Papago

Papago weavers have found the split stitch faster and more commercial, this making their baskets less expensive for the tourist trade. Yucca and martyne are the most popular materials.

BASKETRY

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JERRY JACKA

THE ART OF WILLIAM WHITAKER

It is one thing for an artist to please a particular group of lay viewers and collectors. For an artist to earn the esteem and respect of his peers is something else.

Since the ARIZONA HIGHWAYS April, 1974, debut of William Whitaker's beautiful Indians, laymen, collectors, artists, gallery owners and Indians praise his talent and seek his work.

William Whitaker was born in Chicago in 1943. When he was very young, his father retired from a successful commercial art business and moved the family to California to concentrate on painting.

Later, they moved to Utah and spent the winters in Carmel, California.

He grew up in the Wasatch and Uinta Mountains among the Indians, cattle and horses. At the age of six he started painting with oils and continued under the tutelage of his father until he entered the Univer-sity of Utah as an early admission student.

While at the University he studied art under Alvin Gittins. Later on he studied at the Otis Art Institute under Charles White. He also has a degree in marketing and has worked as a free lance illustrator, film director, custom interior designer, copy writer and portrait painter.

Whitaker spent two and a half years in Germany for the Mormon Church, mainly directing foreign language film dubbing and designing film graphics.

His awards include one from the Utah Institute of Fine Arts and one from the Springerville, Utah Annual National Invitational Show. The illustrations reproduced in this issue represent various mediums including oils on canvas and special Conté crayon, pastel and chalk technique, courtesy O'Brien's Art Emporium, Scottsdale, Arizona, and Blair Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico.