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Ray Swanson(1937-2004)Returning Home 14 x 8in
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Ray Swanson (1937-2004)
signed, dated and inscribed 'Ray Swanson / © 87 / CA' (lower left) and signed and dated again and inscribed with title (on the reverse)
gouache on board
14 x 8in
Executed in 1987.
Footnotes
Provenance
The artist.
Acquired by the late owner from the above, 1987.
Exhibited
Phoenix, Arizona, Phoenix Art Museum, Cowboy Artists of America: Twenty-Second Annual Exhibition, October 30-November 22, 1987.
Literature
S.H. McGarry, Honoring The Western Tradition: The L.D. "Brink" Brinkman Collection, Kerrville, Texas, 2003, pp. 160, 296, illustrated.
According to S.H. McGarry, in Honoring The Western Tradition: The L.D. "Brink" Brinkman Collection, the artist Ray Swanson's background having grown up on a farm served as influence for much of the work he produced throughout his career. McGarry explains, "His subject matter comes from the Hopi and Navajo reservations which he first visited while living in California in the mid-1960s. Since then he has come to know many of the people in his paintings, counting them as friends and extended family. Drawn to texture from worn wood to weathered faces . . . Swanson documents the day-to-day activities of a people whose rich yet rapidly changing heritage lives on in his oil and watercolor paintings. 'God created all people with beauty, and that is how I will paint them,' Swanson told his biographer Tom O'Keefe"1 Among his paintings of elder Navajo tribesmen, McGarry said of the present work, "the man in Returning Home, whose distinguished age and demeanor are set off by contemporary combinations of buckskin moccasins, blue jeans, a rumpled sports jacket, felt hat and cane."2
1 S.H. McGarry, Honoring The Western Tradition: The L.D. "Brink" Brinkman Collection, Kerrville, Texas, 2003, p. 296.
2 Ibid.




















