In the meantime...

Last week I shared how gave up drawing over time as a adolescent. This week, I would like to share how my creativity was fed until the time when I determined to study art at university. Part of my family's heritage, on both sides, includes Native Americans. This was shared with me as a child and I think it influenced my interest in Native American cultures and art. When I was 4 or so, I visited my cousin who was at a summer camp and saw a fireside performance of "Indian " dancers and I swore that when I got older that I would become such a dancer as well. When I got older, at age 13, through the Boy Scouts of America in my area, a local Native American dance troupe was started and I was among its founding members. Through this group, I became immersed in creating costumes for dancing. I worked to create my own outfits over the years and wherever I went, I searched for raw materials such as glass beads, macaw feathers, deer hide and so forth to bring into reality the various designs I had in my mind over the years. I spent hundreds of hours over the years of my teens and early twenties on bead work, leather work, sewing and fabricating various elements of my powwow outfits. All of this work reached a climax for me when I finished an outfit I had been designing for years and danced in at a powwow in Portland, OR. Incidentally, I ended up with my picture in the local paper wearing that outfit. Around the time I finished that outfit, I began to get interested in drawing again and started to find some books and local resources to pursue that interest. As drawing started to take up my free time, I did less and less craft work until drawing pretty much took over all together, although from time to time I do some little bead work projects. The drawing with this week's post is from a photo that was taken by a friend as I modeled my then recently finished powwow outfit. The outfit itself is in pieces, some with me in Turkey, the rest on display with my mother's collection of wondrous trinkets and toys.