A lifetime of art covered the walls and floors of Ed Singer’s home in Cortez, CO. Paintings from family and friends hung in the living room. Still more paintings were stacked on the piano, and a few works-in-progress, taped along a door frame.
“This is one that I started last summer,” Singer said, holding a pastel depicting a Native figure wrapped in a yellow blanket, and streaks of white clouds in the background.
The painting wasn't resolved yet, according to the artist himself. “The only thing for sure I’m going to do is bring more color up into the clouds,” he said.
Singer is 73 years old, and he doesn’t remember a time when he wasn’t drawing.
Growing up in Cameron, Arizona, located on the western edge of the Navajo Nation, Singer scrawled images on any surface he could find.
“I drew on sheetrock, I drew on cardboard, whatever paper I could find," he recalled. "And when there wasn't paper, I would wander out into the landscape, [where] there was an abundance of limestone and sandstone,”
Singer roamed the nearby mountains as child, scatching figures into the stone using pieces of flint.
“Sometimes you had large expanses of these surfaces,” Singer says. “So I would draw...figures and animals, life-size or larger.”
Throughout his childhood, Singer’s passion for drawing was supported by family and community members, who supplied him with sketchbooks and encouraged him to keep drawing.
He was a proficient artist by the time he reached college.
“My art teachers were very impressed [by my] draftsmanship,” Singer said. “I think that comes from especially working large and using your whole body.”
After graduating from college in the early 1970s, Singer moved to Albuquerque and brought along a U-Haul trailer full of paintings.
In downtown Albuquerque, he brought a portfolio of paintings to Sixth Street Gallery, and the owner immediately consigned two works.
“I don’t think the week was out before both pieces sold,” Singer said. Singer brought work to the gallery.
“I had all these paintings, and they kept on selling,” he said.
Singer is part of a generation of Indigenous artists in the US who asserted their own visual sovereignty in their paintings during the 1960s and 1970s. Singer, and notable contemporaries like Fritz Scholder and R. C. Gorman confronted Native American stereotypes, and depicted Indigenous life in a modern context, using both realism and an expressionistic style.
Singer works in charcoal, pastel, watercolor, and notably oil paint, which he applies in thick, vivid layers on the canvas.
His paintings show solitary Native people in desert landscapes. The figures are skewed and angular, seeming to bend in reaction to their environment.
“One of the things that really kind of draws you into his art are the colors. They're very bold, they're vibrant, they're eye-catching, “ said Julie Napientek, an art curator and historian in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
According to Napientek, Native artists in the early 20th century learned style and technique from white teachers, which became as the Santa Fe Indian School style.
"[It was also called] the flat style, because it is characterized by an emphasis on two-dimensional figures [and] flat plains of color,” said Napientek.
It was a style commonly associated with Indigenous art until the mid-20th century, when a new wave of Native artists broke away.
Whereas some Native art has a more idyllic sensibility, Napientek was drawn to Singer's work because of its confrontational style.
“He's not afraid to critique and to point out the struggles that contemporary Native Americans have had,z" she said. [His work is] not idealized or anything like that. It's raw and gritty.”
Singer's social commentary is visible in his "Waiting" series, which the artist has worked on throughout his career. In this series, singular figures stand or sit in fields of color. These images reflect the historic reality of reservation life for Indigenous people.
“As Native Americans, I think we do a whole lot of waiting,” Singer said. “Waiting for change, waiting for justice.”
Singer's work also explores the relationship between human figures and the environment. In his painting Yellow Water, he takes on the 2015 Gold King Mine spill, when 3 million gallons of contaminated water spilled into the Animas River from a mine near Silverton, Colorado. The toxic water travelled downstream, coursing through 200 miles of river in the Navajo Nation, impacting Diné communities.
After reading news reports about the Gold King spill, Singer began by painting a woman sitting in a chair, a thick yellow field of color in front of her. But as he continued to paint, Singer added other elements: an abandoned uranium mine, a forest on fire.
"I wanted to [look at] how the whole Navajo reservation is like an energy sacrifice area," he said. "So I put in all the other things that has hurt our land and continues to hurt our land."
The political commentary in Singer's art comes naturally to him. Growing up, his family discussed political issues at the dinner table.
“As a Native American, as soon as you're born, you're a political entity,” Singer added. “How many people have a treaty with the United States government which has a direct bearing on their life?”
At 73, Singer is still driven by an artistic impulse, and he’s still surprised by what materializes when he paints.
“I hope I'm never a person that goes to work every day knowing exactly what they're going to do,” Singer said. “The day that I know what I'm doing, I think I'm going to quit painting.”
When Singer was a young artist, one of his uncles told him to pray before and after each painting.
“[My uncle] said, ‘You need protection then, because you're really opening yourself up when you're reaching for ideas, you're reaching for inspiration. And you're more vulnerable to evil,” Singer said. “Then he said, ‘You, as an artist, are the closest thing to being a creator, and so in creating you're creating Hózhó each time.’”
In the Diné worldview, Hózhó means finding a balance between the material world and the spiritual. Diné people interpret this idea in many ways.
For Ed Singer, Hózhó means painting the world around him with beauty and honesty.
