There is a reason why gentle hills and mountains are nearly always in my paintings. They kept me company through all my years of growing up and will always be part of my inner landscape. The Black Hills is the backdrop for every formative experience I had in my early years. Always there, always watching silently. The landscape of people was just as rich. My Uncle Tommy who loved to dance, had polio as a young man. He came through it with his life and a wheel chair. Then he creatively overcame his wheel chair by installing a loud speaker in his car, and hired himself to advertise events in all the surrounding communities. I remember him as someone I was proud of. There was always time in his schedule to stop if he saw us, roll down his window and see how we were doing. Uncle Tommy lived with his family near Lead and Deadwood, home of the Black Hills Gold Mine and also hundreds of true stories about Annie Oakley, Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane and Jack McCall. Of course the legacy of those cowboys is somewhere in my story. I dreamed of chasing the bandits, shooting my pistol, all while standing on the back of my racing pony. More frequently, though I was a Sioux Indian princess who was constantly exploring her surroundings, never getting lost because the Black Hills helped me keep my bearings. My name was Black Shawl. This is a substantial part of who I am. My story is woven all through each painting that I do.
This is also why I named my most recent landscape “A Home Coming”.