Mike Ponyah Badlands Image 2011

While driving back from the 4th of July, 2011 weekend Rosebud Casino Powwow Mike, Emily and the kids stopped for a quick look over the amazing scenery at the Badlands National Park in western South Dakota. “A penny for your thoughts Mike.” What was really cool is we had just passed a huge herd of buffalo grazing in the green open land. It was truly a wonderful sight to see that is for sure! This was one of the last photographs that I would create and shoot on the Northern Great Plains. From Trek America in 1981 and fifteen road trips over the next three decades and 200,000 miles driven on Interstates and Highways this is one of my lasting images of 2011 and memories of a life well lived! What makes this image even more interesting is that directly to the right of Mike on the grassy open Badlands plain is a gracing herd of around twelve hundred bison. It was a fun and rewarding powwow road trip with both Mike and Emily Ponyah and their extremely talented six children Kelly, Camille, Grace, Evan, Aiden and Liam called Peanut by his friends!

The True Wild West 1956-2014: With all my creative processes now completed for the exhibition it gives me time to reflect on the words that are published on the cover of the St. Vincent’s Hospital’s Healing Arts Program Brochure. “Art is one of the ways in which our humanity is reinforced. The artists, in the very act of creation, remind us that we care for each other by giving of ourselves.” Nice way to complete thirty-three years as a working artist. I have had lots of fun putting together the six year digital photographic exhibition that at present is showing at one of Sydney, Australia’s Premier Hospitals.

Time now to get ready to ride into the sunset much like the old cowboys and Indians from the black and white television series that I watched each night in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s while living on the Magdalene Gardens Housing Estate in Edinburgh, Scotland. At that early age I never for one moment imagined that my life journey would take me out onto the American Southwest and Northern and Southern Great Plains to record the true historical happenings that was the wild west!