Rock Paintings of the Chumash

Campbell Grant

 

When the author was growing up in Berkeley at the turn of the twentieth century, one of his heroes was his uncle, a marine painter. Inspired, Grant attended what would become the California College of the Arts on a scholarship after high school. He then continued his education at the Santa Barbara School of the Arts, also on a scholarship, where he co-illustrated a children’s book about the Chumash with Channing Peake, not knowing that three decades later he would devote serious effort to Chumash paintings.

 

The art school in Santa Barbara did not survive the Great Depression. Grant emerged straight into the Federal Arts Project of the WPA, where for a year and a half he painted large landscape watercolors of the California countryside and an oil-on-canvas mural positioned at the entrance hall of Santa Barbara High School. The watercolors were initially placed in libraries but eventually became scattered, and Grant lost track of them.

 

In 1934, Grant went to work as an animator for Disney, initially assigned to interstitial illustrations, which he found dreadful until he moved into the character design department and began working on Snow White, Dumbo, Bambi, Fantasia, and Pinocchio.

 

During World War II, Grant worked on Army and Navy training films at the Disney studios in Burbank, mostly with Frank Capra for what was known as Fort Fox. After the war, Grant left Disney and spent a year producing visual education films for the Department of Education of Mexico, aimed at educating people about the causes of disease through visuals rather than text. He then shifted to adapting Disney films into books, illustrating Golden Books written by his wife and collaborating with Richard Armour of Scripps College on a series of satires of history and literature.

 

Later, Grant went on a fishing trip that sparked his interest in Indian rock painting. He secured a museum grant to conduct a survey, which lasted two years. The results were a book on American Indian rock paintings in the United States and Mexico, and "The Rock Painting of the Chumash," published in 1965 by the University of California Press.

 

The Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History reprinted and published the book in 1993, the year after Grant's death. It contains high-quality reproductions of Chumash paintings from many of the sites that Grant visited during his survey. Grant remarked that California Indian rock painting was absolutely fascinating to him. Unfortunately, many of the paintings have suffered from mindless vandalism, exposure to the elements, periodic brush fires, and other dangers that have either destroyed them or posed significant threats. Therefore, it was crucial for this professional artist to painstakingly capture some of the paintings in this book.