There are a couple of decades of my work that went undocumented! Most of that is all the humans and angels I created and sold at joint shows with my mom when she had shows at our house for her paintings. I am horrified now at my record keeping, but I have found a small selection of my human photos. Like my animals, they had names and stories.
I found that humans limited me in a lot of ways. I wasn't able to capture all the irony, sarcasm, and humor that the animals portray without me really even trying. Switching to animals allowed my creativity to roam freely and I will never go back!
One who I have kept, however, is Bernard New Calf. He got his name for several reasons. I grew up fairly near a number of Indian reservations in Montana and the last names of a number of people I came across always interested me. Bernard's appearance is a combination of a lot of my reading about and travels around Montana, the Pacific Northwest, and Alaska but his name came from my daughter when she was a toddler and couldn't say her name properly. She used to tell people she was "Yaya New Calf" instead of Yara Noor Skaf. Sometimes she would tell people she was Honeysuckle Light Shoemaker, a very rough translation of her name from Arabic.
I decided that New Calf would be my adopted native American name for any of my creations, animal or human, with native roots. Often a horse or a buffalo will show up as part of this family. Here are a few of my past humans.
