Tuesday Morning Sun

Tuesday Morning Sun, 10x10

This painting, and the one I made with it, Morning Majesty, come easily to me, which is always a joy. It is a cold morning, frosty even, and I find a place to pull off the main road, a place I haven't seen before, though I look every day. 

When I paint back east, people always honk at me, and often shout at me. This is worst in New England and New York, but it happens pretty much everywhere in the east. 

Here, on the reservation, no one does this, and I am thankful. I will be painting, focusing hard on what I'm doing, and in the best of times, the real world sort of falls away, and it is me and the painting. Then some idiot comes along and feels he has to honk and yell at me. I have often jumped so hard that I've smeared the painting. And it always pulls me out of the painting, out of the zone. 

Several Navajos have come up to talk with me while I've been painting on the reservation, but they have approached me quietly, and asked if it was OK to talk and to look. This happens on the Eastern Shore, too, and I do appreciate it. 

Here are my two paintings in the landscape

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 Around the Region

Matthew Bia works the desk at the Microtel in Gallup where I stay during my time painting on the reservation. He is a nice guy, who answers a lot of my questions, and is interested in my painting. He says that he and the staff at the Microtel work seven days a week, just to make ends meet. Below, Historic Route 66, near the hotel where I stay. Hotels and gas stations and convenience stores line up on Route 66 west of Gallup. There's a strange 7- or 8-mile gap between the commercial area on the west side, and old, downtown Gallup to the east. 

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Saw this guy riding, out on the reservation, and, as you can see, walking up the hills. 

I love this small metal building, gray as the February trees that surround it.

On a day when the wind makes me stop painting, in the Petrified Forest, I drive into the

 non-national-park area of the Painted Desert, on the way to Keam's Canyon.

Here's my van, about halfway through the trip. 

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Dog of the Day

Saw this mastiff at the show in Tubac. He was sweet, but very slobbery! 

Back to Window Rock

Window Rock Again, 10x10

I go back to Window Rock on Sunday, and make this 10x10 of Window Rock. It's windy this afternoon, but I'm able to position the van to block most of the wind. 

I have been hoping to go back and paint there a third time, but between the people working at the Navajo Nation, and the days of even stronger wind than Sunday, I don't make it back. 

Still, I have made two nice plein-air pieces, and taken a whole lot of photographs, and I think I will paint Window Rock again when I get back to Wachapreague. 

My painting in the landscape

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Here's another view, earlier in the day.

 

Horses on the way to Ganado. 

The Ganado Wash is an occasional river that runs near the Hubbell Trading Post in Ganado. 

In  1851, the US government established Fort Defiance, to have a military presence on the Navajo reservation. The fort was built on valuable grazing land, and the government kicked the Navajo off of it. Fighting followed, and in 1864, the US government forced the Navajo people from their reservation. They were made to walk, at gunpoint, to Fort Sumter in eastern New Mexico. 

When they returned in 1868, they found their herds gone, their homes ruined, their fields destroyed. Trading became more important than ever. 

The Hubbell Trading Post introduced Navajos to items like flour, sugar and coffee, and the Navajos brought wool and sheep, jewelry and rugs, baskets and pottery to trade. 

Those items are still for sale at the trading post, along with sodas and candy, postcards and books. There's amazing stuff to see, to touch and to buy, as well as exhibits, demonstrations and more. The Hubbell Trading post is the oldest continuously operating trading post on the Navajo Nation. 

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Dog of the Day

This sweet, shy girl was hanging around the Hubbell Trading Post in Ganado.

 She was very hungry, but too scared to get too near me.  

Morning Majesty

Morning Majesty

Oil on canvas, 10x10

The amazing castle-like rocks surrounding Fort Defiance take my breath away every day. I find a good place and set up to paint two canvases, one focusing on the north portion of the rock formation, the other on the south portion. I'll show you the painting in the landscape when I post the second of the paintings. 

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AS I WRITE THIS, I am holed up in a hotel in Tucumcari, NM. It is snowing and sleeting outside, and the driving is dangerous. I will stay here until the weather clears up. And while it's a pain to be stuck inside, and not painting, it's fine. I'm safe and sound, and that's what matters.

Here at the edge of New Mexico, I realize that part of me misses the beauty and power of the landscapes around the reservation, but another part of me is glad to be gone. 

My sense of not fitting and not understanding is part of it. The Navajo culture is completely different from the Anglo culture, and I saw and felt it up close while I was on the reservation. 

