Oral history interview with Mike Larsen

Little Thunder: My name is Julie Pearson-Little Thunder. Today is Tuesday, November 2, 2010, and I'm interviewing Mike Larsen as part of the Native Artists Project sponsored by the Oklahoma Oral History Research Program at OSU. I really appreciate you taking the time to visit with me, Mike. I was privileged to interview you for Southwest Art many years ago, and it's really nice to check back in and see how your art and career have grown.

Larsen: Thank you.

Little Thunder: You were born in Dallas and spent some of your early years there and in Wynnewood, Oklahoma.Larsen: I was born in Dallas, and pretty much immediately we moved to Wynnewood, Oklahoma, and stayed there until 1956 when we all went to Amarillo, Texas. I started junior high school there, went through high school in Amarillo.

Little Thunder: Your maternal grandparents, I guess, played a pretty important role in your life. How did they impact you?

Larsen: Well, my mother's parents lived in Wynnewood, and I lived with them. My brother and I lived with them for a while. I'm not exactly how long, but two or three years we lived with them, and then we were reunited with my mother. She had to stay in Dallas and work, and they were very influential, I think, in my life. A farm couple, and they were elderly when I lived with them. I was very happy about that time.

Little Thunder: So you got to do quite a few chores? (Laughs)

Larsen: I got to do pretty much whatever I wanted to.

Little Thunder: Oh, I see. (Laughs) What was your first art experience that you remember as a young child?

Larsen: I don't remember art experiences as a young child. I can't bring anything to mind, as a child.

Little Thunder: Your tribe is Chickasaw. Was that on your mom or your dad's side of the family?

Larsen: My dad's side.

Little Thunder: Did you have any exposure to them when you were young?

Larsen: To?

Little Thunder: To your dad's side of the family.

Larsen: No, my dad left us when I was a baby, actually, so I didn't spend any time with him until I was a teenager. There was no relationship there, no contact with the tribe until I made it on my own as a teenager.

Little Thunder: How about junior high art, high school art? Were you taking some classes then?

Larsen: Well, I was really getting into art. I was doing a lot of drawing on my own in junior high and high school. I was fortunate in high school that as a senior, like everybody did, I took an easy course because I needed an easy credit. Everybody was taking art class. This art class at Tascosa High in Amarillo offered pretty much unrestrained periods of creativity, whatever we wanted to do, and all the materials that we could hope to find. It was very enlightening. I went from high school into college, and since I didn't have a clue about what I wanted to do, I majored in art.

Little Thunder: So you had enjoyed your art classes, but there were other interests you had?

Larsen: Yeah, she was blonde and Baptist. (Laughter)

Little Thunder: I read that you had a bout with polio as a child. Did that affect the way you saw or experienced things around you?

Larsen: You know, it's hard to define exactly how my thinking or my experiences might have been changed by that. Understand, I was naturally right-handed. I had polio when I was three, and it affected my right arm and hand. I had to develop my left hand, and everything that I have done since then, creatively or manipulatively, have been with my left hand, which changed my thinking as I understand.

Little Thunder: Yes, because I was going to say we're all cross-wired a little bit. I was wondering if it impacted your sensibility.

Larsen: My sensibilities, you mean the way I see and look at things?

Little Thunder: Right, sensitivity to things.

Larsen: It's difficult to say from my point of view. People might look at me and say, "Well, you see things this way or that," but I can't perceive that, myself. I do tend to look at my paintings and see that since I do paint left-handed, that my paintings, the people in my paintings, tend to go that way. (Laughs)

Little Thunder: Moving in that direction?Larsen: Which is interesting because when I look at the painting, they are moving to the right, but from the people in the paintings' point of view, they're moving to the left. Do you see? I think that's kind of interesting.

Little Thunder: That is really interesting. Once you enrolled (was it the junior college in Amarillo)--

Larsen: Yes.

Little Thunder: --and you started off taking art classes, do you remember a point at which, did that nurture your interest in art, or was that also a good experience?

Larsen: It was a really good experience. We had a really good director of the art department. He was from Washington, DC, a very strange man, but he was very creative. He got me into sculpture, which I had never really experienced. Again, we had all the materials that we could use, and models. It was quite fun but very enlightening.

Little Thunder: So you were actually doing clay figures?

Larsen: Clay figures. We had models that we would do busts and things like that, so it provided me with that opportunity real quickly in a school setting. I still had to do my academics, and I was not very good at that. The art building that they had was just filled with wonderful things. That's where I tended to spend all my time. That's why my academics were so bad. (Laughter) I think that's pretty common, too.

