Traveling the Unknown Highway with Rocky Hawkins

Hawkins has recently finished a painting for Tarrant’s gallery, entitled Color Changers,
depicting a band of Indians in a close, ragged line. The vibrancy of the rainbow color spectrum communicates some sense of peace or hope, the Technicolor shift from cold to warm within these figures is moving.

It’s exactly the kind of painting Hawkins knows Tarrant will appreciate. It is the kind of
image that will evoke superlative praise from this friend who has a keen admiration for Hawkins’ talent.

“He paints from a place of pure passion,” enthuses Tarrant, “a place of harmony between body and spirit in a boldly prophetic vision. Hawkins is a ‘shaman’ with paint, connecting with the viewer at the super-consciousness level of image, energy, spirit.”

At last, Hawkins ambles back toward the studio. Framed by a wide porch, the deep chocolate- colored corrugated metal building is part garage for the vintage cars and hot rods Rocky restores and creates, and part painter’s lair. Rocky pauses as he opens the door. He does not allow many people to visit his workspace. It is deeply personal and he covets his privacy. Yet, he opens the door wide and lets me in.

The windowless room is a cloister for Hawkins. Like an altar to creativity, he has filled it with offerings that inspire him. The atmosphere is serious. Medicine bundles and fetishes hang on the wall next to his own paintings; found feathers and a mounted raven are displayed; erotic art and vintage photos of American Indians are framed above the doorway; and hanging conspicuously at the door is a kitschy 1950s rubber doll of an Indian — big-nosed and smiling, tomahawk in hand.

“That’s where it all began,” Hawkins jokes about the keepsake given to his parents when he was born, a souvenir brought back from a trip out West. It’s a silly image, this stereotyped Indian, but it alludes to Hawkins’ playful sense of humor that is frequently obscured by the dramatic and often dark images portrayed in his paintings.