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ORIGINAL AND VINTAGE ............DAVID PALADIN 'CHETLAHE'.............'SHAWL DANCER', OIL ON BOARD, 8" x 4"........................
This is an 8" x 4" Original and Vintage painting by the Navajo painter David Paladin 'Chetlahe', 1926-1984. The image is described as a 'Shawl Dancer' on back. Signed on front at lower right. Fine original condition.
The Biography Follows:
Growing up wasn't easy for David Paladin, born 1926. He wasn't white and
he wasn't red; he was a half-breed, something that was looked down upon
in the 1930's.
He was the son of a Navajo Indian mother and a
white missionary father, spending his early years on the Navajo
reservation near Chinle, Arizona.
Friends were hard to come by
when the teachers at missionary schools and the Santa Fe Indian School
held him up as an example because he was light-skinned. But Joe Wilson, a
full-blooded Navajo cousin liked him. "It's what's inside you that
counts. It's not whether you're Indian or white," Joe counseled.
An
incorrigible runaway, a stowaway, a secret agent, a WW II prison camp
survivor, Paladin's life story sounds more like fiction than fact. Later
associations with indigenous peoples led to his education as a shaman
by the Huichols and Tarahumaras of Mexico, the Northwest Coastal Indians
and the Pueblo Indians, and by the Australian Aboriginals. While he
lived in New Mexico he was a radio announcer for a classical music
station, midwife, volunteer police chaplain, and prison chaplain at Los
Lunas Medium Security Correctional Facility where he began the first
Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in a prison setting. He died in 1984,
having devoted the last twenty years of his life to painting and
community service.
Although he resisted art teachers such as
Dorothy Dunn in the early days at the Santa Fe Indian School, he always
knew he wanted to be an artist. A visit with Marc Chagall while Paladin
was a student at the Chicago Art Institute gave his art direction as
Chagall encouraged him to draw upon his native heritage and to paint his
personal visions inspired by creation legends.
Although David
Chetlahe Paladin is an influential artist in terms of his contributions
to the development of contemporary Native American art, the breadth and
depth of his work exceeds the usual artistic style appellations.
Paladin's art is rooted in but not bounded by the lore of his Indian
ancestry. His themes are timelessness and universality. While some of
his motifs are recognizably Indian, Paladin's singular ability to
amalgamate recurrent images enables him to straddle cultures and embrace
design concepts that have a universal rather than merely cultural
appeal. At the core of his remarkably diverse art is the theme of
harmony and peace as it touches upon the spiritual and dream qualities
of the roots of humankind.
As ever this is guaranteed 100% money back, to be as represented.