Allan Mardon, a graduate of the Ontario College of Art in Toronto, completed postgraduate study at Edinburgh School of Art in Scotland and the Slade School of Fine Art, University of London. He designed graphics for CBC Television and served as an animator for the National Film Board of Canada. In 1964, he immigrated to the United States where he enjoyed a long and successful career in commercial illustration before moving to Arizona in 1989 to pursue a career in fine art.
After moving to the Southwest, Mardon became inspired by the graphic beauty and history of his new surroundings and began to approach his canvas in an entirely different way, embarking upon a series of paintings with Native American themes. Employing a primitive and narrative style, these works depict in historic detail the artifacts and beauty of indigenous cultures of bygone times.
“Traditional Western artists are stuck in a freeze frame of one historical event,” says Kenneth L. Schuster, director of the Bradford Brinton Memorial (Big Horn, WY), a museum dedicated to Western art that featured a summer-long one-man show of Mardon’s work beginning in May 1998. “But Mardon breaks with this Charles Russell-Frederic Remington tradition. His work is both modern, in that he brings a new viewpoint to the traditional form of Western art, and classic in the way he reverts to the way artists of centuries past presented a scene in many vignettes. This makes his work intricate and exciting, with nothing sentimental or romantic in it. Because Western art, as traditionally rendered, is undergoing a significant change, I believe he is setting the new trend in that genre,” says Schuster.
Mardon’s paintings can be found in galleries and museums throughout the country as well as extensive public, corporate and private collections in the United States and abroad. The Battle of Greasy Grass, Mardon’s highly-acclaimed and complicated, large-scale (11.5′x6.5′) painting of the Custer Battle, has been the centerpiece of an exhibition at the Whitney Gallery of Western Art, Buffalo Bill Historical Center, in Cody, WY, since March, 1999. It has also been featured in several magazines, including most recently Montana’s Big Sky Journal.
Many of my paintings have let me explore the spiritual, war and social life of the Indians. Through my research I have discovered that this past century’s Native American religious movement was no abstract spiritual experience but the Indians’ very tangible response to the duress encroaching European civilization pressed upon their very existence. They had lost their land, their main source of livelihood - the buffalo - and their traditional way of life. And they were dying of white man’s diseases, sometimes purposefully forced upon them in an effort to affecttheir extinction.
In the past, we whites have portrayed Indian life from our point of view, forgetting our greed, forgetting the incredible atrocities we committed against Native Americans. Even though a white man can in no way fully understand the complexities of Indian spiritual life, they impress me mightily. I know I will have made some mistakes in my assumptions, but I’m doing my best to archive their history without bringing white prejudice to my approach.
People find my painting themes and style available to them but perhaps don’t know why. It may be because of the traditional elements I use that are archetypal. I combine the simple visual approach of man’s earliest art with the roaming layout of ancient tapestries and murals. -Allan Mardon
