My granddaughter Karter’s birthday is coming up soon, and this year she wants a painting of a tipi. I love the evolution of subjects the kids choose as they grow up and I hope they never grow tired of getting paintings for gifts. They may need to start trading them out, though, because I’m sure they’re starting to accumulate.

This will be the first tipi I’ll have painted. I’m going to use a public domain image of a photograph taken by a man who made a compendium of photos capturing the way of life and culture of Native Americans since he was a young man in the late 1800’s.

Edward Curtis was a photographer of the Western world on the cusp of change. He was an ethnologist as well, and keenly interested in Native American culture. That time period to me feels like the dark ages of America’s evolution, and his photographs pay homage to a way of life slipping away from the people who lived it.

The Reference

Blackfoot Tipis

1926. Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868–1952)

digital file from b&w film copy neg.
http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3c01152

Progression

As I get the painting started, I’ll update with progress photos here. It’ll be on a cradle board in handmade oil paints from Ozark pigments. She wants grayscale, so it’ll be black and white, and shades of gray like the recent Brahman cow was.