¡Colores!; 513; He Who Stands in the Sun: The Paintings of T.C. Cannon; M. Lord Interview 1

this book yeah right two three four five seven eight nine are eighty seven but if you get a chance to get him to read that book that i gave him that sort of the oracle it's called cities of gold have you heard about this about those parts of hits include it's about this guy from santa fe was a harvard historian who thought it'd be a fun thing to do to retrace courthouse steps from the arizona border here on horseback so i got this seriously ok thank

you dc and you know that is in some way you can tap into that estimate intent on that show that even for going up educate me the us any individual or in you know as i know tease etc cannon was a guy who leave from a hard won right off the bat who was it wasn't easy to get these

again it was a very talented artist he was a person who has very very fond of humanity all parts of it all types of that he said he was almost like will rogers you know i never met a person that he didn't like and he always was interested in people where you came from what you did i mean he loved the outdoors he beat he like the indian this i love that of being outside of la still a lot of what we did was camping and that was as i said i was teaching him to fly fish at one point in time i now i understand it's i'm rambling just from kind of it i got an otc in nineteen seventy four know beckett was way before they're going to start over again i get an otc cannon in about nineteen when he graduated from my a ballpark come back to nineteen sixty four now owes sixty five was i gave a little like ok

so i met him and sixty four i had come back from the university of notre dame and was getting guitar lessons around santa fe and somehow i can't remember how i got asked to teach a guitar class for a bunch of young students at the institute of american indian arts and that's where i met dc he came out i was due yet know i understand i understand i am i was teaching guitar at the institute of american indian arts in nineteen sixty four sixty five and met him along with a lot of the other our students that were there at the time who were a passionate interest in folk music well i've never really had any friends that were native americans before and i never really knew anything about native americans and other than you know they i grew up in santa fe we lived in the pueblo's they were on the plaza and that was

really about my some experience so he and i had a very very strong like i'll for bob dylan and at that particular time not that many people cared for bob dylan because that's when this stuff was very rough and unpolished and but we liked the lyrics and so i think that's probably the thing that drew us together cause i knew how to sing bob dylan songs and he wanted to learn how to sing bob dylan's obscene he sang bob dylan songs just like bob dylan at that time his voice was the same when he did not know how to play the guitar that well and so that's really probably what drew us closer together than anything else i just noticed you know he was he was a nice guy and he he he was he spoke very well and you know maybe that surprised me a little bit because at that point in time in my life i don't know that either thought of native americans as being very well spoken peace you know you get ez he spoke well he understood the the meaning of some of the lyrics and

that kind of thing so you know that that really probably is what that drew us closer together in their announcement from there i went into going into the studio and watching him painting and you know realizing that he could do some things that i was never going to be able to do but it was a real fun time there then with all those people because i just discovered that native americans were as mormon family and you know probably more real and genuine there's a lot of the people that i'd met prior to that time or two you're welcome yeah and it's you know it's hard to to to sit there and go abc be you know cause these kinds of free flowing discussions things will pop into your mind that cetera but i'm you know there's there's everything from from

his aa passion for the oppressed i mean he felt very strongly about the peoples of the world there's that did not have a fair shake and he knew about them and he was interested in them he he loved women and he he really did and he always was it not involved with specifically but friends with one or two or three women at any particular point in time he young that city has the story what are some of the kinds of things we deliver the story of the band the story of the opening three ok burn the feces first art exhibition in santa fe which i all in fact there's another story that goes along with it was it a

gallery in santa fe that can't remember the name of now but tom the first story that has to do with an exhibition is that we were taking paintings from his house over to the gallery and we're using my car and i think he had an all red pickup truck at that point in time and to his truck and we had put a couple of pay we we had paintings leaning up against a sidecar and weird paintings on top of a car we're putting paintings in the car so i got in the car we drive over and get there and were unloading the penny he's in dc said well where's such and such and so so to paint and they were gone and what we said oh my gosh we must've left them on the roof of the car a nice armoire go back to yemen to season nine of go back again and there probably weren't that good anywhere or to care we never did then somebody found them on tour and somebody has them and if they're watching this i hope that they know what they got it they found these paintings somewhere in downtown santa fe nineteen i must've been about nineteen maybe seventy to seventy three the rest of the story we're yes

