A slim card holder featuring Bear by Denesuline Ancestral artist John Rombough.
It includes four card slots, a zipper closure and RFID protection. The turquoise exterior complements the vivid colours of the artwork.
Artist receives royalties from sales of this product.
John Rombough is a Denesuline Ancestral artist born in Sioux Lookout, Ontario. At the age of three, he and his two older sisters were adopted and raised in Prince Edward Island as part of the Sixties Scoop.
His adoptive parents encouraged his early interest in drawing and surrounded the family with art. As a young adult, Rombough began searching for his birth family and eventually found his father, Alfred Catholique, in Łutsel K’e on the eastern shore of Great Slave Lake. He moved north and spent seven years there, learning from his father and reconnecting with his Dene family, culture and the land.
That return changed his art. Rombough had been working mainly in black ink, but life in the North led him toward the vivid colour that now defines his paintings. A self-taught contemporary Woodland painter, he uses strong black lines, geometric forms and northern imagery influenced by Norval Morrisseau and the Native Group of Seven.
Rombough often works on twenty or thirty paintings at once, allowing each composition to develop without a fixed plan. Animals, ancestors, tree lines, faces within rock formations and the changing seasons emerge as he works. He describes painting as a way to express what comes from his heart and to give back to his Dene culture.
He also teaches and mentors young people throughout the Northwest Territories, encouraging them to discover their own creative expression and maintain a connection to their culture.
The revised ending keeps the relationship between art, youth and culture, but does not explain his motivation beyond what we can support.
John Rombough describes Bear as an early spring scene:
“The bear in his elements is walking alongside grandfather rocks. As the Ancestors watch over the land, the Ravens welcome the bear from a long winter’s nap.”
Rombough has said that “everything has a spirit,” and in Bear he makes that understanding visible. The ancestors watch, the ravens welcome the bear, and even the rocks are recognized as grandfathers. Nothing exists only as background.
This gives the painting the feeling of a conversation taking place across the land. The bear’s return is noticed and acknowledged by the world around it.
Rombough builds this complex world from deceptively simple shapes. Heavy black contours, blocks of colour, dots and repeated markings create depth without conventional perspective.
The longer the painting is viewed, the more spirits and relationships begin to emerge from within it.
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