Juan De La Cruz Painting 1967

[Dallas Themshirts]

Cofounder of Jupiter Artland Foundation, the award winning Sculpture Park near Edinburgh, he has also served as Chair of Edinburgh Art Festival. He also serves as a Trustee of Little Sparta Trust, The Royal Botanical Gardens Edinburgh, The Dovecot Studios and Chair of the Arts Working Group at Inverleith House.

Alan Johnston was born in Scotland in 1945; he studied at the Edinburgh College of Art between 1967 and 1970. Latterly he was Professor at the College where he obtained a reputation for instilling in his students a sense of the boundless possibilities of art as well as paving the way for Scottish artists such as Douglas Gordon and Callum Innes to find a place on the international stage.

Alan has been at the forefront of contemporary art in Scotland since the 1960s, and has exhibited his fine abstract art in galleries across the world, most frequently in Germany, The Netherlands and especially Japan.

My work explores spatial contexts and relations through drawing and architectural construction, reflecting on the spatial and tactual implications in architecture where perceptual notions are rendered as common factors in sight and touch. This field is closely related to the work of Patrick Geddes, Philosophical Generalism, and Gesamtkunstwerk. This is a comparative context, which has its roots in the practice of art, architecture and visual thinking in the West and the East, and relates to concepts and practices such as Wabi Sabi. I engage in collaborative initiatives in art and architecture with Professor Shinichi Ogawa, Tokyo, and Neil Gillespie, Edinburgh.

The film was made in May 2022. It records the exhibition at the Pier Gallery which brings together a group of paintings from the 1980s with a series of new works, and a drawing made directly on the gallery wall.

Architect Ben Tindall takes us through the process of working with the owners of Jupiter Artland, from initial concepts to the finished Visitor Facilities and changes to the main house. Ben is particularly interested in the practice of working with artists and craftspeople. His fascinating talk includes some of the problems that threatened the project.

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Tony Da (1940-2008) was the son of Popovi Da and grandson of Maria Martinez. He grew up surrounded by some of the finest potters and painters at San Ildefonso Pueblo and his early education emphasized those traditional arts. He lived with his grandmother Maria while his father was in the Army during World War II and she felt great promise in him as an artist. When he started school, though, it was quickly felt that he was most likely dyslexic. After finishing his first eight years in the Pojoaque Valley schools, he moved on to St. Michael's High School in Santa Fe. He was unhappy there and transferred to Santa Fe High where he graduated in 1958. He then attended Western New Mexico College (in Silver City) for a year before joining the US Navy for four years. It was at Western New Mexico that he was exposed to Mimbres pottery and its imagery and that made a life-long impression on him. It was also at Western New Mexico that he was exposed to modern methods of painting and ceramics production.

When he returned to San Ildefonso in 1964 he became fascinated with the pottery that his grandmother and father were creating together. At that time he apprenticed himself to Maria and began learning to make pottery in earnest. His progress was such that three years later his works appeared alongside Maria's and Popovi's in the Three Generations Show at the US Department of the Interior in Washington, DC. In 1967 he also had his first booth at the Gallup InterTribal Ceremonials. He took eight pieces of his art to the show and earned four First Place ribbons and one Second Place ribbon for pottery, two more First Place ribbons in painting and one more in sculpture. One of his paintings and one of his pots also received "Excellent" ribbons.

Tony didn't produce a lot of pottery during his short career and he mainly produced redware, blackware and two-tone bowls, plates, jars, turtles and bears. His favorite designs seem to have been kokopelli, avanyu (water serpent), buffalo, bear and cloud, sometimes painted and sometimes etched (sgraffito).

Tony was able to build something new on the foundation of his family, who had built something new on the foundation of their predecessors. His work has been called inspired and innovative and it has made an enormous impact on modern pueblo ceramics, especially at San Ildefonso and Santa Clara. Tony was the first Pueblo potter to inlay strands of heishi, coral and turquoise beads, often in incised channels around the tall necks of vases. He also painted and incised designs found on ancient Mimbres pottery. In the late 1960s he was developing low relief sgraffito designs. He also became famous for his two-tone pottery bear fetishes, often wrapped and inlaid with channel beading. He participated in the Santa Fe Indian Market between 1967 and 1976, earning several First Place ribbons for his pottery.

In an interview in 1971 Tony said, "If my work is satisfactory to me then I am content. I do it mostly for my own pleasure." He also famously said, "I'm not really influenced by current trends. I do what I like. I learned pottery making from my grandmother but I have never had any lessons in painting. That is all self-taught. I use a lot of drafting in my paintings and the style is the same. A crooked line bothers me. I can't make a crooked line."

On April 15, 1982, Tony had a motorcycle accident on a gravel road that caused a severe brain injury. It didn't end his life but it ended his pottery-making career. He was able to continue painting but his creations were much simpler and didn't have the depth of field of his previous work. Like his father before him, he was a perfectionist and he'd felt he was about to make an extraordinary breakthrough in his work before the accident. Who knows what he might have achieved had he been wearing a helmet that fateful day.

Tony Da's influence has been such that The Life and Art of Tony Da was first published in 2011 and passed through ten printings very quickly. That same year the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe opened Creative Spark! The Life and Art of Tony Da, the largest and most comprehensive showing ever of Tony Da paintings and pottery. Some of the works shown had never been seen in public before.

Tony's wife Lou died before he did. His son Jarrod Da is a renowned painter who is forging into new areas in Native American painting while Tony's daughter Royale Da is a news anchor with one of the network television stations in Albuquerque.

San Ildefonso Pueblo is located about twenty miles northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico, mostly on the eastern bank of the Rio Grande. Although their ancestry has been traced to prehistoric pueblos in the Mesa Verde area, their most recent ancestral home is in the area of Bandelier National Monument, the prehistoric village of Tsankawi in particular. Tsankawi abuts the reservation on its northwest side.

A mission church was built in 1617 and named for San Ildefonso. Hence the name. Before that the village was called Powhoge, "where the water cuts through" (in Tewa). Today's pueblo was established as long ago as the 1300s. When the Spanish arrived in 1540, they estimated the village population at about 2,000.

That mission was destroyed during the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 and when Don Diego de Vargas returned to reclaim the San Ildefonso area in 1694, he found virtually all the Tewa people on top of nearby Black Mesa. After an extended siege the two sides negotiated a treaty and the people returned to their villages. However, the next 250 years were not good for them. The Spanish swine flu pandemic of 1918 reduced the pueblo's population to about 90. Their population has grown to more than 600 now but the only economic activity available on the pueblo involves creating art in one form or another. The only other work is off-pueblo. San Ildefonso's population is small compared to neighboring Santa Clara Pueblo, but the pueblo maintains its own religious traditions and ceremonial feast days.

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