Red Man's West

The west of the artist Andy Tsihnahjinnie is the land of his fathers domain of the Navajos. Now in his early thirties, he was born at Rough Rock, near Chinle, attended boarding school at Fort Apache and at Santa Fe Indian School, from which he was graduated in 1936. During the war he served with the Fifth Air Force in the South Pacific. His first drawings were of horses and sheep. drawn on colored rock with sandstone. He was then a young boy herding his mother's flock. His water colors, a few of which we present herein, show his intense love of that strange corner of the west where the Navajos live. He sees it in all its grandeur, in bold, vibrant colors. His people are romantic nomads, the fabric of whose lives is inextricably woven into vistas of sand and stone, canyon and cliff, sun and storm. If the artist's mission is the quest of the beautiful, Andy Tsihnahjinnie succeeds as an artist. All was beauty in the treasured land of his happy childhood. One finds that beauty in his lovely water colors, and one finds happiness there, too.... R.C.