Little Thunder: You were thirty-six when you decided to go to the Art Students League. Had you saved money to go there, or how did you manage to get there?

Larsen: I had saved up a goodly amount of money because I was making a good living at the time with festivals and art shows, and so I was able to take off the time that I spent up there without really worrying about it. As expensive as New York City is, I was able to do that. I was very fortunate.

Little Thunder: And it was an unusual setup in terms of a school.

Larsen: The Art Students League is an art school, but it's not an academic school. They don't care if you go to class. You pay your fee monthly for the number of instructors you want to take. You go if and when you want, and you do the work, go to the classes, come and go as you please. They just didn't care. Very New York.

Little Thunder: (Laughs) But that worked well for you?

Larsen: Worked well for me. I have always been disciplined with that kind of thing. I knew I had to do it and wanted to do it, so I didn't waste any of the time that I had up there.

Little Thunder: And one of your teachers was David Leffel.

Larsen: My primary instructor was David Leffel. Also at the time, Dick Goetz from Oklahoma City was teaching there, so I was able to spend a lot of time with Dick. I didn't take classes from him, but he and I spent a lot of time together. We've always liked each other, and so that was good. I knew somebody up there. David Leffel had been down here in Oklahoma City for a workshop, and I took the workshop and discovered that he was doing things that I needed to learn how to do. I followed him about a year later to New York and up to the Art Students League.

Little Thunder: Leffel was a realist, a strong realist. What kinds of things did you learn from him that helped you? In a way, you ended up breaking free of that kind of realism.

Larsen: The reason I went to New York was to learn paint quality in the work that I was doing. I was missing that particular aspect in my paintings. I was coming to realize the paintings that I was doing, even though they were selling and this and that, they were not pleasing me. There was something missing, and it was that quality of paint that I was after. That's why I went to New York to go to school, at my old age. (Laughter)

Little Thunder: How would you define paint quality? Is it just technique, or does it have to do with concept or--.Larsen: Well, it's technique, but it has a lot to do with brushwork. The paintings that I had done before, even though they were on panel or canvas, they were as flat as a watercolor would be. I wanted to get away from that. I felt like there was something physically visually missing from my paintings, and it was that quality of seeing brushwork on a canvas and the way paint moves and rises from a canvas, and moves and blends with another color next to it. I love that. The paintings that Martha and I collect, if you'll look at them, have that quality. They're mostly landscapes, like Walt Gonske, the way he used to paint. Had really wonderful paint quality in the things that he did. I'm afraid he's been tasting his paint. (Laughter)

Little Thunder: You mentioned going to the Met and, in particular, a Van Gogh exhibit that really inspired you.

Larsen: Yeah, I went to the Metropolitan a lot because--. It wasn't cheap. You still had to pay to get in, but it was cheaper than anything else up there you could do. There was a Van Gogh retrospective there, hundreds of his paintings. They were all hanging in chronological order so that you could watch the rise and fall of the man's insanity as he went through his life. Beautiful, absolutely gorgeous paintings, and we were able to stand close enough to them so that you could see the quality of the paint on the canvas. You could tell he was painting out of doors because there would be flowers and dust and grass mixed in with the paint.

Little Thunder: Wow. So when you came back to Oklahoma, you began doing shows again. Did that immediately take off for you?

Larsen: No, it took about a year or so for me to gather my thoughts and apply some of what I was using up there. I discarded some of what I was learning up there because it didn't apply to what I wanted. The biggest thing that I gave up was giving up painting in oil paints. When I came back here, I went right back to acrylics, which I still paint with and really do love as a medium. I had to get rid of some of the things that I had learned up there because you cannot treat oil paints the same way you treat acrylics. I had to overcome some technical problems. Took me a while.

Little Thunder: Tell me about how and when you met Martha.

Larsen: I met Martha for the first time at the Oklahoma City Arts Festival when it was at the Civic Center downtown. She came through with a friend of hers, Greg Burns' wife, Pat. She introduced us because Martha was a picture framer and I was a painter, and so we could do business together. At the time, Martha was married, and--I had just gotten a divorce from my first wife. As it turns out, Martha, in the next year or so, went through that same divorcing with her husband. It was after a period of a year or so after that that we got together and she started framing my pictures. Five years later, we got married.

Little Thunder: You had cultivated some gallery relationships, but I understand they were not in Oklahoma immediately, once you came back.

