Painting - Navajo Ceremonial Night Chant : Harrison Begay Sr.

Harrison Begay Sr.WatercolorNavajo Ceremonial-Night Chant31” x 21″ In the  1930's Harrison Begay Sr. joined the Santa Fe Indian School and studied art under Dorothy Dunn. The photo below of Harrison Begay is from the Denver Post, circa 1947.   Harrison Begay painted in a soft and warm style devoted to the daily lives of the Diné people. Begay grew up on the Navajo Reservation and painted scenes from his life and his memories. He used opaque tempera and casein paints, possibly because those were more like the earth colors used in Diné ceremonial paintings. Navajo painting is a subtle combination of the realistic and the decorative.  The figures in the paintings cast no shadows and are usually themselves flat, unmodeled, and two-dimensional.  A few clumps of sage and juniper suffice for the foreground, a wavy line halfway up the picture may indicate middle distance, and a single mesa may serve as the distant background.  On this simple stage, Diné artists place enchanting animals and fig