absolutely i thought you know wow just like dad and he said no no he said they were damn good and he did that and he would give away their bid their hastert there's probably one tenth known of what he did because everywhere he went if he'd stay was somebody you'd give them a little sketch or a little primer if if somebody said oh i really like that cheney he just give a tour and i know he did an awful lot of that everywhere he went and it would be interesting some time to see if you could find out exactly what is out there as i have in the story was that dc decided to serve at this opening a concoction called part the punch which was basically equal parts of grain alcohol vodka and great tips in here and great big bowl of this big punch bowl of the stuff sitting on his table and so people came and they started sipping a punch and in about fifteen minutes the noise level in the room was just i mean at an all time high and about forty five minutes after that the place was empty and the

show was sold out i mean people just came got up you know i got to that point spend their money and went out the door and that was it that was already sold everything that's it wow yeah between al qaeda he does i don't know that he did it intentionally but that was when a lot of alcoholics things i've ever seen in my life you know people certainly remember what they've done the next morning on tour i can tell you another quick little story that when he had his studio in what is now the samples go center in santa fe but he used to be a warehouse basically and he rented the studio and there he really had that crawl back through the bowels of this place and in order to find him he had to go find the guy who ran this warehouse and you had asked for fred c dobbs and

fred c dobbs if you remember was humphrey bogart character and treasure of the sierra madre in which to see ourselves just a terrific movie so if you know how to ask for fred c dobbs and you get taken to the studio and if you went missing for dc can admit that's a lot of that really is you know is not here i can't help it you say well there was i think the that particular time in native american indian arts was one of the most significant synergistic things i've ever seen there was so much raw talent there and there was an attitude of of total freedom of expression the students could pretty much do anything they wanted to do and they were encouraged to do it and made dave borrowed ideas from one another and they collaborated on things and they were all involved in musical a great many of them more than dump it was a very very

close knit community and of course you know some of the finest of today's native american artists came out of that place at that time and that it was just an explosion of stuff and i i don't know that there's ever been anything that intense since i still go up to santa fe periodically i'll go to be the show's of the students that they have every spring and dump it it was it was it was so new and it was so exciting and you know in the context of the time it was the it was the late sixties you know america was being burned down and torn apart from within and right in the midst of all of these you had people who probably prior to that point and time had not been given total free rein you it also marked a change in the way i think that and that native americans were educated in terms of you know instead of all of us telling you this is what you have to learn how to do and this is what you're going to do they basically said you just go do what everyone stand back and we'll just wasn't suited to employee what they did so really was and even today

i still have a sense of what was going on at that place and it was really neat being involved in being in the middle of it the only thing i know about pc cannon then i can only speak for him because of experience with him was that when he got interested in his art he started to study everything that had anything to do with anything that he might be thinking about painting whether it was historical whether it was i mean i remember him for is poring over a book of victorian furniture because as he was wanting trying to paint a chair in a particular painting of his and he wanted it to be exactly the way that it should have been so he was studying victorian furniture so he really applied himself to his craft and only came back from vietnam he felt that the first thing he had to do was go get better technically he just did not feel that he would even though at that point in time he was already starting to gain some recognition that he just felt that he said i'm nowhere near good enough i know

where have near that the skills to you know mix color and to do all of those kinds of things so that's why i went back to school just to do that and he was getting ready for a dive he does next step was to go to europe and he was going to go spend a couple of years in europe studying all the great masters and you know looking everything that they had done so he heaped he prepared himself a lot i mean he he was very very interested in in knowing everything he could know about what he was thinking about and about the time in which she lived and he probably got ideas just from that he was you know he was very astute he knew what was going on in america he you know he was informed in terms of news and the community you just paid a lot of attention it's huge so i didn't you know and i think that that mark one of the major turning points of native

