With personal life situations and demands, age and now a new deadly virus, I have been distracted, as well as highly focused on other issues. I have not been a good blogger. I have, finally, printed an image long in wait. A photograph I took twenty years ago, at a Pow Wow in Tucson, AZ. That image began as a digital image from a Canon 10D SLR. The advantage to this being I was able to eliminate all modernity from the image, save on small detail, something I leave in every print with an historical setting, or event. What appears to be an image from the 19th century, is marked by one small detail putting the image into the correct time period, if noticed.
This print continues the gum over palladium printing in the 11"x14" format. I have two more Native American dancers at this Pow Wow, with more dancers in each. Family legend has it that great-great-grandma was full blood Cherokee. Perhaps that is true, perhaps the rest of my Welsh/Irish genes prevail, although I do hold a special affinity for my Native American brothers & sisters, whom continue to get shafted even today by governmental theft and misrepresentation, and of course old fashion blatently breaking treaties.
What I am after with these images, is attempting to capture the spirit of the dancers, replicate their colors, and the feel of the time, and energy, when they dance. I will likely never know if I have accomplished any of this. As always, time is the arbiter of such matters. There are ten print layers over the original palladium print. All but three of these print layers were of multiple color mixtures, either two, or three colors per print layer. As always, the essence of the print image, is the light. The light is everything, and the most difficult to get right, hold right in place, somewhere in the tonal range between zone 6 and 7. That is where the light that is seen hangs out.
Gum over Palladium Print
"Sacred Dance" 11"x14" Unique
Pow Wow; Tucson, Arizona [1999]
