Description:
Watercolor on paper. Inscribed l.r.: "Navajo Woman Carding Wool", Signed l.r.: Hoke Denetsosie, Stamped: PLANCHE 66.
From: American Indian Painters, Vol. 2, p. 10: The vast wonderland of northern Arizona is the home of the independent Navajo. To have been born there is enough to make anybody an artist, a musician, a poet, or a mystic. Most Navajos seem to have a little of the one or the other. Hoke Denetsosie, a full Blood Navajo, was born in a hogan in 1919, somewhere east of the Grand Canyon, where he spent his childhood. Hoke, like many other Navajos, is a born artist and is essentially self-taught, having had practically no training. From his childhood he drew and painted pictures but he had never done any work in Black and white until 1939 when he was asked to illustrate Ann Clark's book "Little Herder", written in the Navajo language for the Education Department of the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs. With great enthusiasm and intelligence he undertook the task, developing his own technique as he went along and solving some problems that many artists would simply avoid. As a result Denetsosie has created a style of his very own which is neither flat like that of the Pueblos, nor shaded like that of the Hopis but a successful something between both. Later he did illustrations for another book, "Dogs". Having failed to pass the physicals for military service, he accepted an appointment as a visual education artist for the Navajo Indian Service at Window Rock. There he remained for four years. Later he executed ten panels of mural decorations for the Arizona Craftsman Building at Scottsdale. Still later he worked as a "logger" in a lumber camp in Utah, and as a commercial artist in Flagstaff. Since 1946 he has been working at the Grand Canyon. In his own words, he does his best to express "characteristics which distinguish Navajos from other tribes" and local scenes and native setting "just as one sees them on the reservation". Denetsosie loves his native country and its landscape, and paints life on the Navajo reservation with the utmost sincerity, sympathy, and understanding. His work is full of vigour and of the graceful beauty that seems to be the inborn prerogative of Navajo artists. He is fond of reading and of music and responds to rhythm like a flower to the sun. (Collection, Oscar Brousse Jacobson)