Larsen: No, the galleries that I was associated with were in Santa Fe or in Taos, the Gallery A in Taos, and the Wadle Gallery in Santa Fe. There were a couple of other galleries out there, but I can't bring their names to mind. They have since closed, so it really doesn't matter. (Laughter)

Little Thunder: So you were doing Native subject matter but with this quality of paint that you had evolved for yourself. Were you incorporating landscapes at all in those paintings yet, or were they more expressionistic?

Larsen: During that period in the early '80s, working up through there, most of the things that I was doing were figurative with not much of a background. The landscapes gradually creeped in as we were going more and more out to Santa Fe, that wonderful color out there. The landscapes, for a period of time, overtook the figures, and then they kind of came back together and worked as--

Little Thunder: As a unit again.

Larsen: --as a unit.

Little Thunder: You did win First Place at Red Earth Arts Festival. -- How did that feel?

Larsen: That was the best experience that we have had from winning a prize. It was 1987 and the first year for Red Earth, and we won the first Grand Award. The greatest thing about it was that the judges for that show were Allan Houser and Dick West. From that time, which was the first time I'd met Allan Houser, we became quite good friends, and it lasted until he died. That was very wonderful.

Little Thunder: I was wondering what Native artist had impacted you in some way, and Allan Houser, I guess, would be one.

Larsen: I think he would be the one. There are a lot of aspects of Indian art that don't appeal to me. I like to look at them, and I like to study them as historic upbringing, or whatever you want to call it, because they were very important. The ledger paintings, I mean, how can you beat those? I look at those, not necessarily as wonderful art but as bites of history that appeal to me. Over the years, we have become painters of history. You look at those things, and you just have to admire them. I like to look at them. They don't appeal to me to do.

Little Thunder: They've already been done. (Laughs)

Larsen: They've already been done.

Little Thunder: It is interesting how each generation has its own recording of history to do in their own style. In 1991 you received a commission from the state Arts Council to paint the five Indian ballerinas from Oklahoma, which you called Flight of Spirit. How did you approach that project?

Larsen: Well, we initially were approached by the state Arts Council, Betty Price, to participate with a group of other artists. I don't remember exactly how many there were, five or six other artists, to do a proposal for an area in the Capitol, which was in one of the rotunda's half-circles, twenty-two feet long, twelve feet high. Interesting shape.

Little Thunder: Wow, yes!

Larsen: They were pretty loose, which is a good thing. What they asked us to do was a proposal based on these five ballerinas. That was it. It left us a lot of leeway, and we came up with a good idea, I think. As it happens, the proposal that we did was on a panel, twelve by twenty-four, I believe, twelve inches by twenty-four inches. Not real large, but that's kind of what they wanted, with the half-circle drawn inside it and then the painting. As it turns out, on an ominous Saturday night, I had that panel on my easel. Martha and I were going to go down the next day, and I was going to sign it. Then the following day, which would have been a Monday, or two days next would have been a Monday, we were going to go and turn our painting into the Arts Council for their consideration.

That Saturday night at eleven o'clock, my studio burned down. Burned up that painting along with the studio. (Laughs) That was an interesting night. We didn't have any time to waste, so Sunday morning I got on the phone with Betty, and she knew about it because it was on TV. She didn't know my painting was there, but we talked to Betty and got a two-day extension for turning in our proposal. The very next day, which was a Sunday, we went to Hobby Lobby (no, it wasn't Hobby Lobby; I forget where we went) and bought the materials we needed, and I painted the proposal again on our kitchen table since I didn't have a studio.

Little Thunder: Wow.

Larsen: We turned it in. We were fortunate and won the competition. I think you would know some of those other people who were competing. It was the five ballerinas onstage, and then surrounding them were members of their particular tribe, man and woman, behind each of the ballerinas. There were little ballerinas on each end, and back in the background was a portrayal of the Trail of Tears. Like I said before, it kind of reminded me of that first commission that Allan Houser did at Haskell.

Little Thunder: Oh.

Larsen: Remember he told them he was a wonderful sculptor? He'd never sculpted anything. (Laughter) Well, I'd never done a big painting like this. It was quite a challenge and took us about six months to do.

Little Thunder: It's trial by fire, too, because the curvature. It's challenging enough to do a mural, and then you're talking about dealing with a curve.

Larsen: Yeah, the shape of the canvas that we had to work with provided some interesting compositional problems. It was interesting because we were able to overcome that really quickly with the five ballerinas because we recreated the half-circle with them within the canvas. Putting everything around them worked out pretty well.

Little Thunder: That was a wonderful way to handle that. You've since done a number of murals. That's pretty exciting. Are you to the point where it's not intimidating anymore to take on a mural?

