Excerpt from Annotated Bibliography of American Indian Painting<br><br>Contemporary American Indian painting began with the discovery by Indians that they could paint with white men's tools and materials. They had, however, little inclination to adopt the European or academic approach to painting. Products as they were of an ancient ancestry, they followed a law of perspective quite different from that of the Western world.<br><br>Indian painters did not need models, nor did they proceed in piecemeal fashion - sketching and erasing, measuring and rearranging. As Mary Austin said, the artist simply selected a subject from his own mind, sat down with a blank piece of paper and a pencil, began in the lower left hand corner and continued on steadily until the whole composition lay before him complete in every Many Indian painters abandoned preliminary sketching and relied solely on their phenomenal memories.<br><br>The rare ability to retain in mind the entire concept for a painting made it possible for Pueblo artists to paint ceremonial dancers in suspended action; for Sioux artists to depict the violent action of the hunt; for Navajo and Apache artists to paint deer vaulting clumps of bushes, or their beloved horses racing across uncluttered landscapes.<br><br>About the Publisher<br><br>Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com<br><br>This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.