Description

Reign Fancy, dancing through life.

Fancy

Fancy is such an interesting word. In my mind when I hear the word fancy I think dressed up, but fancy means a lot more than just how nice something looks.

Fancy is defined as: elaborate in structure or decoration, also created from the imagination rather than from life. It comes from the word Fantasy, which comes from Greek phantasia ‘imagination, appearance’, later ‘phantom’, from phantazein ‘make visible’. 

When you are fancy, you decorate or rather make with your imagination. To be fancy is to make your imagination visible.

Reign

Reign is the quality of prevailing and overcoming opposing forces, to live with sovereignty which is a state of self governing.

Reign Fancy

Reign Fancy was painted using my imagination. Imagination is the action of forming new ideas, or images or concepts of external objects not present to the senses.

Intuitive Painting

Bringing my imagination to life through the use of my intuition, I created this painting without knowing exactly what it was going to be.

I first began with a lotus flower shape, and slowly added layers of colors while flipping the canvas in different directions. Slowly I started to see a woman figure from the flower and realized it was an indigenous fancy dancer.

Fancy Dancing

When I was young we would go to powwows and I would dance in the fancy dance category. Fancy dance, or shawl dance was first a men’s dance but after a while women adapted it. The women’s fancy shawl dance represents the opening of a cocoon when the butterfly emerges. The shawl is usually the most extravagant piece. The fringed shawls are colorful and flashy, often featuring embroidery or ribbon work. The fringe on the shawl has movement that coincides with the dancer and mimics a butterfly’s wings.

The fancy dancers’ shawl represents the wings of the butterfly. The butterfly is a metaphor for transformation and hope; across cultures, it is a symbol for rebirth and resurrection, for the triumph of the spirit and the soul over the physical prison, the material world. Among the ancients, is an emblem of the soul and of unconscious attraction towards light.

When I dance I imagine that I am swirling energy up to Creator Gitchi Manitou vibrating peace, love, unity, harmony, balance and bliss. I feel supported by the energy of those who came before me, the energy of lives lived on this land and the rituals of everyday life that charge the land with intention. When I dance I feel uplifted by the energies around me, and it feels like a new dawn.

Spirit Name, Raining in the Dawn woman

At age 11 my parents sent my sister and I back to our reservation in North Dakota. While out there we receive our spirit names from our medicine woman during a naming ceremony. As my name was being presented to me, our giiwa had to take a moment to explain that it was unusual for our Ojibwe Spirit names to be the same as our Christian names. She said that Creator told my mother to name me Raine Dawn because that is who I am. My Ojibwe name is Raining in the Dawn woman. When I think of what Raining in the Dawn means about who I am… there is no shortage of synchronicities, it is who I am.

As this painting emerged I felt the true meaning of raining in the dawn… rising above into a new dawn. Dawn is the beginning of a phenomenon or period of time, especially one considered favorable. Dawn is to come into existence, into a new era.

When I think of the word Raining I think of the purification the rain brings. I think of the ions in the atmosphere and how they change before and after a storm. How they rebalance themselves to bring back equilibrium.

The title evolved through all of this as the painting unfolded. I decided to use the word reign over rain because I’ve always had the inclination to think of the word reign just as much as rain. Being able to prevail in any situation, to have a growth mindset, is one of the most important things in my life.