Watch the Interview with Ethan Brown on his artwork “Mapping the Dragon” as it correlates to our event topic of Indigenous Perspectives on Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676.
Transcription
Alem: Welcome, welcome! Thank you for letting me interview you today. And hopefully you can see the screen. And hopefully everyone who’s watching this video can see the screen in front of me. If not, it should be available on our website. But thank you, Mr. Brown, for letting me interview you. And if you see me looking on the other side, that’s my questions, so, that is the other screen with my questions. Could you introduce yourself and give a quick overview of what we’re looking at in your piece Mapping the Dragon?
Mr. Brown: Yes, well, my name is Ethan Brown I’m an artist and filmmaker. I’m a citizen of the Pamunkey tribe, I live here on our reservation, my great grandpa was born here in 1901 and… I was commissioned by Preservation Virginia to make this artwork to go along with the lecture “Mapping the Dragon: Indigenous Histories of Bacon’s Rebellion” and this is for the 350th anniversary of bacon’s rebellion. They let me do what I wanted with the artwork so I just tried to sort of give an image that would go along with the theme of the lecture and so you have two Pamunkey figures and a child in Dragon Run Swamp and then you have bacon on the horse in the background my understanding was a lot of the lecture was going to be about how the Pamunkey’s knowledge of the environment sort of helped them escape during this time and they were being pursued for a couple weeks and dragon swamp… now I don’t actually know if the where the name dragon swamp originates from but dragon run but for me like it went along with the theme of this thinking of him on his horse as this pursuing violent force. It’s kind of like a dragon and they’re on the run so… I don’t know if that’s where it comes from, but in my imagination, it works with it. And I have him on the other side of the swamp to show how the environment is standing between them. And they’re sort of crouched down, hiding behind some Tuckahoe here. The female figure, it could just be a Pamunkey woman or it could be Cockacoeske our chief who was leading us and her holding the baby in her arms is sort of symbolic of she’s holding her people’s lives in her hands as she guides them during this time.
Alem: Yeah, thank you. I never really thought of the horse kind of like being a figure of the dragon. That was very introspective.
Mr. Brown: Yeah, I put it sort of rearing up like this and it sort of reminded me of like when you see an old, like, crest with a dragon on it, just like the position that they can be in. I was playing off that a little bit.
Alem: That’s amazing. That kind of leads up to my next question, actually. My next question is, I’m kind of under the impression– I kind of had other friends look at this piece– and they said you used watercolor, if that’s correct. That kind of leads me to ask, why you chose this perspective? And this technique to illustrate for Bacon’s Rebellion?
Mr. Brown: It is Gouache which is sort of an opaque watercolor so you can thin the paint out like watercolor but then you can also paint it more opaquely. This is a medium I’ve been experimenting with. One of the projects I’ve been trying to build towards is doing a short animated film and so this would maybe be the medium I could use for that so I know they use this for a lot of, like, anime films. It’s sort of like a poster paint a high quality poster paint and it just captures the, like, it doesn’t reflect when you photograph it and such. I picked it because of the timing of the commission, I probably wasn’t going to be able to do an oil painting just because it takes a while to dry.
Alem: Okay, that’s amazing. Thank you. I never really thought about the comparison with this and anime, but also your future work. We’re excited to see more.
Mr. Brown: Mm-hmm.
Alem: Leading on to my other question, while creating this piece, I know you kind of said you want to kind of chose this perspective even in this painting, I kind of feel like I’m standing in the kind of perspective of the indigenous people looking over at this forest that’s trying to kind of tamper on their land and go through them. And you also said about the woman at the very bottom holding her child as if it was taking care of her own people. I want to ask, what do you think this perspective would bring to the greater knowledge or understanding about bacon’s rebellion in that aspect.
Mr. Brown: I don’t know what this specific painting would bring but I guess just, well, here’s what I’ll say. I don’t think most people even know much about Bacon’s Rebellion, the average person, if you ask them. I think any artwork or conversation about it is just telling the story and bringing knowledge and perspective to people.