Larsen: I really enjoy it. I've come to, over the years, really enjoy working on large canvases, painting people life-size or bigger. It has proven to be a benefit because there aren't that many people who are willing to paint large paintings. We have slipped into kind of a group, I guess, that when large paintings need to be done, we're considered.

Little Thunder: And do you start with drafts, drafting or sketching preliminaries that are regular size?

Larsen: Yeah, we do preliminary studies relative to the size of the large paintings, and they're all on smaller canvases that we have to have for approval.

Little Thunder: I understand that the fire in your studio was really a turning point for you career-wise and in terms of some decisions you made about your personal life, too. Can you explain how that impacted you?

Larsen: The fire was kind of cathartic, in a way. I was quite mad for about a day or less but then realized pretty quickly that wasn't going to get me anywhere and thought about it. We were really fortunate because a friend of ours, Tim Pillow in Oklahoma City, had a building about a block away from where my old studio was, and he offered it to me for my use as long as I needed it. I was able to quickly get into a studio space. We determined really quickly that I needed to make some changes, had needed to make some changes; this was the time to do it. The color palette that I had been using for the last twenty years, I dispensed with. It was filled with earth tones, earth colors, yellows, browns, blacks. I still use those colors, but added to those colors now are bright yellows and bright reds and green. I thought I would never use green. (Laughter) I have discovered you can do a lot with green. Learned that you can make an incredible black with green and alizarin crimson, and it makes black burst full-color. It's amazing.

Anyway, I made these decisions to dispense with those colors and that palette, move on, paint much, much larger. I had fallen into the trap of painting what I knew would sell. We had settled into canvas sizes of twelve by twenty-four, small canvases. The repetitiveness of that was getting on my nerves and making me worry because I knew it wasn't going to last. I got away from that, and we took a risk. We stopped painting for the market. There is that term; I read it somewhere. We started creating our own market. It took a while, but it worked. We developed into a particular style, for lack of a better word, and it incorporates to very, very large canvases and lots of color.

Little Thunder: Was that also the time when you thought about moving out of state?

Larsen: Well, Martha and I had decided that as soon as our last child went to college, moved out of the house, that we were going to get the hell out of Dodge. We had been living in Oklahoma City for thirty years, both of us, and we wanted something else. We decided we were going to move into the country. We thought about moving to Taos, which is where "artists" live, and we dispensed with that after one day of being there, driving around and discovering there were no zoning laws in Taos, New Mexico.

Little Thunder: I didn't know that.

Larsen: Yeah, don't ever move there. It's a wonderful place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there. Then we found a wonderful, beautiful place in south Colorado, south and west of Colorado Springs in the Wet Mountain Valley, beautiful, beautiful place, and we tried really hard to move there. We looked in Cody, Wyoming. We went up there and stayed there for a month and thought about that until we discovered that the winters up there last about seven months. (Laughter) We dispensed with that. Then we were driving back from somewhere, probably from an art show or something. I looked at Martha, and she looked at me and said, "What in the hell are we doing? We have overlooked something. We have overlooked Oklahoma." So we came back home, and we put out feelers with several realtors, up to Perry and Chandler and all in through all this area over here. As it turns out, the realtor from here in Perkins called us and said, "I've got forty acres. Maybe you want to come look at it." We came out here and fell in love with it and bought it, and Perkins went with it. We didn't know about Perkins, but we love it out here.

Little Thunder: It's been a good place to do your art.

Larsen: Been a good place to live and do art. I don't rely on people to walk into the studio and buy things. That happens, but we don't need to live in the city. People come up here from the City or from Tulsa, or they call. They come from different places, but it really doesn't matter where you live.

Little Thunder: That's beautiful. How did your project of portraying the Chickasaw elders come about?

Larsen: We have become friends over the years with Bill Anoatubby, Governor of the Chickasaws, very wonderful man. Martha and I have talked for years and years and years about a way to paint some of the people that we had seen down at Ada, Tishomingo, and around. I don't remember exactly how we came up with the overall idea, but I went down one day and talked to Bill. I said, "Bill, I would like--," Bill in private, (Laughter) "--Governor Anoatubby, I would like to paint a series of paintings on our living elders." There are a lot of photographs of elders going back to the Removal. That wasn't what I wanted. The living elders. I started talking to him about it, and he held up his hands and said, "Mike, let's do it." That's the way he is. He makes instant decisions.

