Here is the picture, Young Plains Indian, on display in the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art that, on balance, I liked the most because it is so evocative of much of what I have been blogging about during this part of our journey. The life of the artist, James Bama, from Manhattan, New York to Cody, Wyoming is 100 per cent American and so are his chosen themes, the rodeo, trappers, mountain men, native Indians, loosely bracketed as ‘Western art’. His particular form of photo realism may not be the greatest of art but I defy anybody not to be moved by the pride and optimism of the handsome young man, dressed in all his tribal finery, in the picture. To get that luminous effect (it probably doesn’t come across in my copy), Bama used an old photograph and repainted it, thus further emphasising (to my mind, at least) the sense of lost promise for, as we all know, that young man’s proud optimism was misplaced.
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