastel on paper. I work standing up. That allows for good motion, so there’s a gesture in the process. If I put in a big graphite area it takes a lot to get a line erased back through that. Even when I’m painting, I get my fingers in there to do what I need to do. Mostly what I do is draw and draw and draw. I begin, I listen and I look and maybe a shadow appears.
I remember Bartow as having everything together: his art, his presentation skills, and, at long last, his life. Even if I hadn’t been sitting a few rows away hearing him talk of his struggles after the Vietnam War, I would have found his art compelling. Bartow was uniting color, the form of the animal spirits, and emotion with an intensity that took my breath away.
Unlike Scholder and Bartow, R.C. Gorman was unknown to me until I read his obituary on the internet this month (November, 2005). Gorman was a rarity, a resident of Arizona, whose death made was noted at length in The New York Times. You will recognize the names of some of the admirers of his prints capturing the brilliant light of the Southwest and statuesque grace of the Navajo women who sat for him as models. Collectors like Gregory Peck, Erma Bombeck, and artist Andy Warhol all bought Gormans. Jackie Onassis and Rosalind Carter asked to meet him.
Thanks to the internet, I was able to see Gorman prints and read what he had told interviewer Susan Rich in 1990. I was surprised to learn that when he was a young man the Navajo tribal council gave him a grant to study in Mexico City.
I went to Mexico and discovered Diego Rivera and myself. In contemporary work, I like the Mexican artists. I’m greatly influenced by the galleries and museums in Mexico City. The artists deal with the same subjects I do: their own people. . . The color is too intense for words.
There will always be at least two ways of looking at paintings and prints done by artists with tribal roots whose work is influenced by their membership in or affinity to a tribe.
One is to push the work off to the side as out of the mainstream.
The other is to realize that, in fact, the work of these artists is the mainstream, treasures without boundaries that connect us to the past and the future.
Scholder, Bartow, Gorman, American Indians Whose Work Will Last
You have to be your own worst critic. Painting is very much a maturing process. This is nice, because at the end of your life you can be doing your best work. Hokusai, the great Japanese artist, on his death bed at 102, said: “If I could only have one more day, I could do a great painting. – Fritz Scholder
With luck, half a millennium from now art historians looking back at North American art made during the last half of the 20th Century, will still view the work of artists with Native American roots--painter/printmakers like Fritz Scholder, R.C..Cannon and Rick Bartow--with admiration.
Scholder and Cannon, born in the ‘30s, both died this year. Bartow, a prolific, highly regarded artist with Yurok ancestors, continues to work from his South Beach, Oregon studio near where his uncle and great-grandfather lived. The three are only a few of the “Native American artists” who have become known since 1950.
My enthusiasm for these artists may sound like the preaching of a wannabe (want-to-be-Indian) so I’ll try to explain simply why I admire their work. It boils down to their skill as artists and their strong connection to their own creativity and mine.
The eye, dedication and spirit of these three artists reminds me the monks who illumined mythological creatures for medieval religious manuscripts or the sculptor of a statue of a Venus in the days of Classical Greece. Their paintings and prints, although they are not making objects for use, also reminds me of the spirit and design skill of those thousands of anonymous craftsmen-artists who made baskets and masks regarded beyond and within tribes as treasured, beautiful objects.
As an outsider, I do not have the same connection to a dance mask as if I were the dancer or her granddaughter, but I can sense the vision of the maker and the beauty of the object. Many other Americans, whether members of tribes or not, feel a similar aesthetic connection to paintings, prints, and sculpture by artists of tribal descent, whether Navajo, Luiseno or Yurok. Indian teenagers, collectors, museum curators, all feel a connection.
I am not an artist or a collector, but a long time ago I picked up a book showing a selection of Scholder’s powerful, unromanticized prints of urban Indians. When I moved to Mexico six years ago, although I sold most of my books, I packed the Scholder book in my suitcase. I had worked in a reservation town in North Dakota and I was struck by his gaze and his prints, works of visual art that combine inner and outer vision. In 1996, Scholder who didn’t labels, told an interviewer:
Today, in our society, everyone has to contend with the media, in which they like to immediately pigeonhole you and say, “This is an expressionist, this is this type of artist, or dancer, or whatever. It’s a constant fight. All artists have to fight against what they become known for.”
I can hear you saying skeptically that maybe I kept the Scholder book as a souvenir of my experience. But I didn’t have that connection the night I went to the Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center in Portland, Oregon where Artist Rick Bartow was showing slides and talking about his work as an artist. You can find his similar explanation on the internet:
There a physicality to the paper, the sound of pastel on paper. I work standing up. That allows for good motion, so there’s a gesture in the process. If I put in a big graphite area it takes a lot to get a line erased back through that. Even when I’m painting, I get my fingers in there to do what I need to do. Mostly what I do is draw and draw and draw. I begin, I listen and I look and maybe a shadow appears.
I remember Bartow as having everything together: his art, his presentation skills, and, at long last, his life. Even if I hadn’t been sitting a few rows away hearing him talk of his struggles after the Vietnam War, I would have found his art compelling. Bartow was uniting color, the form of the animal spirits, and emotion with an intensity that took my breath away.
Unlike Scholder and Bartow, R.C. Gorman was unknown to me until I read his obituary on the internet this month (November, 2005). Gorman was a rarity, a resident of Arizona, whose death made was noted at length in The New York Times. You will recognize the names of some of the admirers of his prints capturing the brilliant light of the Southwest and statuesque grace of the Navajo women who sat for him as models. Collectors like Gregory Peck, Erma Bombeck, and artist Andy Warhol all bought Gormans. Jackie Onassis and Rosalind Carter asked to meet him.
Thanks to the internet, I was able to see Gorman prints and read what he had told interviewer Susan Rich in 1990. I was surprised to learn that when he was a young man the Navajo tribal council gave him a grant to study in Mexico City.
I went to Mexico and discovered Diego Rivera and myself. In contemporary work, I like the Mexican artists. I’m greatly influenced by the galleries and museums in Mexico City. The artists deal with the same subjects I do: their own people. . . The color is too intense for words.
There will always be at least two ways of looking at paintings and prints done by artists with tribal roots whose work is influenced by their membership in or affinity to a tribe.
One is to push the work off to the side as out of the mainstream.
The other is to realize that, in fact, the work of these artists is the mainstream, treasures without boundaries that connect us to the past and the future.