A woman I spoke with late in my time there helped me understand a little. She has spent time away from the reservation, though she is living there now. So she has some perspective, and she has asked herself some of the same questions I asked her. 

In short, she says, traditional Navajo don't do anything that's not necessary. That could be as simple as not saying hello, or not smiling to a stranger, or it could be something as visible as not picking up the trash that's blowing around in the yard. If it is not necessary for survival, she says, it is not done. 

She also helps shed some light on the dogs. This is the issue that, more than any other, makes me glad to be away from the reservation.

When we lived there, my dad says, the government would round up and shoot the stray dogs once or twice a year. Articles I've read about dogs on the reservation (here's one from the Huffington Post, and here's a 2011 article from American Indian Report) say that the problem persists. 

And I see, instantly, that it does. I pull up to a convenience store, and three dogs approach me, looking for food. They approach everyone. I take photos and send them to Peter, and I find myself crying about the dogs, homeless and hungry. Peter urges me to look at the dogs, really look at them, and see that, in fact, they aren't starving. 

And he is right. At least the ones at the gas station aren't starving. But I find one out near Navajo, NM, where I am painting. She has just had pups, she is thin and sinewy, her teats are swollen and one looks infected. I feed her. Feed her a lot. I find another on a back road in Fort Defiance, and his bones are visible through his skin. I feed another on the main road from Gallup, one I've seen sitting by the side of the road for three days in a row. He runs off when I approach, but I see him eating as I drive away. 

The woman I speak with late in my trip says that she believes that most of these dogs are indeed owned by Navajo families, and are allowed to run free. A friend reminds me that there is some beauty in this. And she's right, I know. Peter is right, too. 

After days of anguish, I stop worrying. It is not my problem to fix. But on the day I leave, I see three dead dogs, two on the road and one at the convenience store. At least, I think he is dead, and I don't stick around to find out. 

Veterinarians are few and far between on the reservation. Veterinary care, I know, is expensive. And certainly, there are more pressing problems in the Navajo Nation - but none that is quite so visible. 

The woman I speak with reminds me that you don't see homeless people on the reservation, and that it is certainly better that the dogs are homeless. 

I agree. I understand that I am sort of a dog nut. I know I am. So this issue is one that might not touch most people the way it touched me, reducing me to tears again and again. If I could have taken all the dogs I saw with me, I would have. But I remind myself again and again and again, that this is a cultural difference, and while it is a problem, it is not my problem. 

I will help in a way I can, dedicating a portion of my earnings this year to helping ease the dog situation on the reservation. If you'd like to help, too, you can find out more here about groups that work to help ease this situation. 

Here is the lone vet I found on the reservation. I visited three times, and called twice, and was never able to rouse anyone. But it looks like this vet has a pretty amazing mobile unit, below. 

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 These cows, above and below, were just hanging around in someone's yard,

 early on a Monday morning. 

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Dogs of the Day

 These are some of the dogs I fed at the convenience store. 

Blue Mesa

Blue Mesa

Oil on canvas, 16x16

The Petrified Forest and Painted Desert national parks are connected, and seem to me to be one park. 

The Painted Desert National Park lies north of I-40; the Petrified Forest, south of I-40. They're about an west of  Gallup, NM, and an hour east of Holbrook, AZ. 

The latter was set aside as a national monument in 1906, to preserve and protect the petrified wood found there. People have picked up and taken away innumerable pieces of petrified wood; you can buy it at dozens of shops near the park. 

Petrified wood is nearly 100 percent quartz, according to the National Park Service.  More than 200 million years ago, logs washed into rivers and were buried so fast and so deep by sediment and debris in the water that oxygen was cut off to them, and their decay was slowed. Minerals absorbed into the wood over hundreds of centuries crystallized, replacing the organic material of the wood, as it broke down slowly over time. 

Where there were cracks in the logs, clear quartz, amethyst, citrine and smokey quartz formed, the Park Service says. 

Painted Desert National Park is just a portion of the Painted Desert, which stretches from the Grand Canyon to the Petrified Forest. Much of it is within the Navajo reservation. The stripes and striations of the Painted Desert are layers of siltstone, mudstone and shale, fine-grained rocks that erode easily. Iron and manganese compounds which provide the pigments for the layers. 

All that being said, these places are just amazing, otherworldly, vivid, stunning. 

Also, they are windy. I am about halfway done with this painting when it becomes utterly impossible to finish. I pack up and head out, and finish the painting later, in the hotel. 