I said, "But Bill, I haven't told you everything I want to do." (Laughter) "Let's do it." We set up with Lona Barrick and their [Chickasaw Nation] Department of Arts and Humanities, working with them, because I didn't know all these people, (they do) and working with Glenda Galvan. They were able to come up with a number of people that we would interview. Martha would take photographs, and we would do these interviews about their history. We ended up doing twenty-four paintings which I think turned out pretty good. At the end of that, I talked to Governor Anoatubby again and said, "Governor, this is not going to do it. I mean, we've seen all these people, all these interviews, and I'm not going to paint them." He said, "Let's do twenty-four more." (Laughter) So we did forty-eight paintings, in all, of these wonderful people.

Little Thunder: So it was pretty much the tribe that identified, for you, people?Larsen: Yes, like I said, we did not know them, and so we needed a lot of help from a variety of people, maybe half a dozen or more people, working with the Arts and Humanities Department. They would gather the names of these people, and we would go and interview them. Not all of the people made paintings. Not that they were bad interviews or whatever, but for whatever reason, I just didn't feel like I could make a painting here. That's one of the things that we concluded early on, that there were two or three aspects in these paintings that had to happen. The primary one was, it had to be a good painting. The second one was, my portrayal of this person had to look exactly like this person. We concluded pretty quickly that if I were to paint one of these people and it didn't look like them, one of their neighbors was going to come and say, "That doesn't look like you," and it would have ruined the project. Fortunately, I'm able to capture likenesses, and so these paintings all look like who they are. They're all wonderful paintings, and like I said, some of the people, I couldn't do anything with them.

Little Thunder: There is that very strong realistic, some of the most realistic work I've seen you do. On the other hand, everything becomes symbolic in a painting. You choose an attitude, or you choose a background, or you choose a posture, even, that conveys the individuality of the person that you've painted in these portraits. Some of the choices, like a woman on the walker, (I got online and looked a little bit) seem like easier choices than others. I'm wondering how you balanced all of that.

Larsen: Well, a lot of it came from the interview, but some of the people were reticent to talk, and reticent to look at me. During these interviews, I would be sketching; Martha would be taking photographs. She would take a couple hundred photographs, sometimes more, and out of all those photographs, maybe one, maybe two would be what I was after. Over the years, she has come to be able to see the same things in the same way that I do, and I see the same things that she's looking for in photographs. So it works.

Little Thunder: So the hundreds of photographs were collectively of the twenty-four people. You just took multiple photographs each time--

Larsen: Of each person.

Little Thunder: --to give you some choices about stance and--.

Larsen: The way it worked was, we would also have facilitators with us, somebody that knew this person.

Little Thunder: Right.

Larsen: Glenda Galvan came into play here very heavily because she knows all these people and she speaks Chickasaw. We would go in, and after a while, these people knew why we were there. They were very accepting from the very start, but having your photograph taken a lot is disturbing, especially to Indian people. Glenda would be over here talking to these people, and I would be over here just sketching away and have this person start talking about their past. Again, a difficult thing for Indian people to do. So what happened was that after a few minutes, Martha would be clicking photographs all around, all over the place; they would forget she was there. They would talk to me, or they would talk to Glenda and start telling their story, get lost in it. Wonderful photographs come from that.

Little Thunder: That is such an amazing body of work, too. Now, were these oil? These were not oil. These were acrylic portraits.

Larsen: Acrylics.

Little Thunder: But, still, we're talking about two months? Is that right?

Larsen: Oh, no, it took two and a half, three years.

Little Thunder: I see, or the first set of twenty-four?

Larsen: No, for all of them, but bear in mind, I'm doing other things, also. I wasn't just doing that. Sometimes we would do one a month, sometimes two a month, sometimes one every two months. It would depend on when we were able to get together with these people. Because sometimes this person would get sick, we wouldn't be able to go. We went down to Texas two or three times to gather people. Went all the way to Washington, DC, to do one. You can't do those weekly. Plus, it kind of wears you out.

Little Thunder: Yes. How did you feel when the cultural center was opened and the portraits were unveiled?

Larsen: Oh, made me cry. You walk into the room, and it was interesting because the first twenty-four, we never saw them all together for a long time. We'd see one or two of them at a time. Walking into that room and seeing all twenty-four of them there, it was just astounding.

Little Thunder: Kind of like an emotional homecoming.

Larsen: A very emotional homecoming, it was. Some of the people were there. Several of the people had died in the interim, but that was a wonderful thing there that we were able to portray these people before that. A couple of the people died within a month after we painted their painting. We might not have gotten that.

Little Thunder: How about the families and the people themselves? What was their response?

