DARREN, THE SON OF A POWERFUL APACHE CHIEF, had a charmed existence in the first 50 years of life. He became a star early in his career – a successful painter, friends with Robbie Robertson, married to actor/director Jill Momaday (daughter of Scott). They were a golden couple, until everything crashed with a very public and excruciating divorce.
He was shattered. He stopped painting, withdrew from the world, lost his money, let his career go. The meteoric fall mirrored his previous rise. There he lived for years, lost in rumination, still half in love with his wife. He talked about her throughout our interview. There is something romantic about a man who talks about his ex-wife with so much longing, pain, and regret.
Now he is returning with his first shows in years, with paintings that have a new depth. Risen from darkness, he sees the world with a young person’s fresh eyes, yet also with intensity, perspective, shock, and an earned absolution.
Oh, and one more thing: He frequently touches the flying saucer charm that hangs on one of his necklaces. It’s a connection to when he saw the UFO.
The UFO
We had to be bussed to school from our town, Dulce, located on the Jicarilla Apache Reservation. We went early, seven o’clock or so. I must have been in fourth grade. We were a contingent of native students that went to parochial school. My sister and brother were on the bus, and my brother was the person who spotted it out the left side of window. I can still hear him saying, Look, look, everybody! There’s a flying saucer in the sky. Everybody jumped up. It was a beamship – a typical flying saucer shape but with windows around the edges. It was sleek. There was nothing around it, and I remember seeing circular things underneath it because it flew right over us. It was bigger than the bus.
I jumped to the other side as it passed over the bus; it was moving in a linear direction, not varying or moving up and down. Little kids were crying – it was pandemonium.
I remember in the moment I said, I want to remember this, I want to remember this. I can’t forget this because this is real. The priest who was driving the bus was looking out the window at it. He sped up the bus, and we started going at a very fast clip.
Meanwhile, it was just moving really slowly across the landscape, really low. It would disappear behind a hill and then reappear on the other side. And we watched until we couldn’t see it any longer.
When I saw it, it changed my life. I can see it like an old 16-millimeter movie in my head all the time. I can see it right now as I talk to you – just the way it looked, what it did, and the feeling of the space I was in.
Just knowing that this was something otherworldly, that what we perceive as real in this time-space continuum is really nonexistent too. There are other worlds that coexist alongside ours. Our native belief is that Indigenous people all over the planet came from a star system. We were put here eons and eons ago, kind of like an experiment. And I think in that moment on the bus, there was a connection to other worlds.
My parents
I grew up in a rodeo cowboy family, a ranching family, so I was around horses and cattle a lot. My mother was a voice soprano from Oklahoma. Beautiful arias. My father was a great Jicarilla Apache leader. He was a chief for a long time, an amazing man. He was a honky-tonk musician and a rodeo rider. We choose our parents, our parents don’t choose us.
My wife
I met her, and I was in love with her. I thought, Wow, my old life is gone. From that day forward, I went off like a rocket, and she did too. We both knew we were destined to meet each other because we’re old souls, we’ve been around the block several times, and we came together to finish some unfinished business from a past lifetime. At our wedding, Val Kilmer was my best man, and it was a beautiful day. Our first daughter came like clockwork.
The fall
The astrologist told us, Long story short, you guys are like oil and water. If you decide to keep this relationship going, you will not get along. You will have a tumultuous relationship. You’re like fire and water, lots of fire and energy, and water putting out the fire.
I think a lot of us go through life not really knowing who we really are. We live in a superficial world that gets muddled with acclaim and notoriety and takes you away from your spirit. You’re just chasing a dream.
So when it crashes and you live in a small town, it’s like Peyton Place. Everybody knows your business. Santa Fe is full of people who like to gossip – they get off on it. So we were the butt of what a lot of people were talking about.
I lost everything. I was down to $5 in my pocket.
I am told it takes like seven years to recover from a fall, but I’m in year five now. It’s starting to even out. And it’s starting to feel good again. I’m welcoming all of that energy now. It hasn’t been easy, but I think I had to lose everything to get where I am now.
I’m painting like a madman right now – it’s crazy. There’s an energy force within the new works.
I’ll take a big brush, a nice white brush, and I’ll mix colors and get a palette together; it’s sitting there all juicy, and then I’ll grab a little bit of this – I just intuitively know what I want. But I don’t know for sure until I hit the canvas, and then I start moving my hand. It’s like automatic writing, and I’m moving just to create forms and shapes and planes of color. I make a very chaotic mess in the beginning, but then I start to mold and shape it as I’m going along.
The painting
My latest painting is based on a historical Lakota man. When I painted it the first time, he looked almost biracial, with a very light-skinned face. It’s from a turn-of-the-century photograph: He’s holding a tomahawk and he’s sitting, wrapped in a blanket. He’s looking at you.
There are two bobcats in my painting. For some reason, they appeared, and I kept them in there. They almost look like his pets. Then there’s a woman in the background. And an innocent little rabbit in the left corner that looks like the bobcats could eat it. There’s an elk skull to the left side of his leg and a moccasin coming through. And then this huge hawk, with his wings spread, and he’s gonna swallow up the whole picture.
It’s about regaining a sense of time passed. And a sense of who we are. And it’s about spirituality. It’s about grace. It’s about acknowledging the natural world and the elements. I grew up on the reservation, where everything is based on nature. You just walk out your door, and you’re in nature. You know, you’d see a deer right there and a mountain lion over there and a bear over there and the streams running and…
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