PAWHUSKA, Okla.--Painting a drum is a pain in the lap.
“There’s no easy way to paint on a drum,” said Gina Gray, laughing as she exerted strength to adjust one on her lap.
Gray, an Osage artist whose works have been featured in art galleries and museums across the world, was painting the drum for the Osage Tribal Museum here.
“I’m trying to incorporate our beautiful landscape that we have here on the reservation,” Gray said. “We’ve got such a diverse landscape on our reservation. It can be far as the eye can see, straight plains, not one tree. And then you go to another part of the reservation, and it’s rolling hills and waterways. I’m going to be putting up a blue sky in the background.”
Gray was finished with one side of the drum in which she painted an old Osage shield from the early 1800’s that she had looked up in the book, “Art of the Osage.” She added her own interpretation of the shield by painting a bird in the middle. Gray edged the drum face with Osage ribbonwork designs and painted the words “Osage Tribal Museum” on both sides of the drum.
“Every now and then we’ll have someone come in and ask if we have a drum they can borrow . . . but we don’t like to [loan] those out because they’re in our collection,” said Kathryn Red Corn, the museum director. “So we asked Rock Pipestem [Osage drum maker] to make us one and Gina Gray to paint it.”
For a workstation, Gray sat by a table. Her paintbrushes filled an old Osage Peaches can. Tubes of paint lay in a neat row. A Styrofoam plate served as her palette. She sat relaxed as she held the drum on her lap.
After Gray finished the drum, Red Corn said she was pleased with the designs Gray used for both sides of it and was looking forward to having it in the museum.
“The drum is finished now, and we are very pleased with it and the artists who created it,” Red Corn said.
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