Larsen: Well the families were--families. We became part of that family, with each one of those people. That was gratifying and heart-warming and comforting. Charlie Carter prayed over us. An astounding history of that particular man. We were all in his house, and he prayed over us in Chickasaw. Never been prayed over like that. I don't know what he said. I know what he said, but I couldn't understand what he was saying. It just went on and on. When we had our first showing at the History Center, all these twenty-four paintings in there, there were family members there, sons and daughters, and all those people, a lot of people. One man came over and grabbed me by the arm and said, "Brother, come and let's take a picture with Mama." Mama was in the painting. I've never been called Brother by somebody who is not my brother. It's very, very big. Those people were accepting of us when they did that, and we still run into these people. After the series had been done, you know, they walk up and say, "Brother, come."

Little Thunder: That's wonderful. I'm going to shift a little bit to talking about your philosophies and practices in art today. I'd like to talk a bit about the larger-than-life hands that you use in your portraits. What was one of your inspirations for developing that?

Larsen: That developed when I went to the University of Houston. When I went down there, I followed this sculpture professor there because he was renowned and all that and I was going to learn a lot. I didn't, but I went to Houston because I had planned on making my life as an artist, as a sculptor. I am down there, studying the way we had to study. He wanted us to look at history, the history of sculpture. We all studied Michelangelo and Rodin. Those two, in particular, if you'll look at them, they made the hands of their people quite large. The most notable one would be the Michelangelo sculpture of the young David. The hands are way too big, and I just love them. We all did that. Here you have a classroom full of students, all doing sculptures with big hands. When I got into painting more, it just kind of naturally flowed into the paintings. It also provides, we discovered, a certain visual dimension, an immediate visual dimension within a painting. It's like holding your hand close to a camera. All of a sudden, the hand is bigger than it should be. Do you see? It's that kind of thing, that when you make a hand a little bit bigger in the canvas, all of a sudden it has a depth, and nobody understands why. Well, I'm not going to tell them. I just do it. (Laughter)

Little Thunder: And that requires scaling the arms in the painting a little bit differently, too.

Larsen: Sometimes. One thing we discovered, especially in this series for the Chickasaws, and doing these older people, as people get older, they tend to grow closer to the floor. Some of these people that we painted were shorter than me, when in their youth, they were taller. Their spines may contract and all this kind of stuff. They may get a little closer to the ground, but their arms are the same length. One individual, in particular, that we paid attention to, she could almost touch her knees with her fingers because of getting old, but her arms were the same length, and wonderful hands. If we had shortened her arms to match her height, it would have been wrong. Sometimes, I use that extra length in arms or hands to sweep across a canvas, but that's for a purpose, for guidance or for design or composition. I do it on purpose. I know the dimensions. I know the measurements, so I can expand them if I want to.

Little Thunder: You've done a number of series. Does that allow you to sort of explore a subject in more detail? Besides the Chickasaw paintings, I know that you've done some series paintings. What are the advantages of doing a series?

Larsen: Well, a lot of times, if you do a painting, somebody will come and say, "I want a painting on this particular period of history." Well, a painting just won't do it. There's too much, and if you try and put too much in a painting, it becomes so complicated that it can become boring if you're not careful. You need a focus in a painting. You can surround it with other stuff, but you need a focus in a painting. Doing a series gives you an opportunity to develop an idea that might include many, many different aspects of a particular group of people. We did a series of paintings, very large paintings, for the Potawatomi people up in Michigan. Eight paintings, they were eight feet tall and twenty feet long, eight of them, and it was about Potawatomi history. Again, what came into play here was that we were contracted to do this because we paint large paintings. They have many good Potawatomi artists, but they don't paint large paintings. They contracted us to do that, and it really suited me because I was able to get into their history, going back into ancient history up to present-day powwow. We were able to, in these eight paintings, go back hundreds of years, maybe thousands, and do eight paintings of their history up to present day. I was delighted with the way it turned out because it gave me the opportunity to really, really get into the meat of what those people are about.

Little Thunder: What kinds of research did you do for that project?

Larsen: We were provided with an elder who we became very good friends with, and he was my guide. I had many, many conversations with him and went up to Michigan more times than I want to ever go again. (Laughter) I talked to him about this or that, and he walked me through it. We talked, like I said, many, many times about what the paintings might be, what was important to them, what their culture was like, how it developed. He was very knowledgeable and guided me through it. I would come up with all these ideas. We'd talk on the phone. He said, "Eh, I don't like that," so I wouldn't do it. I had to pretty much rely on him because every tribe is different. He was quite good at that. I would do the studies. I did eight studies, and I took them up to be approved by their council. It was quite a process. Art by committee is always difficult. I took these paintings up there and had to please over twenty people. That's difficult. I had to please twenty Indian people, which is more difficult. They came back at me about a thing or two. There were two or three other people that didn't like my paintings or didn't like me, but overall, it worked out. We were able to get it done. It took a couple of years to do, very big paintings. They're up there now, and they'll be there for a while.

