Walpi, Circa 1947

Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck.

This is from one of Dad’s old sketchbooks, which he gave me recently. It is not possible to adequately describe the importance his art has for me. It’s my whole visual language – the smell of oil paint and those remarkable paintings I stared at as a child, before I had words and experience to describe and understand what I was seeing.

I’ve long been interested in those moments when everything changes, and this sketchbook is a remarkable document in Dad’s artistic evolution. He was a Pennsylvania boy who saw The West as a young soldier and returned after the war. This sketchbook in part documents that return, and the resulting transition from an artist interested in the foreground to the artist I grew up with, interested in the great spaces of the West and the colors that inhabit them. To see it happening first hand its to have the privilege of traveling back to a time before I was born and glimpsing Dad’s artistic mind.