50th Year as an Artist, 1991-1992

Celebrating my 50th year as an artist from the 1991-1992 perspective is perplexing, because it was such a difficult period in my life, and I don’t have much art to show for it. I am very proud of Eagle Feather, and wish I still had it, but it is being lovingly cared for by a dear friend. It is painted from a photograph I took at the Birds of Prey Rehabilitation Foundation, Broomfield, Colorado, where I was volunteering.

My duty was to clean the eagle flight cage, North America’s largest. What an honor to stand inside, gazing at the recuperating eagles fly from one end to the other while I scrubbed their wall down. It was one of the most important times of learning and being healed by proximity to eagles and other raptors like Ajax.

The ground was littered with eagle feathers that founder Sigrid Ubelager would gather up for distribution to Native Americans. She was strict about no one else taking any but she said I could take a photograph of one. Outside of the cage I held the feather up with my left hand and took a picture with my right hand. Then gently returned it to the cage floor.

When I developed it I saw that it appears to be a part of the front range in the background, sort of astonishing. Then I noticed that there were shapes in the grey cloudscape and the wintry ground that resembled buffalo. It felt like to paint it would be a sacred ritual, so I prepared the paint myself, grinding pigments into linseed oil. It made me appreciate artists from previous ages who had to master that skill, that required patience or apprentices. The format is a Golden Rectangle, one that I use for sacred art.

While I was there I also did a a fundraising card series of drawings of Ajax the red tailed hawk, Grandmother, a golden eagle, Tundra, a snowy owl and Blue Lady, the first rehabilitated falcon to be released in Colorado in many years.

It was Ajax who called me there in a quite magical way. She was an education bird, and foster mother to countless orphaned hawks. When she died at a very old age, I installed a cutout, oil painted version of the card, with Ajax on a nest bundle for her happy hunting ground, in the mirrored Traveling Shrine.

That’s all I could find for 1991, I had to dig and dig through archives to recall my activity, Surely, I was involved in something… Oh yeah, I was mostly teaching art and craft classes, like making rattles. I loved that so much! Here’s a beauty from friend and student of one of the classes, Francesca TePoel.

This rattle grounds me. The vision that birthed it always comes back when I play it, as clear as that first time. It’s meaning continually, slowly reveals itself. I suspect its deepest secret still waits, somewhere up ahead. Francesca TePoel

I was making quite a few rattles myself and exhibiting. I’m glad I found this “evidence” from Boulder’s Daily Camera. We artists were so lucky then to have an avid art critic in Jennifer Heath, the good ole’ days…

I had already painted the Skies in the Four Directions for Wallace Black Elk a few years earlier. I painted them again for a two person show, Dovetail with Norene Berry at Hichiwa Gallery in Denver. The four paintings were installed on the ceiling.

This tarot-like self portrait in light colored pencil was my artist manifesto.