Native American Art Prints
Kirby Sattler Original Art

I Am Crow, by Kirby Sattler.

You don’t often come across an artist that makes you sit up and take note.  I’m sitting up straight and I’m definitely taking heed.

There’s an artist in Colorado Springs, CO named Kirby Sattler.  I’m not sure what his background is, but I can tell he understands northern Renaissance painting.  He paints representations of Plains Indians that follow the tradition of Van Eyck, and in this era, has affinities to William Beckman.  Whereas Beckman’s work simply records the natural world, nudes, portraits, and landscapes of rural New York, Sattler doesn’t record a particular person, but like Raphael’s Madonnas, compiles visual information from various sources, possibly impressions of  Edward Curtis photographs or the depictions of facepainted chiefs in Catlin’s work, and I suspect personal observations of Native Americans, without the subject matter being of a specific source or individual.  He is not quoting anyone or anything.

These are meticulously painted acrylics on linen.  They are layered in glazes that are within the vein of Flemish painting, and the abstraction of the shapes that are wedded to the figures remind me of them also, like in Jan Van Eyck’s Portrait of a Man.

This is realism, but it is also romanticism, for it evokes a time and a culture that was all but destroyed by the greed of those who invaded Turtle Island and then contained Native Americans on the prototype of the Nazi concentration camp, the reservation.  The images Kirby Sattler paints are Platonic representations of a person that haunts American history.  These are images of warriors who were never murdered by cavalry marauding their camp at daybreak, massacring all who breathed.  Women, children, old and young.  These warriors were never disarmed, only to be executed thereafter.  These braves are uncowed, whose only episode of altered consciousness was during a Sun Dance.  These ozuye were never hunted down by the FBI and set-up for a life behind bars.

But if these are Platonic renditions, maybe they are the ideal form of the ozuye, calling to us, who are deep in the Cave, beckoning to us to become unchained and make our way to the light, where justice for Indigenous people comes at last.   It’s already clear that the dominant culture can’t be dealt with by means of bows, arrows, or Ghost Dances.  Certainly not treaties.  They are hardly worth the paper they were written on.  But art can show us what the subject of Plato’s Cave saw:  true brotherhood, sisterhood.  That the Other that worms like Andrew Jackson hated are actually our selves, in another, distressing disguise.

Maybe Kirby Sattler’s work is not about the past.  Perhaps it is about the future.

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