Shonto Begay captures the feel of road bumps and wind whipping the faces of passengers as they catch a ride in the back of a pickup truck. The genre scene is familiar to Arizona travelers up North; the long drive from Gallup, Phoenix, or Albuquerque to home is etched in the memory of both children and adults. For decades, Begay has easily been the best-known practitioner of the Navajo school of genre painting. The artist is the product of reservation realism: the scenes of daily life that reveal the beauty and hardness of life that Navajo people experience growing up and living on the land. His work is imbued with the details and vivid colors of the Four Corners region, the reds and blues, yellows and greens that distinguish the sandstone cliffs of his homeland.

      Begay is a storyteller. Verbal and visual tales pour from his canvases and draw the eye into each element of the scene, which seethe in the motion of his brush. Often his distinctive brushwork (fig. 1) is described as neo-impressionism or pointillist in reference to the stylistic techniques which defined George Seurat’s nineteenth-century scenes. This reading is critically erroneous in the work of Begay. Visually, his technique mirrors Van Gogh’s night time skies or blazing sunlight, but this interpretation, too, is incomplete, as it denies the Indigenous originality that Begay’s style reflects. His paintings are formed by the undulation of acrylic paint that builds form, creates light, and defines space.

      In this scene, the visual elements of the sky suggest the continual movement of clouds, air, summer monsoon rain, and hot dust blown up from the ground. Unlike Seurat, Begay is not interested in the optics of color theory which defined late nineteenth century post-impressionism. Begay notes how his distinctive brushwork originated from a specific incident, the Challenger disaster on January 28, 1986.¹ He describes working on a portrait when news of the Challenger explosion spurred him to intone a chant for the lives lost. As he painted, the chant became the movement of his brush, guiding his hand and thoughts into the rhythmic, stylized manner akin to Van Gogh’s Starry Night (1889). But, instead of an undulating sky, Begay’s canvas is a prayer which forms every element of the scenario. He expanded:

The style in which I paint, the dabs, the lines, the squiggles, dashes and dots, These are syllables that leads to a word: the words lead to a sentence, which leads to a paragraph, which in turn leads to the ancient prayers. For me it is a way of communicating with the Spirits.²

      In a recorded interview with the artist, he pointed to the daily scenes of Navajo life which inform a majority of his subjects. Navajo Blue Highway depicts a familiar theme for Begay: the pickup truck headed toward the sun, cab filled with adults, tailgate hosting hitchhikers old and young. And within the scene, the rear-view mirrors catch the eyeline of driver and passengers as the road unfolds ahead. Headed out, caught a ride, the road across Navajo is picturesque and sublime, never more so than depicted through the artistry of master painter Shonto Begay.

¹ Amy Pallas, “Shonto Begay,”Cowboys and Indians, 22, no 6 (August/September 2014): 68-69.

² “Shonto Begay: Honoring the Past – Painting the Present,” Western Art Collector, 1 (August 2007), 130-135.