Portrait of Tahoma
WHEW! Haven’t been here for ten whole days but we have a good excuse. We sent the completed manuscript to the printer yesterday.
Charnell had the task of getting permissions to reproduce pictures, then formatting them to fit, deciding which ones went where (with some input from Vera), making color prints, checking the color, and lot of other technical stuff. Vera wrote and formatted the captions.
In the end, we had more than 260 illustrations! When you get the Tahoma book, (working title Quincy Tahoma: The Life and Legacy of a Navajo Artist,) you will be seeing over 100 paintings that have never been seen before in public. So many private donors shared their paintings with us that we have paintings from every year of his painting life, starting when he was a teenager.
We also have photographs that were given to us by girlfriends, school friends, and descendents of friends who knew him during his lifetime.
This collection of photographs of Tahoma seems amazing when you realize that it took years of research before we saw what he looked like in a photograph. When the Circle of Light tribute to outstanding Navajos was created in the Tanner Trading Post in Gallup New Mexico, we were told they searched for a very long time and finally found ONE picture of Quincy Tahoma.
More about the manuscript in future posts, and why not subscribe by e-mail, so that you can learn all the secrets of writing a biography?
I’m very interested to hear about how you put together this biography. It sounds fascinating
Yes, Brette, always fascinating, if sometimes grueling. Charnell started more than 12 years ago, and I got involved about 10 years ago. Of course we were doing other things in our lives at the same time, but still…..