american arts from what people are used to essentially called mar two to art that that had relevant subject matter too the id id id marked a change from the sort of primitive anti are two expressionist art to where they were painting and making comments on social situations they were doing it without any fear recrimination you know that's about the time that dee brown's book bury my heart wounded knee came out which i think is one of the main things it sort of woke up america's guilt complex about some of the things that happen to native americans and then that part was coming out of that same period of time in that same context and they were writing about and campaigning about those same kinds of subtext there's a very black dc campaigning centers painting of and i can remember his name but he was the indian chief it was frozen in the snow after the massacre wounded knee and it's a very stark

black painting but it's very very powerful women says an awful lot so they were able to to express themselves that way they did it in a fashion that they had never done i think up to that point and i'm i'm not a great student of native american art you know there was such a major change in in what they felt they could do in the statements that they could make they were just making pretty things to sell two people to hang in their homes are starting to make powerful statements you see you all i don't think he was that i don't think he's he was a leader in this movement per se because there are other people that were doing the same thing i think i think that he was able to maybe be more specific in the statements that he was making and i think inspired a lot of people by doing that i am but i don't think he was the only one nor was he the one that dreamed up the idea or thought about it or anything else he sees the present

i think i think he said that point in time was like all of us were at that point in time you know we work we were somewhat disillusioned with the establishment we realized that there number one there are so many of us as we were the baby boomer generation that that we could make enough noise to actually get you know the grown ups in washington to at least acknowledge that we were there and and you know our music that music that we listened to it the time demonstrated that and the kinds of things that we were interested in at the time demonstrated that man and i think he's he was caught up in that whole thing to a certain degree i did get caught up in the belief that you know gee maybe we can make a difference maybe we can make the world a better place and we really believe that we thought we could levitate the pentagon point in time so i'm in and i think that's what he was going through a very good experience i think was very similar to my own in terms of

just how i was becoming the things i was learning about you know i was realizing that native americans were really nice people and just as intelligent and and and literate and everything else is i was in that that there was a whole portion of american history that i didn't know about i think deasy was discovering that you know not all white people were these whatever particular stereotype bay he may have had at that particular point in time that you know we're all we can all like each other and get along with each other we're here nobody knew it was him it was so fast you know miller the scene in cat ballou it where at the end of it the guy says oh never saw men get through day so fast in my life when winnie does the thing he's taken an oath and then he passes out that's about what that thing was like oh and here i think the conference was only

and we i think we both shared we we liked a lot of the same things and we had a lot of the same opinions and attitudes which was kind of surprising again you know maybe as much for him as it was for me that you could get that close to somebody that traditionally you really were exposed to get close to arm we its greatest art and that it disclosed blank only a lot of fun together i mean you know it well you know when the things we love to do this is set up until three o'clock in the morning and then drink beer and sing music or listen to music sometimes he when he was traveling around the country he would show up in santa fe at one o'clock in the morning with a case of course beer under one arm so a whole bunch of new records and the other arm and then we would stay up until the sun came up he used to put a fair amount of strain on my first marriage when

we've had this small baby in dc would come on in the town at two o'clock in the morning and one a stay up and listen to music in and play music and drink beer so we did have a lot of fun together oh yeah oh yeah i did i did i always do it with you you know it adds it gets funnier i can i gotta get going on a subject and and you know first for whatever reason and i'm not particularly nervous but the words to start coming yeah five dollars while some of the most the best times' and i remember with him are the things what were we really seemed to be the closest we spent a lot of time in the back country of them were

national monument and it was something that i had done a lot before it etc and something he'd never done until he came to santa families to go back that we just go out and spend the night somewhere around the bush and dumb that place i feel