Evolving image

Take a look at the 2009 Navajo Nation Fair poster.

The oil painting depicts a Navajo warrior, his face clenched in determination. He is defiantly holding up a bow, riding a white horse. Behind him are a group of soldiers in chase. On the horizon is the iconic Window Rock.

It's a dark image for the fair, a dark image even to its creator, Navajo artist Jim Abeita.

"When I painted it, I didn't think Window Rock (fair committee) would be interested in it," Abeita said.

"I don't do soldiers like that," Abeita said. "My paintings are really nice, innocent. I paint sheep. This one came out accidentally."

But the image evolved, starting as one of Abeita's innocent flashes of everyday Navajo life - a trademark that has earned him acclaim throughout the country - into a portrait of a climactic battle scene.

The painting started as a snapshot of a calf roper. Where the warrior holds up the bow, he originally held a rope, frozen in twirl.

Abeita, originally from Crownpoint and the grand marshal for the 63rd Annual Navajo Nation Fair parade, has been creating some type of art for nearly all of his 62 years. He started drawing at 4 years old and started painting with oils while still in school and has stuck to the medium ever since.

"When you paint with oils, you have to be an expert at creating colors," Abeita said. "You start with one, then you add another and another until you make it three-dimensional, that photographic look."

The most difficult part, he said, is to match skin tones, which usually is done through memory.

"You don't know what a color is going to look like until you put it on the canvas you have to guess and get it as close as possible," he said. "The colors depend on you."

The subject matter, of course, can be a different story. In the fair poster, the warrior has a look on his face that determined the fate of the painting. The gritted teeth, and focused eyes implied something stronger than a calf roper.

A friend told Abeita it looked like the warrior was looking at something in the distance, a deer for the hunt, maybe.

"Then I knew, he was being chased," Abeita said.

He replaced the rope with the bow, and added the charging soldiers.

"Then I thought, 'That's seven against one. Wow, they're going to kill him.'"

There is a realism in the image that shouldn't surprise those familiar with Abeita's work. By using oil paints, he has managed to create realistic depictions of Navajo culture. He gained prominence in the 1970s, a time when Navajo art was dominated by watercolors or casein, paintings that didn't show depth.

Abeita, a member of the Sleep Rock People Clan and born for the Salt People Clan, specializes in portraits. In 1971, while living in Chicago, his wife convinced him to paint a portrait of country singing legend Johnny Cash, who was performing live in the city. She convinced him to present the portrait to the singer for an autograph.

Although Cash was not seeing fans, Abeita asked the singer's manager to relay the portrait, rolled in canvas. The manager returned with an invitation from Cash.

In the end, Cash invited Abeita to his home in Nashville for three months to paint portraits of the singer and his family. By the time Abeita moved back to Crownpoint in the fall of 1972, he had painted 30 images for Cash, including the cover portrait for one of Cash's albums.

In the Navajo Nation Fair poster, Abeita's dark image takes yet another plot twist.

Abeita noticed that, with the Window Rock set on the right side of the horizon, that implied the soldiers were coming from Fort Defiance. Therefore, under the icon for the Navajo Nation, he painted a group of Navajo people.

"We can put in some Navajos to do the ambush," Abeita said, as if he were recalling an oral history. "No. An ambush sounds too set up.

"Then it hit us," he said. "The warrior, he's a decoy."

It's difficult to make out exactly what the group is doing, as they stand, some with horses, some with rifles. Hiding? Preparing to attack?

Like all great art, it leaves the conclusion to the audience.

"All of this came out accidentally," Abeita said.

But, sometimes, that's what happens with art.

Abeita said the image of the warrior is entirely fictional. He compared it to a cartoon. But the creator of even the silliest cartoon has to add a streak of realism if anybody is going to enjoy the images.

"A cartoonist, he just makes up whatever he wants," Abeita said. "Then he really details it. He has to create a mouse that people will believe."

Following his time with Cash, Abeita worked almost exclusively with Nello Guadagnoli at the Kiva Gallery in Gallup until it closed in 2003.

Abeita now paints at home, in Gallup. He estimates he has painted more than 7,000 images, he said. And many of them, at least the memorable ones, came as a surprise to the artist.

"Sometimes it's done in a way so I don't know what's going to happen," Abeita said. "I was going to make a guy roping a cow."

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