Today, I’m staying away from facetious.
Nope, didn’t have a ghost of Christmas future visit and tell me I am being a thorn in some universal toes. But sometimes, there’s stuff you see and it’s…thought-provoking. And when that happens, I guess there really isn’t a venue to get creative with digs.
Whaling Your Wintertime Blues
‘Cause, if you are anything like me, faced with a truly fine works of modern Native American artists, you had probably felt as if you had stepped into a world where nature and civilization, mundane and preternatural coalesce into a seamless, somewhat psychedelic whole. The technique
is oftentimes fairly abstract bordering on impressionistic, though just as common is neosurrealism, every line drawn just so, every expression brought out into a nearly phantasmagoric relief.
And it works! But to me, it is an unfettered, nearly childlike whimsy inherent in this first technique that truly captures the essence of Native American art. And never is it so apparent as in the works of Joanne Swanson, an Alaskan native of the Inupiaq Eskimo descent. Her paintings breathe life, and wild, politically incorrect beauty, and the exoticism so sadly missing for those of us firmly planted in this one, 21st century, world. Which isn’t so bad. I like TV, and the net, and, most importantly, indoor plumbing. But looking at her works, it just isn’t altogether Joanne.
Like her Bowhead Whaling, dragging us kicking and screaming into a celebration, one, in the normal run of things we probably would never have joined on our own. Slaugthering a whale? A member of an endangered species? Certainly not something we could admit getting behind of – and respect ourselves in the morning as enlightened Renaissance women or men. But the Whaling, well, it depicts the world as it used to be, a harsh, touch-and-go place, in which collaboration, and tribal unity, and the skill with row and spear make all the difference between slow Cimmerian starvation and a mellow winter full of hot savory dishes and light from copious whale fat being burned. Looked at it this way, a cause enough for brrr!, canonizing a hunter – and precisely what Native American paintings are all about, insidiously making us rethink the status quo.
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