Description:
Watercolor on Paper. Signed l.r.: Gerald Nailor, Stamped u.r.: PLANCHE 71.
Excerpt from American Indian Painters, Vol. 2, p. 11: Gerald Nailor was born in 1917 in Gallup. He painted a mural for the Post Office at the National Park in Mesa Verde, Colorado, others for the Department of the Interior Building, Washington, D.C. The flowering of American Indian art is nowhere more apparent than in the work of six young Indians whose murals, covering the walls of two large rooms in this new Department of the Interior Building, were done in 1939. The twenty-four separate panels cover two thousand two hundred feet of walls in the cafeteria and recreation room of the building. In subject and execution, they vary as much as the tribes represented among the artists. Each painter has drawn from the experience of his own tribe, either in the symbolic designs of the past or in scenes of contemporary Indian life. As subjects for the decoration of the cafeteria, Nailor chose Navajo women weaving, a scene from a Navajo healing ceremony, and the symbols of the earth, clouds and snakes seen in Navajo sand paintings. In the recreation room, he depicts Navajos hunting deer and bison. In 1942-43, he worked for nearly a year at the Window Rock Agency, Arizona, painting murals in the Indian council house. These are, in fact, a pictorial history of the Navajo people. Gerald is a gifted painter, thought by many people to be one of the best in the Southwest today. The Nailor style is very much his own; he eliminates details to a great degree and thus obtains powerful and stately effects. His work reflects his proud reticence and a true Navajo sense of humor. He paints the Navajos, their history, and social life, but he is also fond of animals, especially horses, deer and antelopes. Although a practical rancher, he has not abandoned Navajo religion, myths, and lore. The Navajo story of creation is as exciting and complicated as the Greek and Norse mythology. Nailor uses as subject matter many Navajo nature myths and religious symbols.
"The Female Rain and Corn" is a recent work. This painting, beautiful in tone and graceful in line, is obviously based on a nature myth as old as the fertility rites of the Druids of ancient Brittany. He uses a somewhat stylized but pictorial figure of a girl dressed in velvet blouse, full skirt, and red moccasins, performing a ritual before a growing stalk of corn, planted among sacred symbols of clouds and falling rain. Few Indian artists can better combine the decorative and the pictorial into one picture scheme than Nailor. In 1940 Nailor illustrated with thirty-five line drawings the Navajo language reader "Little Man's Family". These drawings are simply magnificent. They have a refinement and beauty equal to that of the classic vase paintings of ancient Greece. Resuming an activity interrupted by war service, Gerald now divides his time between raising cattle on his ranch and painting.