Page 17 - the NOISE July 2014

clockwise from left: Tree of Seven Hearts (detail & full), Chasing Shadows No More, Mr. Begay in his studio, and Monument Symphony are a few of the paintings featured in “Map of my Heart,” opening this month at MNA
BY SARAH GIANELLI
deniable shape of a fetus, which Mr. Begay didn’t see until someone else did, is curled up in the corner, its umbilical cord leading directly to Mr. Begay’s birthplace, the heart of the map of his heart.
“When a child is born the umbilical cord is buried in the ground and it stays there forev- er. Mine is buried here,” he says as we bump through a gate and pull to a stop before a sprawling turquoise hogan. “I tell the kids if your umbilical cord is held by the earth, you feel like you are home anywhere in the world. Because you are rooted. This is my root.”
In 1980, when a 24-year old Mr. Begay returned from Berkeley after earning a BFA from California College of Arts and Crafts, he tore out the seats of his Volkswagon bus, and started hauling materials to build a home on the very spot of his childhood hogan. Grow- ing out from the center, the round structure honors the four directions, leaving a little room for interpretation, with an east-facing door and the appropriate placement of rooms: greenhouse in the south; recreation room in the west, and his studio in the north.
Standing on the upper balcony, which af- fords an even loftier view of his family’s land, he says, “I appreciate it so much more now. When I was a kid, I thought, this is going to be here forever and it’s always going to be the same. It isn’t. People passed on, elders, land changing ... In that sense, you become a lot more in tune with it; you don’t take it for granted; you embrace it more, spiritually. Every time I wake up here in the morning light, I ask myself what the heck am I doing anywhere else in the world.”
Back at his studio in Flagstaff, sage smoke hangs and dances on the breeze as Mr. Begay sits at his easel, his paintbrush poised before the canvas between rounds of short, rhyth- mic strokes, like the break between stanzas of a poem, or verses in a chanted prayer.
“Jo’Hona’eii’ shi’ T,aa goh adish ni’, Naa’ noosh, Ka, Nii’ ke’ dii’ dlaad,” chants Mr. Be-
gay, which translates loosely to “in humil- ity, I plead, stripped of my Hope, Father Sun, bring back your light to your children.” Mr. Begay is revisiting a childhood memory of a solar eclipse, the subject of a piece he is working on for his upcoming show which opens on the Summer Solstice.
In Chanting Back the Sun, a frightened huddle of boys sit on the hogan floor, pass- ing corn pollen as sacrament, while his father, a medicine man who passed in 2004, stands on the hillside chanting back the sun, and the boys anxiously wait for the crescent sun to become whole again.
“In the middle of the day everything got dark,” remembers Mr. Begay. “At noontime the stars came out; the wind died down; the animals went to sleep. I was puzzled. And I was scared.”
He calls his paintings “visual chants,” be- cause “each stroke is a syllable to a Navajo word, each word to a sentence, each sen- tence to a paragraph,” he explains. “I like to think of each painting as a completion of a blessing or healing ceremony. That’s the purpose of art. That’s the spiritual void it should fill.”
Mr. Begay came upon his current style, or it came upon him, on the day the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded.
“I was painting my grandmother in that normal, color blended, realistic way,” he says. “I remember hearing the tragic news, and
seeing Dan Rather crying on the television ... there was a collective moan arising from all over the world. I think it was that energy that led me to the blessings in my work. It was when I first drew a squiggly little line, a little dot, a little circle.”
Many people compare his wavy, dynamic style to Van Gogh, and if it irks Mr. Begay, he keeps it hid, graciously ascribing any similarities to tapping into the same energy. When his brother commissioned a piece and showed him A Starry Night as an example of
what he wanted, Mr. Begay conceded and made his own rendition, somewhat tongue and cheek.
On the walls of his studio are two large works that demonstrate the style he has be- come renowned for. Citation on the Green is a park scene in which youths drink and so- cialize, and young lovers, their hearts aglow, lounge in the grass. In Chasing Shadows no More, a rusted, busted up old Triumph has found its resting place in a sagebrush flat, mesas and skies undulating in the distance. Mr. Begay recently reacquired the piece from a man in Santa Fe who purchased it in 2002, some deep tugging in his heart telling him he needed it back.
“This old war pony has gone through a lot,” he says, the first verse of spontaneous poem reminiscent of some of Bob Dylan’s spoken word, the way it rocks and rolls and tum- bles along. “It has seen a lot of adventures, chased a lot of dreams, encountered a lot of coups; if it could talk it would scream. Now it’s retired, chasing shadows no more.”
This month’s cover piece of two innocents kissing across a stone wall, is as tender as Mr. Begay’s intended message — the necessity of finding tenderness not only In Spite of the Coming Storm, but because of it. He shows me Walking through Beauty, a piece dedi- cated to his sister who was killed in an auto- mobile accident. She walks through a field of sunflowers, releasing butterflies, a look of inward contentment on her face, and faint wings on her back.
“It’s easy to lose hope, but there’s still a lot of beauty to be found — a dream of happi- ness, a dream of something good, finding a place to walk in beauty. I don’t know a great- er place of beauty than finding greatness, great beauty, something permanent within.”
Art was Mr. Begay’s means of survival as a boy, and today, living in Flagstaff, it serves a different kind of survival. It’s a way of bridg- ing the many worlds through which he
moves, and keeping alive the totality of ex- perience that has made him who he is, ever changing, but ever connected to the great reservoir of Spirit residing in the landscapes within, and without.
Flipping through one of Mr. Begay’s illus- trated stories about the Hero Twins, a Navajo messiah myth, I ask how such a story is still pertinent today.
“It’s always been a continuing story,” he ex- plains. “The first, second, third, fourth world ... With each the beings were destructive and forced out. It’s always been said there’s no fifth world; that’s what we’re facing, another calamity, another shifting of paradigm. The Navajo stories have always been about the evolution of consciousness, the evolution into the glittering world. We’re on the cusp
of the fifth world, that’s what I always say. What is it going to be? I don’t know. We’ll see when the shifting happens. But what- ever it is, it should be beautiful.”
Mr. Begay’s exhibit at the Museum of Northern Arizona opens to the public June 22 and runs through September 1. A Gala dinner, exhibit preview & live auction will be held 5PM Saturday, June 21; and a brunch & curator’s reception beginning at 10AM, Sun- day June 22, 3101 North Fort Valley Road in Flagstaff. Visit musnaz.org for details.
Also this month, Mr. Begay will be partici- pating in the 6th annual Rock the Canyon Arts & Music Festival in Shonto, Ariz., on Saturday June 7 (search Facebook for de- tails); and at the FireFly Gathering outside of Flagstaff, June 13-16. fireflygathering.org
For a comprehensive list of Mr. Begay’s countless awards, accolades, exhibitions, publications & community service proj- ects; and to preview more of his work visit medicinemangallery.com or shontosacred- mountaingallery.com
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