Navajo Triptych

by Lianne Schneider

Title

Navajo Triptych

Artist

Lianne Schneider

Medium

Digital Art - Digital Painting/photographic Art

Description

The triptych is comprised of three individual paintings - Canyon de Chelly, Zion is Lost, Vanishing Race - each my interpretation of an Edward Curtis black and white photographic study with my own artistic adaptations. Each is hand painted digitally.
The information below is from a research paper I helped to write:

There are probably few indigenous cultures in America about whom so little is known regarding their evolution from hunter-gatherers to the pastoralist people anthropologists classify them as today, as the Navajo or Dine (as they call themselves) tribes of the Southwest United States. The Spanish, who conquered and settled the Southwest did not distinguish the Navajo from the Apaches for over 100 years after their first encounters.

The Navajo are an Athabaskan language group whose history preceded their known residence in the American southwest. They call themselves "Dine" or simply "the people" and their creation legends, like many primitive cultures, have their origins in the mists of time. Legend has it that the Dine emerged through a reed from four previous existences. Begochiddy, the Great God, some lesser gods and some beings similar to humans lived in an underworld of great darkness and climbed up through a reed to worlds of increasing light. This climb and transformation is referred to as "the emergence."

The actual migration and settlement of the Navajo or Dine from Western Canada occurred around the late 14th or early 15th centuries. They first settled in an area near San Juan River Valley in southern Utah. Their traditional homeland is known to the Navajo as the Dinetah (the people's land) - the area between the sacred mountains. The original area encompassed a large part of northwestern New Mexico, southwestern Colorado, southeastern Utah, and north-eastern Arizona. Today it is confined to a much smaller area that is the Navajo Nation, though it is still the largest Indian Reservation in the United States. It is found mostly in Arizona, New Mexico and Utah, encompassing today some 16,000,000 acres or 27,000 square miles, but well inside the original boundaries of the sacred mountains. Virtually none of the originally large section of southern Colorado is part of the reservation today and the Navajo share a portion of that homeland, too, with the Hopi tribe whose reservation is entirely within the boundaries of the larger native territory.

The Dine, like most Native Americans, feel an attachment to the land that is a part of their religious/spiritual heritage and for the Navajo that eternal bond is with the land between the four sacred mountains - the northernmost mountain, Hesperus Peak in Colorado, the eastern-most, Blanca Peak also in Colorado, the southernmost Mount Taylor in New Mexico, and the westernmost, the San Francisco Peaks in Arizona. Each of these mountains represent the spiritual and social laws of the people, and the Dine adorn themselves just as the mountains do, with the white shell to the east, turquoise to the south, abalone shell to the west, and black jet to the north.

Living in balance -
"To Native Americans, health is a continual process of staying strong spiritually,
mentally, and physically. This strength keeps away or overcomes the forces that cause illness. People must stay in harmony with themselves, other people, their natural environment, and their Creator." This idea of balance is best expressed through the Navajo concept of "hozho" or the longer phrase "sa-ah naaghaii bik-eh hozho - which generally means something like "in old age walking the trail of beauty." To live hozho (the actual word cannot be translated because English is too limited) is to be constantly growing in and acquiring knowledge - which for the Navajo is life - and finding and renewing balance daily.

"The Navajo world was created through thought and sound. Together, in the form of ritual, this thought (Saa' Naghaii) and speech (Bik'e Hozho) manifested in the creation of the universe. Here knowledge as ritual and as the world itself is complete. It cannot be "developed". It cannot be "discovered". Once it is, it simply is."

"It is now and was then incumbent upon human beings to expand their knowledge of the universe by living in Hozho. Human beings cannot create knowledge; we can only expand our awareness of it."
"This world was transformed from knowledge, organized in thought, patterned in language, and realized in speech (symbolic action). The symbol was not created as a means of representing reality; on the contrary, reality was created or transformed as a manifestation of symbolic form. In the Navajo view of the world, language is not a mirror of reality; reality is a mirror of language.

I am very grateful to the following groups for featuring this image:
- Motivation Meditation and Inspiration
- Why Not Group
- Art From the Past
- Old Masters Photography and Digital
- Creators of Beauty
- Beauty
- MOUSE
- Memories and Nostalgia
- Artists Best Five
- Digitally Re-Imagined Photos
- Art Perspectives
- What Is In It For You?
- Raised Country, Raised Right
- Art With Flair
- Forgotten By Time
- Comfortable Art
- Visual Voice
- All Landscape Photography
- All Seasons Nature Mountains Woodlands
- Out West - 1 Per Day
- The Awe Factor
- Daily Dose of Wisdom
- FAA Featured Images
- Life Is What Happens
- Triptychs
- Spirit Vision




Image Copyright - Lianne Schneider http://lianne-schneider.artistwebsites.com All rights reserved.
All images and my personal poetry/prose are protected by copyright and may not be reproduced, downloaded, distributed, transmitted, copied, reproduced in derivative works, displayed, published or broadcast by any means or in any form without prior written consent from the artist. Copyright on works derived from or based on images in the public domain applies only to the subsequent manipulation or painting resulting from my changes. The original image remains in the public domain and such images are used in accordance with international copyright laws.

Uploaded

October 5th, 2013

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