Buffy Sainte Marie was
Born at Piapot (Cree) Indian Reserve in the Qu'Appelle Valley of
Saskatchewan. She was raised in Maine and Massachusetts and received a
Ph.D. in Fine Art from the University of Massachusetts. She also holds
degrees in both Oriental Philosophy and teaching. As a college student
in the early 1960s and 70s, Buffy Sainte-Marie became known as a writer
of bone penetrating protest songs and soul piercing love songs (times of
civil disobedience, psychedelic Flower Power, nuclear proliferation and
the Vietnam war).
Virtually alone, she toured North America's
poverty stricken reservations, college campuses and packed concert
halls, singing and affecting hearts and
souls, young and old, igniting consciences and creating awareness along
the way. She encountered vast critical acclaim and also critical
misunderstanding from audiences and record labels who anticipated a
profit-making "Pocahontas in Fringes", and not the raw talent and gut
wrenching dose of Native Indian medicine wrapped in a parcel of genetic
Cree poetry, wisdom and with the voice of an angel.
By the age of 24, Buffy Sainte-Marie had
extensively traveled and appeared all over Europe, Australia, Canada,
and Asia, receiving numerous awards, high honors, medals and her songs
such as "Until It's Time for You to Go" were recorded by Elvis Presley,
Barbra Streisand and Cher. Her "Universal Soldier" became the world's
anthem of the peace movement protesting Vietnam along with Bob Dylan's
"Masters of War".
She disappeared suddenly from the mainstream
airwaves during the Lyndon Johnson years as a result of her social
activism and was blacklisted with others such as Eartha Kitt, Taj Mahal,
Lenny Bruce and a medley of other outspoken singer songwriters artists
and performers. Her name was included on White House stationery as
among those whose music "deserved to be suppressed".
In Indian country and in the rest of the world her
fame grew as she still continued to appear at grassroots concerts, AIM
events and other activist benefits.
While still in her twenties, Buffy established a
scholarship foundation to fund Native American studies;
she spent time with indigenous people in distant
countries, received a medal from Queen Elizabeth II and even presented a
colloquium to Europe's philosophers. She has made more than 17 albums,
three of her own television specials, spent five years on Sesame Street,
scored movies and helped to found Canada's 'Music of Aboriginal Canada'
JUNO category. She raised a son, taught Digital Music as an adjunct
professor at several colleges and won an Academy Award for the song "Up
Where We Belong".
She is also a pioneer in the computerised digital
arts as well as computerized music. Begun in 1984, Buffy Sainte-Marie's
dazzling large scale digital works were among the
first to be seen in museums and galleries across
North America. Her illuminescent images are re-created as limited
edition Ilfordchrome photographic prints,
ranging in size from two feet to nine feet high.
She describes her electronic paintings as
"Painting with Light". Beginning in her "wet" studio with
regular brushes and paper/canvas, she imports images into her Macintosh
at home in Hawaii, and the works become digital.
Using mainly Photoshop software, she combines a vast range of
kaleidoscopic colours with occasional pieces of
scanned-in apparitional Edward R. Curtis looking
photographs of native Dakota warriors, a Yaqui
dancer, an Arapaho elder; dressed with feathers and adorned with
beads, fur and bones to create large radiantly lit
vibrant computerized paintings which she also describes as being "both
reflective and deep, like new car paint". Once she's turned the images
into photographs, she paints them with discreet applications of
metallic dyes. They begin and end in the "real studio", but the middle
is a combination of photography and digital pixel painting.
The life-size Ilfordchrome photos of paintings
such as "Elder Brothers" are saturated in a metallic sea of neon "Liquid
Sunshine" swirling like psychedelic gasoline patterns floating on water;
bringing to mind William Wordsworth's "The pleasures the mind derives
from the similitude in dissimilitude".
As in her music - which goes from the primitive
voice and mouthbow - to electronic scores and hightech delivery,
it is Buffy's use of the ancient conjoined with the
technological, the intuitional with the empirical,
her emotional abandon with her cool cerebral ancient philosophies, which
give these paintings a melodious equilibrium and spiritual akari.
These works have ingrained authenticity and
polyphonic attributes as if made by electromagnetic tessellations to the
music of Bach or the tranquillizing flute playing of R.Carlos Nakai.
After all these years, Buffy's art and music is
still full of passion and joy that one can hear in her breathtaking
voice can also be seen in her radiant "Paintings with Light".
John LeKay
September 2005
www.creative-native.com
