Juan Nakai

Today I am going to share a story with you about a man I never knew. He was a wonderful artist who captured the beauty of the Navajo reservation as well as anyone has.

Juan Nakai painted hundreds of watercolors in his life and was well known in all the Navajo reservation border towns where he sold his work.

He was born in 1926 in Red Valley, Arizona.My mom’s dad, Ed Black, ran a trading post/general store at Blanco, New Mexico (not the Blanco between Albuquerque and Farmington, but a small town up the Gobernador Canyon between Bloomfield and the Navajo Dam). I can remember a Juan Nakai painting at his home.

Later, when Granddad retired in Aztec, New Mexico, he sometimes ran into Juan around town and bought several more paintings from him.

Nakai primarily painted watercolor landscapes. Shiprock and the red rock canyon walls of the Navajo Nation were his favorite subjects. Sometimes he included people in his work, but mostly his paintings were the soft pastels of a beautiful, solitary vista.

The problem was that whenever he finished a painting, he would sell it and spend the money in a liquor store. His was not a pretty story with a happy ending. In 1977, he drowned in the San Juan River in Farmington.

My grandfather told me about being approached by Nakai with a painting one day when he was at the post office in Aztec. Nakai was not drunk, and he wanted $20 for the painting. “I did not want to buy it from him because I knew he would just drink it up,” he told me. “I should have because he ended up taking it to a liquor store and trading it for a bottle.”

That was always a dilemma for people who recognized Nakai’s talent and wanted to buy his work. He had been to detox numerous times and, at the time, there were no treatment centers for someone like this. From people who knew him, I doubt it would have made a difference. The only two things he appeared to care about were his paintings and his bottle.

Dealers who bought his paintings did so with a mixed sense of appreciation and sadness. His paintings were always wonderful and hard to pass up, but buying one enabled his alcoholism.

One Santa Fe dealer whose father ran a trading company in Gallup showed me a room full of Nakai’s paintings back in the 1980s. They were all lovely. “My father just kept buying them because he liked Juan,” the dealer explained. “What do you do? If you don’t buy them, someone else will and either way Juan was going to do what he was going to do.”

When I look at them I see the beautiful, lonely landscapes that Nakai spent his life appreciating and painting. Whatever his weaknesses were, he was a man whose work should be admired.

A client recently brought in some of Juan’s paintings from the 1960s. We put nice frames on them and are offering the work of Juan Nakai with respect. No one can deny that he was a talented artist. His addiction probably kept him from reaching the potential he could have, but he did leave his mark in this world and the world of Native American art.