Painter explores heritage with art

It’s a recent muggy Kansas summer evening, right about dusk, and lifelong Wichita artist Ric Dunwoody is in his backyard, feeling slightly nervous about being interviewed on video.

“I’m not the smoothest in front of a camera,” he said in a text message before.

But all his anxiety seems to vanish once his paintbrush touches his canvas, set in the shade amid a nicely quaint, forest-like setting. It’s very serene.

The painting he’s working on depicts a Native American woman carrying a child on her back. White outlines fill in the background, and take the forms of warriors, drummers and an eagle.

Dunwoody, 25, who is of Pawnee, Otoe and Wyandotte descent, says he grew up exploring and appreciating his heritage. It’s all a learning experience, he says, and a journey. Perhaps like the one he’s currently painting.

“This piece is just about this woman’s life, how she’s going down a road, in a sense. How she’s looking forward and her child is on her back trying to grasp what’s going on.”

In many ways, the painting is telling a story, he says, and shows “what’s going on around her, throughout the community, throughout nature. The way they live, how different people in the community play different roles. I just think it’s a strong woman taking care of her own.”

Dunwoody was introduced to Native art at an early age. His grandfather, Baptiste Bayhylle Shunatona, was a renowned Pawnee artist.

“Looking at his paintings growing up,” Dunwoody says, “being surrounded by them, he totally inspired me and made we want to pursue that and wanted to be, hopefully, one day at the level he was at. I never got to meet him, personally, but I was completely influenced by him.”

While his art may depict Native stories or themes, he says it isn’t always serious, and it doesn’t take insider knowledge of Native culture to get it.

“I’ve got a painting I’m working on right now with a Native shooting a bow-and-arrow at a Buffalo Wild Wings logo,” he says. “You don’t have to be super-educated on Native heritage at all, you can just look at it and go, ‘Ha-hah. That’s a joke.’”

Dunwoody doesn’t only deal with Native themes, though; he likes to explore as much as possible. He also doesn’t only work in acrylics, branching out into airbrush or spray paint.

“I like to dabble in anything I can get my hands in,” he says.

He says making art isn’t only a form of expression; it’s also therapeutic.

“I skateboard, as well,” Dunwoody says. “And find vast similarities between the two, just in the escapism part of it. I don’t have to worry about what’s going on in my life or the world right now, I can just focus on what I’m trying to accomplish.”

And that would be creating a conversation, he says, between his art and the viewer.

“You really put yourself out there and have to accept how people are going to receive your artwork,” he says. “I just kind of push it out there and say, ‘Hey, take what you will. If you don’t like it, all right. If you do, even better.’”

This story was originally published July 30, 2015 at 4:31 PM with the headline "Painter explores heritage with art."