AN ARTIST IN NAVAJOLAND

an artist in avajoland

Navajoland has been a mighty magnet that has attracted artists for several generations, each artist in his own way trying to capture the harsh, brilliant beauty of the land of the Diné, struggling, often hopelessly, to translate on canvas the brilliant light on sand and slick rock, an effervescent light, forever changing, whose mercurial qualities are a formidable challenge even to the most disciplined brush, the most discerning artist's eye.

This is the land of the Navajos, a land in which they and only they belong. A poet once wrote, "The White man is out of place / In this land..." Charlie Russell, one of America's foremost artists in his or any other time, after a visit to Navajoland, wrote to a friend, "The Navvys are picture-book people." Such an evaluation, coming from an artist who derived some of his greatest art inspiration from the Flathead, Arapaho, Kootenai, Blackfeet and Crow tribes of his long-time stamping grounds, Montana Territory, is, indeed, high artist praise. As so many artists have learned, the Navajos are truly "picture-book" people.

One artist, who found in the Navajos inspiration for some of his greatest art creations, was the Swedish artist, Carl Oscar Borg. He had roamed the world with an artist's eye and poet's soul, recording with discernment and understanding the beauty he found in his travels. Around 1917 he discovered Navajoland, and a love affair between artist and subject lasted for nearly thirty years. It is interesting to note in Albin Widen's Carl Oscar Borg, published by Nordisk Rotogravyer, Stockholm, Sweden, 1953, the illustrations presented, obviously considered the best of his work, feature his penetrating and understanding studies of the Navajos and the Hopis.

The list of artists who have found inspiration in Navajoland would be endless. To name just a few: W. R. Leigh, Leon Gaspard, Brown L. McGrew, Poko Petek, Frank Tenney Johnson, Olaf Weighorst, Gerard Delano, Ross Stefan, and the great E. A. Burbank, some of whose finest works are preserved forever in the Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site at Ganado. Jimmie Swinnerton, in his time one of the most successful cartoonists in American journalism, to get away from the tensions of a busy and demanding commercial life, wandered into Navajoland, and the resultant landscapes he produced will be cherished and admired as long as men value and appreciate fine art.

Ted DeGrazia, the Tucson artist whose reputation is ever-expanding and whose art is featured herein, owes much to the Navajos and their land not only for his artistic maturity but for his status as a successful artist. His love affair with Navajoland is best told in his own words: "My first trip to the Navajo reservation," he says, "took place in the late 1930's. I had spent most of my life in Greenlee, Cochise and Pima Counties and had always been interested in Indians the Pimas, Papagos, Apaches and Yaquis. I had always considered them my neighbors and friends. That first trip to the land of the Navajos, some thirty years ago, was a revelation to me, almost as if I had discovered a new world. I was driving a beaten-down old junk heap that would not merit the name of 'jalopy' and the roads, such as they were, were mainly wagon tracks in the sand. There were no speed records made on that first trip. But each mile, as we jogged slowly and wheezingly along, was a revealing mile. The high plateau country was a palette of color, all shades of red and gold, burned by a bright sun that glowed out of the brightest blue sky I have ever seen.

I thought at first I was in an empty land an empty land as far as people were concerned. Then occasionally I would come upon a couple of Navajo children herding their sheep, a solitary Navajo rider, and every now and then, a Navajo trading post. It is in the trading posts that I came to know the Navajos best. I have spent hours in trading posts, many of them so isolated you could not find them on a map. The trading post was then, as it still is in isolated parts of the reservation, a social center. The Indians would travel miles to bring in their wool and buy or trade for the necessities of life. And meet old friends. It was a pleasure to watch old friends meet at the trading post. Their soft voices their dignified and gracious approach to each other and their gentle manner in shaking hands. When the whites shake hands they do so as if they were pumping water out of a well. The Navajo handclasp is just a soft brushing of the hands, each reluctant to show undue strength to the other. I learned much, and much I admired, just from watching Navajos in far-flung trading posts in which I have had the pleasure of spending many rewarding hours.As the Indians say, many moons have passed since I made my first trip into the land of the Navajos. Their world is a remote world from mine. I do not know how many trips I have made into their land since that first trip in the late 30's. Sometimes as an artist, sometimes just to find peace and tranquillity that the Navajos and their land seem to offer to me. Now the wagon tracks I first knew are hard-surfaced highways sleek and slick and fast. The pickup truck is replacing the covered wagon. This, they tell me, is progress. Is a way of life, which I have found simple and noble at the same time, disappearing? I reconcile myself with the knowledge it is a big land. Navajo life, as I knew it, will survive in those remote areas and artists of today, and artists of tomorrow will be rewarded by their efforts to seek out the remote and faraway places in the land of the Navajos.

In this color portfolio we would like to call your attention to our double-page spread: "Navajo Night Chant" is one of a group of studies in oil that DeGrazia has painted to capture the Navajo way of life, a way of life he feels is fast disappearing. "The vanishing American," he has said, "did not vanish before the onslaught of the U. S. Cavalry, but is vanishing before the influence of the white man's civilization. All over the Southwest our Indians are changing. Call it progress, if you will, to bring the Indian a better way of life. But it saddens me when I see a jukebox in a Hopi trading post, and it saddens me to learn a mammoth super-market is being built at Window Rock, capital of the Navajo Nation. The Apaches, the Papagos, the Pimas, the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico they are all changing. If God gives me the strength and time, I hope to capture on canvas what vestiges of the old and more colorful ways of the life of our Indians that still exist.Few artists are as well equipped for such an ambitious task. He understands and loves the Indians, and that love and understanding shows in his work. The painting "Navajo Night Chant" was inspired at a "sing" DeGrazia once attended near Chinle on the Navajo Reservation in Northeastern Arizona. (A "sing," it should be explained, is a healing ceremony or ritual practiced by the Navajos.) Hundreds of Navajos had gathered to attend a "sing" for a sick man. When the medicine man had finished his rites, the Navajos rode through the starlit night chanting songs of glorious things past and of glorious things to come.... R.C.