(gentle music) - Although I've been painting for 40, almost 50 years, I consider myself an emerging artist.

If you grew up in my family, you probably were some type of artist, that being beading, we learned a loom work and we also learned a lot about basket making.

I was different in the family though and I knew it when I was very young, I wanted to paint.

I remember at six years old I mixed dirt, gravel, sand, whatever I could find, lots of water.

And I took that to our barn and I remember putting my brush in there and stirring that and started to paint on the side of our barn.

This is green, this is blue, this is red.

And I know I could see those colors.

And I remember thinking even then, wouldn't it be wonderful to see real art?

(gentle music) Let's jump ahead some 50 years or so.

And now I'm going to galleries to see my work.

I've been painting many years secretly and I used to just paint with oils primarily.

They were landscapes and very, very traditional landscape.

And I was painting all the time.

And so I started to give away my paintings and then I started running out of family and friends.

And so I started to throw away my paintings 'cause I just couldn't store them anymore.

And my sister found them and she said, some homes that I'm in, they may not have a lot of artwork.

Would it be okay if I gave them your work?

From that, I got a call from the me Miikanan Gallery in at the Watermark Art Center in Bemidji.

Please consider submitting some of your artwork to the opening of our gallery.

I'm gonna submit something that I feel is different and that's what they selected.

Prior to that, I would get the comment often, you're Native American, so your painting has to look Native American.

And that's what I was hearing but it wasn't what I was feeling.

And so my response to that was to quit painting.

If you know artists, you know that they don't do very well if they're not creating.

And after a while, I spoke with my wife and I said, let's travel, let's start looking at art.

And I was introduced to a lot of native artists that I didn't know existed.

Many of them didn't look like there was something Indian in it.

They were different.

And I found the work of George Morrison.

I remember walking into the museum and I think it was the Whitney Museum, and seeing his work, my heart flooded because I was seeing something that I had seen in my head.

If I just had this freedom to paint what I wanted to paint, this is what I would paint.

And I looked, and there's George Morrison, Ojibwe artist and one of the statements that I'll never forget was that he said, I'm not a Native American artist.

I am an artist who happens to be Native American.

The best way to honor your heritage is to paint what you feel.

Then my work started to get more abstract and contemporary in nature.

Lots of color, lots of movement and I went back to my landscapes.

But they started to look, they started to look a lot different.

When I start a new piece, there's not a lot of pre-planning beyond the colors I know that I'm going to feature and the size of the canvas.

I just start putting down paint.

I like nice shades of browns and reds.

I like to paint with the brightest colors I can possibly find.

I like to use fluorescent paint in my work, since I'm exclusively acrylics, I use the the color right from the tube.

Most of the time you'll see me and I'll have a tube in my hand or a jar in my hand and I'm dipping my brush directly in that color and applying that on canvas.

And my preference is to mix the colors on the canvas.

That's fun for me.

There's pieces of the painting that I'll really like and then that'll change the whole piece.

Sometimes I am still that six year old boy painting on the side of my barn and wondering, are people gonna like this?

Are they going to see the color?

Are they going to appreciate the color?

It's pretty awesome to think that where I grew up and where I'm going with my artistry has surpassed even my imagination.

- [Narrator] Funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4th, 2008, and by the members of Prairie Public.