Mirage 2016 READ 'EM AND WEEP
17
Steve Bovée
It was around my third year of artistic failure that I started making paintings of crying Indians. Frankly, it was an act of desperation. I'd begun my career painting representational landscapes and done all right with them in terms of sales. But in time, I grew dissatisfied and bored with realism. I went more abstract in approach. My landscapes grew flatter, more distorted. The sales faltered and then dwindled to practically nothing. Finally, I abandoned landscape altogether in favor of human figures—gaunt, twisted figures with haunted, staring eyes. Personally, I found them compelling, but apparently I was the only one who did. “Barney Googles with anorexia,” my friend Vercammon called them, mockingly. And he was an artist! The public, of course, didn't get them at all; nobody bought a single piece. The viewers just laughed. This galled me. It was good work. They were good paintings. Maybe they did look a little bit like Barney Google on a starvation diet, but the quality was high. Very possibly, that was the problem. People wanted claptrap, not art—I’d come to realize that much. I read all the fine-art magazines, and it appalled me to see how much money clearly inferior work was fetching on the market. I knew of one painter—a fellow with a national reputation by the name of Gizmo or something—who painted nothing but broken-hearted Indians on horseback. His work went for five figures, and it was absolutely dreadful. I could do better blindfolded. I knew I could. And then I thought to myself, well, why not try a few Indians myself? It wasn't as though Gizmo owned Indians. They were fair game. Stylistically, Gizmo and I were worlds apart, so it wouldn't be theft. I wasn't poaching. I didn't need his permission to paint Indians, or anyone's permission. What did I have to lose? I didn't just jump right into it. You have to get a feel for your subject. I did my research. I must have looked at a couple thousand old black-and-white photographs of Indians. It wasn’t until I could close my eyes and conjure up an image of these handsome people that I started sketching and making studies. Once I mastered the iconography, I had no more need for photographs, or even models; I made it all up out of my own head. My first major portrait was a night scene. It showed a young brave staring into the coals of a campfire. Very dra-
