Painting with sand
Mae de Ville and the invention of commercial Navajo sandpainting
By Ernie Bulow
Special to the Times
GALLUP, May 26, 2011
(Courtesy photos)
TOP: One of Mae de Ville's early sandpainting sketches.
BOTTOM: Mae de Ville preparing sand for sandpainting using an ancient metate.
Mae sold her work for 50 cents apiece to Carmen's Curio Store in Gallup. The store sold them as tourist souvenirs for $1.50 each. They were instantly popular.
Her husband George, a classically trained painter who once studied with Charles M. Russell in Great Falls, Mont., thought the sandpainting idea was silly. It certainly wasn't "art" in his mind.
Later he pretty much took credit for the whole idea, painting hundreds of works with colored sand.
According to family, George, a fairly accomplished violinist, was a chorus boy in New York for a time where he became close friends with Tommy Manville, heir to a huge fortune. Tommy's father put de Ville through art school for keeping an eye on the boy.
The de Villes met in California where Mae had grown up on a ranch. George had been working for the early Lasky Studio in Hollywood, painting lobby cards and posters for the movies. He didn't really enjoy commercial work.
The Great Crash (which happened on his birthday) ended George's art career as nobody had money to buy "pictures."
Family of gypsies
The de Villes, with their two daughters Marie and Melody in tow, gypsied around California, Nevada and Arizona, even dipping into Mexico for a bit.
To make money the vagabonds painted "specials" on grocery store windows, once a common practice. For a short while they managed an auto court in Cortez, Colo.
Passing through Gallup in 1931 their car broke down and they had no money to fix it. They spent the next decade in their accidental new home.
Mae and her daughters were enchanted with traditional Navajo life and attended various sings. They made friends with a local medicine man and were allowed to copy sandpainting designs.
Mae got the idea of making elements of the sandpaintings into permanent art. Though she experimented for years to find the proper glue medium, she started with a mixture of raw linseed oil, varnish and white lead.
Later practitioners would lay down a coating of red sand as a base, but May, working with pieces of house siding sized with the glue, would paint small areas at a time with the glue formula and apply the sand. Within two years she started trying her hand at actual pictures of Indian life.