By Devon Jackson
Early on during his years at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, NM, Brent Greenwood had a choice to make: keep painting the way he always had, or change. He had been painting in a style he learned in art classes at Oklahoma City University. It was a style that critics and instructors had often praised him for, but it was also a style used by so many others in his native state of Oklahoma. “I had been very influenced by the Kiowa or Oklahoma style of art,” says Greenwood. It is also known as the Bacone style, after Bacone College in Muskogee, OK, where in 1935, Acee Blue Eagle, the school’s first art department director, popularized paintings of Native peoples that emphasized flat colors, a two-dimensional perspective, and distinct lines throughout the composition.
As intent as Greenwood first was on sticking with the Oklahoma style he’d grown up on, he soon realized he could do what he’d always done but expand upon it and make it deeper, more interesting; he could evolve a style that would be his and his alone…
Featured August 2007
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