Description:
Watercolor on Paper. Signed l.r.: Tahoma 46.
From: American Indian Painters, Vol. 2, p. 12: Quincy Tahoma is one of the better known Navajo artists of today, born in 1920, near Tuba City, Arizona. Like all Navajo boys he herded the family's sheep and rode horseback, learning, from the "inside," one might say, all about the rhythm of the horse's many gaits that he so successfully expresses in his paintings. A mere child, he drew pictures in the sand with a stick; sometimes he also carved them in rocky cliffs in imitation of men of long ago. He entered the Santa Fe Indian School for which he later painted a mural, "Sheepherder". He is also a silversmith. For some time he worked in a Hollywood studio. Like many Navajos he volunteered after Pearl Harbor and saw action during the war. His paintings won early recognition. They have been reproduced in several magazines and the Encyclopedia Britannica. Tahoma made the poster designs for the exhibit "Man becomes an Artist" organized by the Laboratory of Anthropology in Santa Fe. He had previously demonstrated the technique of Indian painting at the San Francisco World's Fair in 1938. He has exhibited all over the United States and his works have found homes in many public and private collections. Tahoma's style is very vigorous and highly individualized. It carried to the nth degree the Navajos' feeling for rhythm and decoration. There is cyclonic violence in his buffaloes' charges, winged fleetness in his horses; his low horizons magnify to immensity the conflicts of the hunt that he paints with such keen relish. There is exquisite suavity in his slender winged birds -- his trademark -- in the precise folds of his women's dresses and in the filigree-like manes and tails of his horses. The suave elegance makes Tahoma's work extremely popular. He receives the highest price of all Indian artists for his work. Let's hope he will not be betrayed by popularity into empty mannerism and repetition. "The Last Jump" is considered by many one of his major works. It pictures and Indian in the act of jumping on the back of a wildly charging bison. The terrified beast is caught high in the air by the observant artist. As in all of Tahoma's drawings of charging animals, it is anatomically very skillfully rendered. It is a little difficult to determine the tribe of the hunter, presumably he is a Navajo. The whole effect of violent action strangely recalls the Japanese paintings of the Fujiwara period. (Collection, University of Oklahoma)