EXPLORING NATIVE ROOTS
Artist incorporates memories, dreams into work
Growing up in Santa Fe with a Scottish-Irish father and a Navajo mother, David-Alexander Hubbard Sloan lived a pretty assimilated life, he said.
But he has been exploring his Native roots more and more over the years, working on learning the Diné language, and incorporating the words and cultural concepts into his art.
The environment has always played a central role in his work, added Sloan, noting that he graduated from the University of Arizona in 2003 with a major in studio arts and a minor in environmental science.
If you go to his open studio and artist’s talk Saturday at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, though, you’ll see that the environment reflected in his paintings can range from around the world to inside his head.
A sinuous dragon and water serpent were inspired by a family trip to Japan, he said. A stately saguaro arose from visits to his mother’s relatives in Arizona. And a painting of his own crouching figure between vaguely Aztec- or Mayan-style totems aflame at the top was inspired by a dream he had, while some of the jungle background includes plants he saw in New Zealand during some months he spent there and in Australia on a study abroad program.
During his artist-in-residence stay at the museum, which began in November and finishes in March, Sloan has looked to return to his painting roots, and refine and finish some canvases that he has had for years.
“It’s hard to make a career or a living” as a painter, he said, explaining that he was painting a lot after graduating from college, but began to turn to other avenues in search of an income.
“In 2008, I got into print-making,” Sloan said, noting that those artworks tend to sell more easily. He pointed out some prints he made from old pages from the Navajo Times in the 1960s, many with ads with stereotypical Native images that didn’t apply to his tribe. He super-imposed animal figures with their Diné names
over those pages in his prints.
“In the ’60s, they were pushing consumerism on the Navajos,” he said.
Around 2010 or so, he started printing designs of animals accompanied by their Diné names on bandanas to sell and, in learning silkscreen printing at Warehouse 21, has taken on jobs such as printing t-shirts to earn some extra money.
“They say that, as you lose words for animals, you lose your connection with them,” Sloan said. When he sells the bandanas at Indian fairs, he added, a number of people will comment that they hadn’t heard some of those words in many years.
In the meantime, he’s also been taking jewelry classes at Pojoaque Pueblo’s Poeh Cultural Center in search of other marketable products he can make, he said.
His current residency has opened an opportunity for him to return to painting, though, Sloan said, adding that his skills in the medium have been a little rusty, but are coming back to him.
One of the oil paintings getting his attention is one he calls a “rough draft” that he’s had since about 2007. It shows a desert scene with a camel in the foreground, along with palm trees, a horse with an emu on its back, a luxury car and a bicycle, while windmills and solar energy cells make up the background.
“It’s like an oasis in the Middle East or Africa,” he said, explaining that he’s trying to show the future, when a shift to clean energy and conservation may slow the consumption of and pollution from fossil fuels. Sloan said he’d like to eliminate 90 percent of cars in the world and replace roads with local food crops, or plants such as hemp, which can be used for clothing and other items.
The day a reporter stopped by to visit, Sloan was working on outlining the detail on the palm leaves in the painting.
“It’s pretty tedious,” he said, noting how so many people romanticize the idea of creating art. But using a tiny brush on a four-foot canvas takes a lot of time and a lot of patience, he said.
With more maturity, along with the time offered through the residency, Sloan said he now is finding the patience to work on the small details that might help him consider some of those earlier paintings to be finally finished.