Wright's Indian Art > Artist: Wallace Ben (Navajo)

From the Four Corners area of the Navajo reservation, he is son and grandson of medicine men, and a medicine man himself. His intricate, elaborately detailed sand paintings are very, very close to the traditional ceremonial designs, with colors and number of feathers, etc. tweaked, so as not to blaspheme and anger the spirits invoked.

He went out with his grandfather at toddler age, to collect stones to be ground up for the five traditional colors: terra cotta (red sandstone), turquoise, white (gypsum), black (coal), and gold (ocher). Wallace has also mentored several other, leading, traditional-style sand painters. However, he remains the most intricate, most traditional of them all.

A big man, he carefully dribbles grains of colored sand through his fingers to create the complex patterns of dots, and filaments.