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Reviewed by:
  • Rance Hood: Mystic Painter
  • Patricia A. Etter (bio)
Rance Hood: Mystic Painter by James J. Hester and Rance Hood. University of New Mexico Press, 2006

If one cannot afford a Rance Hood painting or sculpture, then this beautiful and well-published book should serve as a fine substitute. Some seventy pages of color plates reproduce his works held in both private and museum collections and include Hood’s interpretation, which adds greatly to the understanding of each painting. Also included are 134 smaller images in “Catalog of Selected Works,” many in Hood’s own collection. The first appendix, “Career Resume,” details both outdoor and gallery exhibits throughout the country, along with books and articles dealing with Hood’s art. A second appendix provides a timeline of American Indian painters in Oklahoma from pre-1875 to the present time.

Certainly, one does not have to be an art historian to be drawn to Rance Hood’s works. He uses clear and brilliant colors in dramatic fashion to set mood. His figures literally dance across the canvas. His warriors on horseback showing hair, manes, and tails streaming in the wind almost defy description as if caught in suspended animation.

James Hester, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, University of Colorado, worked closely with Rance Hood to present this biography, which focuses on Hood’s art “in its context within Native American art, history, and culture.” In addition, Hester demonstrates that Hood’s art is grounded in two Comanche traditions: “the warrior on horseback and the symbolism in the Peyote religion” (xv). He has also done a fine job of letting Hood tell his own story.

Rance Hood writes that he was born to a traditional Comanche family and lived with his maternal grandparents from whom he learned the Comanche language and traditions. He grew up on a small farm in Cache, attending the Post Oak Mission School not far from Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where he learned to speak English. His first attempts at drawing were made in the sand with a stick while his grandmother encouraged him to draw Indian things like teepees and horses. He dropped out of high school and followed his older brother to Los Angeles where he obtained a set of cheap watercolors and soon began to paint. It wasn’t long before he sold a painting of a horse for $15 and [End Page 121] realized that art was in his future. Ultimately he returned to Oklahoma, where he continued painting and selling on a regular basis, with horses a dominant theme. Hood did not attend art school, but studied other artists’ work by visiting museums and galleries. He considers T. C. Cannon and Jerome Tiger among his mentors. Another influence was thought to be Blackbear Bosin. More recently he has shown some Jackson Pollock influence by adding streaks and drops of paint over or around the figures in his painting. Using that technique in his Native American Family he wrote: “I painted this with the abstract background to try to show the viewer what the Indian goes through in the white world. It is very complicated for a Native American” (91).

Hester quotes numerous art critics and scholars who have attempted to understand and analyze Hood’s work. Perhaps Hood himself is the best one to explain his art: “I see something through medicine, then paint symbols that are my feelings about what I saw. In that manner every true Indian painting is an abstraction—the Indian artist does not carry his brushes and canvas to the field and paint a tree exactly as it stands there. If he feels something about a tree he paints that feeling: spiritual revelation symbolized by drawing from objects existing in the conscious world . . . Color is as you see it; the Indian artist sees it in his own, ageless way . . . My painting style explains itself. I am Comanche” (39).

Patricia A. Etter

Patricia A. Etter is recently retired from Arizona State University as curator of the American Indian Research Library, Labriola Center. She currently serves on the editorial committee of Western Historical Quarterly, and on the board of directors of the Oregon California Trails Association. She is author of several...

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