Alem: Mm-hmm.
Mr. Brown: That’s what I would say but Cockacoeske, her husband was chief before her and he and 200 Pamunkey warriors died in the Battle of Bloody Run and then she became chief and we already had a treaty with England and like the Battle of Bloody Run our warriors were fighting for England at that time so this coup in the colony and then Bacon attacked. There was some other native group that had some confrontation with them and it wasn’t us but then he attacked us to try to capture Cockacoeske so it’s just telling the story. I’ll let the speakers at the lecture talk about what perspectives they’re exploring.
Alem: That’s very interesting. I personally, going into this, I thought you choosing this perspective of them looking outward kind of makes me place me in the perspective of the indigenous people, so it was interesting that you chose like this kind of point of view and that’s what I’m saying.
Mr. Brown: Well, I think one thing I was thinking, the lecture is called Mapping the Dragon, which, for me, I was thinking it was the Pamunkey’s mapping, which I said the symbolic dragon in the landscape. So, they were always a couple steps ahead of where he was enabled in order to escape. They were the ones mapping the dragon in the landscape is how I was thinking of it.
Alem: No, yeah, of course. Thank you. And you kind of talked about the symbolism of the woman, but also, I kind of saw there’s a crane over here and also a frog. And I want to ask, like, is this another symbolism? And what do you think the viewers can focus on other than the horse and the woman in that aspect? Are these cranes and the animal’s kind of… They seem to be intentional. So, I want to ask, was there any thought on where to place them and why?
Mr. Brown: Yeah. So, when you’re telling a story through a static image, sometimes you use symbolism just to get a sort of the idea of it through so the male figure is sort of crouched down similar to the frog and then she’s sort of looking up the same as the crane so I was sort of, and these are both you know animals in a swamp that can stand very still and so I was just sort of showing that. You know, maybe when Bacon is looking out at the landscape, he’s just seeing the frog or the crane because they’re just blending in is what I was trying to go for. So, they’re hidden and still just like the animals next to them is the idea.
Alem: Oh, so the personification of the animals. I can see that. Yeah. I never thought about that. Wow. And kind of, because you already said this is a depiction of the dragon swamp, were you able to do any research on how the dragon swap was seen or did you try to preserve what it was what it looked like back in the 1600s or is this based on your image of what the dragon swamp looked like.
Mr. Brown: I tried to get a feel for it a little bit but also at the same time I’m working with trying to get the painting to be balanced and I don’t know, it was probably very wild. I’ve been to the dragon swamp today, so it’s very dense, marsh, sort of environment and yeah.
Alem: Yeah. I just wanted to like to know if there is, if this is like something you’ve seen before and you’ve been, it’s great to know that you’ve been at the dragon swamp. So, we can say this is very realistic in a sense.
Mr. Brown: Yeah. This is a bald cypress that’s sort of leaning over and you see the cypress knees in the foreground. And then you see the Tuckahoe sort of patch behind the crouching figure. The water is sometimes green, brown, blackish. I was trying to capture all that. But at the same time, I’m just using my imagination to just make the image.
Alem: Yeah, you made this perfectly. Thank you so much. And just to close out, I know you said you want a lot of our panelists for July to talk about the perspective, but what is something you want someone to take out of this piece, your artwork, not just what people can expect from July, but what you expect someone to take out of this, take out of Mapping the Dragon.
Mr. Brown: I don’t know that I expect anyone to take anything out, but I hope they go to the lecture.
Want to learn more?
Mr. Brown’s piece is directly tied with our upcoming July 15th panel event in Jamestown Settlement discussing more on Indigenous perspectives and history during Bacon’s Rebellion. This event, along with our other upcoming events in the next month are part of our mission to reconsider Bacon’s Rebellion for its 350th anniversary this year as well as America’s 250th. Please look into our July panelists’ blog here and ticketing for the event here.