Here are more photos: 

And, in the Painted Desert outside of the park, a lone cow grazes, in spite of the wind. 

It is hard to tell, but this is a herd of wild horses. 

At the edge of the Painted Desert

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Dog of the Day

Painted Desert

Painted Desert

Oil on canvas, 10x10

Feeling out of step on the reservation, I decide to drive an hour or so west of Gallup and visit the Painted Desert and Petrified Forest. I've visited these places before, and I know how beautiful and alien they are. 

I also know how difficult it is to paint these rock and sand formations. I remember struggling, three years ago, to paint them in a way that worked. 

So one of the very best parts of this trip is finding that I've learned - or figured out - how to do it! That is a joyful, thrilling discovery. 

The hundreds of paintings I've made between then and now, the hundreds of mountains I've painted, the thousands of hours of thought and study and exploration and discovery and failure and success, all these have brought me an ease and a confidence that I never imagined I'd have. 

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Around the Region

All along Interstate 40, from Holbrook, Arizona, to Gallup - and perhaps beyond? - I see Indian stores, selling everything from blankets to kachina dolls to fossils to petrified wood to turquoise jewelry. This sign made me laugh. 

A beautiful afternoon. The sky goes on forever here.

I see trailers like these, out in the middle of absolutely nowhere, and I wonder what it would be like to live there. I can only imagine that the people who live in these places run cattle or sheep or something - there's no way they are commuting to a job. Maybe they're just living off the land. They have no neighbors, no fences, no towns anywhere nearby. I can imagine that the nights must be unutterably dark, the sky brilliant with stars.

 These are the first red hills that you see, from the highway, heading west toward the Painted Desert and Petrified Forest.

Above, the view from one of the overlooks in the Painted Desert. Below,

 an overlook in the Petrified Forest

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Dog of the Day

It's Meeka, and she's visiting the Painted Desert with her humans, from California. She reminds me very much of my Jojo, minus a white streak on her nose. Also, Meeka has brown eyes, and Jojo's are blue. But the ears are the same, the nose is the same, the I'm-a-handful-attitude is the same! 

Outside Steamboat

Outside Steamboat

Oil on canvas, 10x10

The drive from Fort Defiance to Ganado takes about 30 minutes. About 40 minutes past Ganado, you arrive in Steamboat, Arizona. 

In 2010, according to the Census, there were 56 households in Steamboat, and nearly 300 people. The median yearly income was $9,276. There is a gas station/convenience store, a place that appears to fix cars and other machines, a church and some houses. 

Steamboat's page on the Navajo Nations Chapter website says that the town's Navajo name, Hoyee, means "State of Fright." The site says that there is a V-shaped canyon there, with an overhanging cliff and a spring at the convergence. The spring was a place where travelers could get water, but locals were afraid of being ambushed if they got water there. "Steamboat" comes from a rock formation that supposedly looks like a steamboat. 

The town fascinates me because I can't imagine living there. But Wachapreague - where we live, on the Eastern Shore of Virginia - is not that different! Same general size, though Wachapreague has a grid pattern to the streets, a town green, fire department, restaurant and hotel. All of Wachapreague's 200 or so residents live in the 192 square acres that make up the town. I think many of the people of Steamboat live on the plains. 

It takes 90 minutes to get to Salisbury or Virginia Beach from Wachapreague - but then you're in a big city. It might not take much more than 90 minutes to get to Gallup, but then you're in Gallup. And Onley is 100 times larger than Fort Defiance, in terms of shopping and amenities.

But it is beautiful. The plains stretch out pale and silvery between deep-red buttes. The sky is the size of the world. There is nothing there, but the quiet of the landscape makes serene that which could be desolate. I love standing in that landscape and painting. 

Here's my painting in the landscape

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The plains shimmer under a huge sky. 

Wild horses, cows, sheep, llamas and dogs roam all over the reservation. I have seen

 horses pretty much everywhere I've traveled. 

I've really come to love the sage that grows all over. Its stems are gray, its leaves a soft, silvery green, and its flowers a light mustard color. At certain times, I could smell the scent of sage on the air. 

Here's the place in Steamboat where I think you could go to get your car fixed. 

Gallup must be a major hub for trains. This one had four engines, and a far-as-I-can-see line of double-decker boxcars, stacked on on top of the other. It seems pretty miraculous. 

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Dog of the Day

Here's Minnie! I met her in Tubac, and she was a funny, friendly dog.