Navajo Tribal Fair

U. S. 66 and U. S. 60, two important transcontinental highway arteries, follow their romantic ways through Navajo County.

Seek the sun's rise over the Painted Desert and marvel at the color combinations when earth and sky are woven together in the red rays of a new sun. Pause for a day or so in Monument Valley and watch the monuments therein as they change their colors all through the day and then become cathedrals of orange flame at sunset wherein the very gods of earth must worship. The Hopi pueblos themselves are beautiful etchings, aged by the changing seasons. This mountain road, lined with aspen, is truly a road to travel. If you scout around awhile you'll come to hidden places like Heber, Aripine, Clay Springs, Pinedale, and Standard, clustered among trees that were planted by the Mormon pioneers not long after the middle of last century.

And to bring your studies right up to the minute, visit Winslow and Holbrook, modern American cities, busy travel centers, right-up-to-the-minute, if you please, where everything desired by the traveler can be had.

Whatever it is that you are seeking when you travel, you'll find yourself well rewarded when you journey through one of Arizona's most interesting counties-Navajo. . . . R. C.

If your quest is beauty, you can pause in your search when you come to Navajo County.

and carry the traveler through the heart of a vast forest country.

MARTIN GAMBEE came to our land in 1936 as field artist for the Rainbow BridgeMonument Valley Expedition. He has spent three seasons here and this season he's back again with his wife and two childrentraveling the lonely trails and backroads of Northern Arizona in a car and trailer, leading the carefree life of the nomadic traveler painting as he travels, where the scenery and fancy wills. A collection of his water colors is to be shown at the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff August 2-19. That he is deserving of the critical acclaim his water colors of the Navajo country have earned for him in the East will be apparent to any Arizonan attending the exhibition.

Born in New Jersey, Mr. Gambee is a graduate of Technical High School, Buffalo, New York, and the Pratt Institute of Brooklyn. He studied painting in America under Howard Giles, Gustave Cimiotti and Eliot O'Hara and attended the Academie Julian in Paris. In France he was also a student of Andre Lhote, the French modernist. Fortunately he has had the good judgment to paint as Gambee and not to paint as a good student of a good teacher. Learning hasn't stifled his own personality and expression.

Martin Gambee says, "I always go back to my first love the Navajo country." We are concerned herein with the things he has done in the Navajo country.

Of Martin Gambee

The reverence he has for the country and the simple, friendly people who live there is portrayed in his water colors, vividly and well. When you see his things you will feel that you have met a person who understands the Navajo and Navajoland, and one whose sympathy and feeling grows out of profound understanding and respect.Too many of our own artists and art-ists visiting our state are reluctant to leave the more populous and comfort-able centers. To the artist like Martin Gambee who prefers to follow the by-ways to distant places, Arizona has rich rewards the inspiration, for in-stance, that the Navajo and his land and such places as Monument Valley, has for a person with an eye for beauty and love for the primitive and remote, for places far away.

Arizona Highways is privileged to show reproductions of some of Mr. Gambee's water colors in this issue. We offer them as a noteworthy contribution to American art and as an indication of what exciting things can happen when a sincere artist gets into the Arizona back country where the scenery bears the mark of the centur-ies and where simple people still live and die as they have always lived and died-unadorned with the more blat-ant embellishment of our own time and tempo. We repeat that Arizona is a chal-lenge to the artist. Martin Gambee, at least, has tried to accept the challenge. He shows that he values a worthy antagonist... R. C.

Painting in ARIZONA BY MARTIN GAMBEE

MY FIRST VISIT to Arizona in 1936 left me with an insatiable desire to return again and again. The results of these “artistic explorations” have been most interesting. My travels have taken me from the northern to the southern border of the state, and from East to West. The variety of scen ery to be found is amazing.Consider, for instance, the change in appear-ance of the country when driving southward from Tucson on Routes 80, 83, and 82, to Patagonia and Nogales. One suddenly leaves the flat semi-desert, which has a beauty all its own, for the rolling grass country down Patagonia way. A trip into the mountains anywhere in the state brings another kind of scenery. The artist may run the gamut of subject matter from cattle-raising to cop-per mining, with something always to beckon him onward.

I always go back to my first love, the Navajo Country. Up there, surrounding the remote little town of Kayenta, lie Black Mesa, Tsegi Canyon, the Rainbow Plateau, and Monument Valley. These are the homelands of a people whose culture and philosophy of life are in many ways superior to our own. The Navajo are a shy, dignified tribe. One may paint their home life only after patiently having earned their respect and confidence. This is as it should be. The idea entertained by visitors to an Indian Reservation, who regard the people as so many caged specimens to be photographed or observed at will, is quite as intolerable as the idea that we ourselves would like to be followed about by a group of tourists armed with cameras and flash-bulbs with which to pry into our private lives.

Traveling alone among the Indians has brought me many interesting and unusual experiences. One day, as I was finishing a sketch of some men building a summer hogan, they came over and sat down in a circle around me. The spokesman, one of the leaders of the clan, addressed me in English, saying, "We Indians pull our whiskers out with tweezers so we don't have to shave. We could do the same for you."

I was aware of this custom, and anyone who has been on the reservation may have noticed an Indian sitting idly on a horse pulling out his whiskers with a piece of spring brass bent double to form tweezers. My several days growth of beard began to look to me like anything but an asset, so I replied.

"Yes, I know, but I really don't mind shaving. In fact, I rather enjoy it!