APACHE MYSTERY.

APACHE  MYSTERY.
(A painting that shape-shifted.)

There's another indigenous portrait i intended to include in a recent post dedicated to the people of Standing Rock.  However, i wasn't able to retrieve it from the folder due to lack of a code number and how to resolve that.  So i rephotographed the painting till i got a presentable image to feature in this post.

Actually two images, the completed painting plus a print of an earlier stage on the same canvas, which is the only record of what i set out to do.  That image now under further layers of paint, as, in modifying details it took on another life of its own and went through a radical transformation, simultaneously gaining something and losing something in the process, which i hope to show chronologically.

        

It was originally based on a 19th century photo of an Apache woman in a book called The Spirit of Indian Women, a collection of photo portraits from that period.  I chose to study this image because of the depth of experience clearly apparent in the face, and having read some remaining documentation about her life.  So i'd like to think i can preserve a record of this earlier stage of the painting.                

                     

To express in paint proved to be continually elusive and comes nowhere near the presence in the photo.  Involving hours of concentration and imaginative empathy with the mystery of the life of the subject.  It came to feel like a ritual of healing, not only of this woman, but universally, through art, acknowledging in spirit what indigenous people have been subjected to for 500 hundred years and still continuing in the present.

There can come a point after a long intense contemplation of subtleties of a face, when its actual essence eludes you completely, and no matter what minor adjustments are made, it seems to morph into something other, subjectively as slippery as a fish, and that's exactly what happened.  Gender and age become ambiguous, proportions questionable, light and shadow needing endless adjustment, and eyes reflect even the slightest modification.

I stayed with the process for many long hours and sessions, not knowing where it was going or if it would arrive satisfactorily.  Even resorting to a magnifying glass momentarily when anomalies in the weave of the canvas made it problematic to apply a blemish-free brush stroke to crucial areas of the face.  Sometimes difficult to discern a textural shadow from a painted one, and the slightest tone change makes a huge difference for better or worse.  A face is very challenging because we are biologically attuned to reading faces.

A superimposition of faces and races, a microcosm of the macrocosm, blending as unity in diversity.  A mere microscopic metaphor hopefully harmonizing and healing the pains of polarization.  A further footnote to feet on the ground and tribute to all souls at Standing Rock, and everywhere indigenous to earth and beyond.  Painting as prayer.  Apache Mystery, painted November 2008.  With diligent care that the goodness of human-heartedness radiate and shine through. < 

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             Martin Rainbowmaker