Little Thunder: That's always a process, I think, especially when you're an artist of one tribe, depicting another tribe. Did you go through a similar thing with the Quartz Mountain Institute murals?

Larsen: As a matter of fact--. (Laughter) These were with Kiowa people, and Kiowas are beautiful people. I mean, look at the Black Leggings [Warrior] Society. We were fortunate to deal with some people like Dixon Palmer, the Palmers. You know the Palmers? Wonderful people. Early on, we ran into some difficulties because, again, there were Kiowa artists who weren't real happy with me, not because they knew me, but because I was not Kiowa. We had to talk to them and go through a process and get through that. As it turned out, they were happy with what I did. You have to be careful. You have to be very careful. That's why you need guides from the tribes, competent elders. I prefer dealing with elders, quite frankly, than younger artists in a situation like that because the elders deal with the overall picture. They're aware of their history, and they have no ego to deal with. We were happy with the Kiowa paintings, and they were, too. It worked out.

Little Thunder: It's wonderful how you started out wanting to be a sculptor, and then painting became the primary focus of your ar. You're sort of coming back around. It's still primary, but you're doing a lot of sculpture. I'm wondering if your mural work has better enabled you to take on some of these monumental sculptures.

Larsen: I think so. The way we try and sculpt is painting and clay. Doing these large paintings, oversized paintings, is a real benefit, I think. [In sculpture], you don't deal in color, but you do deal in contrast and light and shadow, and all of these form things that you deal with in painting. Just a different way of looking at it. We talk about the sculpture every once in a while, about the brushstrokes in clay. People look at it. They go, "What the hell are you talking about?" (Laughter) Well, you understand, because you've been in art all these years, what I mean about brushstrokes in clay.

Little Thunder: Sort of that hands-on, immediate contact with the material. What do you enjoy about the sculpting process?

Larsen: I think I just covered that. (Laughter) When we look at building a sculpture piece--like the large piece we did for the hospital in New Jersey, they wanted us to keep a running daily documentary. We documented the thing photographically.

Little Thunder: Martha did that.

Larsen: Martha did that, from the very first day. When I built the armature, which is just wire, first layers of clay which looked like Don Quixote, no clay, no nothing, and the development is what I enjoy about working in sculpture. I love saying that.

Little Thunder: It's so concrete when you see it. Can you describe your creative process for me, from the genesis, maybe for painting or sculpture?

Larsen: Describe the creative process?Little Thunder: Yes. (Laughter) In the case of commission work, there's more of an external--.

Larsen: I'll tell you what. Some of my best paintings have come from church. This has happened before. I'll [nudge] Martha. "Martha, you got a pencil?" (Laughter)

Little Thunder: When you're in church?

Larsen: This is in church when we're listening to the sermon or homily or whatever, and somehow I kind of go away. (Laughter) I'll just sketch down an idea really quickly that just kind of washes through my mind, like that painting of cranes, and do a real quick little sketch, bring it home, tack it up on the wall. It might not become anything for a year, two years. Then one day, you're walking by it, and you see what you saw that you may have forgotten. It becomes a painting. Real quickly, you do a bigger sketch, and you put it on the canvas. Most times it works; sometimes it doesn't. It's difficult to describe.

Little Thunder: So rather than writing down a concept or a title, what you've got is a quick little sketch that you might put somewhere, on the wall, in a book, or--.

Larsen: Yeah, and sometimes those sketches are so obscure that I look at them a week later, and I just can't figure out what the hell they are. (Laughter) I keep them. They're still up on the wall. One of these days, you know, they might become something. Not that the sermons are dull or anything like that, but they might say something. One of our best paintings came from a furniture store out in--somewhere--. We were walking down the aisle, and here is this green couch over here, with a red lamp right beside it. I saw it just in my periphery. I'm not going to tell you what I said. (Laughter) I grabbed something and sketched it down, and it became this guy with a red bandana with a green cloak, flowing across the painting. It became one of our best paintings. It was a couch and a lamp. That's the creative process, I guess. I cannot explain it. I think maybe being able to recognize something. I don't know.

Little Thunder: We've talked about your work with the Chickasaws as being an emotional homecoming. Do you think of yourself as an artist who happens to be Indian? Do you think of yourself as an Indian artist?

Larsen: It's the first one. I'm an artist. I happen to have an Indian heritage, and it has blossomed over the years because of our relationship with all these people down in Ada. Their history is becoming more and more important to me all the time. Like I told you earlier, I was kind of a late bloomer because I did not spend any time with my father, who was Chickasaw. I had to kind of develop it from a need of my own. The need that Martha and I both felt when we were doing this series was fulfilled because we became part of forty-eight families. Those people know us, talk to us, and we became a part of their life. We learned things about them that, in some instances, their families didn't know about until they told their story, and we happened to be there when they told it. That's a blessing, to be a part of that, becoming so familiar with these people that you don't know. It's wonderful.

Little Thunder: To have shared in those histories and be passing those on. You have done two books together: They Know Who They Are and Proud to be Chickasaw. Did you have a book at the back of your mind when you started the process, or how did the idea of a book develop?

Larsen: Well, doing the paintings was first, working that out with Governor Anoatubby. Then I got together with Lona Barrick, and pretty quickly after that idea, before the first painting was done, they said, "We need to make a book out of this."

Little Thunder: It was like a collective reaction, everybody's response?Larsen: We had several meetings with those people down there. I'm not real fond of meetings, you know, several people around the table, everybody talking at once, and all you want to do is leave. (Laughter) Some good ideas came out of it, and then the book, and concepts there came up. That's where that came from.

Little Thunder: I understand you're in the Chickasaw Hall of Fame.

Larsen: Yes.

Little Thunder: Is it a portrait, or is it a photo? (Laughs) I assume it's not a self portrait. Do they have a picture of you there, too?

Larsen: Yeah, I don't know how they did those--a photograph of me.

Little Thunder: Looking back on your career, is there any highlight moments that we might not have discussed?

Larsen: No, I think we pretty much covered everything. I would say that the mural in the Capitol was the most important thing that happened to us. Could have been because of the time that that happened. It kind of projected us, gave us a jump start, in a way, to do that very large painting, have it in the Capitol. We have the best spot in the whole Capitol for that thing to be hanging. You walk up the steps, and that's what you see. That was wonderful. It provided us with a good amount of money, which allowed me to do some things that I wanted to do that I had not done. I think the recognition that we have received because of that has been our greatest event, art-wise. We have some other things, like the big sculpture in New Jersey and those paintings for the people up in Michigan and stuff like that, bigger projects, but maybe not more important.

Little Thunder: It sort of started with that?

Larsen: It was in '91, and that was a very pivotal period for us, I think.

Little Thunder: Is there anything else you'd like to talk about that we haven't discussed?

Larsen: No.

Little Thunder: We are going to take a look at some of your artwork here.

Larsen: This painting is one of the religious paintings or works of art that I do, and Martha modeled for this. This is the Assumption of Mary that Martha has modeled for. She made the clothes. A very good model. Has not been for sale; never will be. We did this for ourselves.

Little Thunder: That's tough, to be able to keep paintings for yourself. (Laughter) We're going to shift over to Tecumseh.

Larsen: When we were showing at the Ray Tracey Gallery in Santa Fe, we did a series of paintings one year on the great Indian leaders of history. Tecumseh was one of those. This is a portrayal of him. We found this [decorative antique] screen that he is standing in front of, so I put it behind him in the painting. So Tecumseh is really in the painting twice. You can see him and his brother. The man on horseback, the face of the man on horseback, is [Andrew] Jackson. I put his face on there because he was a nasty fellow. It's interesting because on the screen, Jackson was shooting Tecumseh on the screen back there, but it looks like he is also shooting Tecumseh in the foreground. I don't know. It was interesting the way it worked out. That was an accident. I did not intend that. Maybe I did.

Little Thunder: Yeah, I love the picture of Jackson's face there.

Larsen: This painting did not sell in that series in Santa Fe, so we were very happy to get the painting back.

Little Thunder: Yes, sometimes you actually try to jinx stuff. I know we do. (Laughter)

Larsen: This (Gestures) is interesting because that is my grandfather that I lived with in Wynnewood. Sharecropper, old guy, smoked a lot. Smelled like Vitalis and Camel cigarettes. I sold this painting back in the mid-'70s, '75, '76, something like that, to a lady in Oklahoma City. At the time, I really wanted to keep the painting, but I really needed the money. I sold it to this woman with the stipulation--. I was kind of kidding in a way, but I said, "If you die, I want that painting back." Well, here about four years ago, she died and willed me this painting back--

Little Thunder: Oh, my goodness.

Larsen: --so we got it back. Very, very happy to have it.

Little Thunder: What a wonderful story. Mike, I thank you so much for your time, doing this interview.

Larsen: You're welcome. Thank you.

------- End of interview -------