A CELEBRATED SCULPTOR WORKS BY FEEL

BY DOTTIE INDYKE

In 1968, in a rice field in Vietnam, 22-year-old Michael Naranjo was hit by a grenade. He was instantly blinded and sustained injuries to his right hand that made it practically useless. For a less determined person, these afflictions could easily have extinguished any hope of becoming an artist. But for Naranjo there was, quite literally, no looking back. Born at Santa Clara Pueblo and raised in Taos, NM. Naranjo is the son of distinguished ceramic artist Rose Naranjo and one of 10 children in a celebrated Pueblo family that includes potters Jody Folwell, Dolly Naranjo - Neikrug, and Nora Naranjo-Morse.
As a child he was surrounded by pottery, and he crafted hi~ first piece-a horse-at his mother's side. He'd wander downtown Taos and look at the art in gallery windows, knowing that was what he would do as an adult. But much of his youth was spent in the outdoors, where he camped, hiked, hunted, and fished with his father and brother Tito and played baseball on an all-sibling team.
After his war accident, Naranjo attended a school for the blind in California. Then he returned to Santa Fe, where he set up solo housekeeping, learned to cook, and tackled the challenge of trying to sculpt without having sight.
"I asked my sister about the nose on one of my sculptures, and she said it was a little crooked. My brother said it was fine. Who was I to believe?" Naranjo says. "After that, my work was all about what I thought."
He honed his intuition to the point where he can assess through touch alone whether his pieces have movement, composition, balance, and flow. And it helps that he is intimately familiar with his subjects: a Native American warrior, a hoop dancer, a female nude, a child, a soldier, a bear or fish or bird.
His style is relatively simple-he uses his fingernails to etch the detail in his sculptures. Tools are impractical since Naranjo can't see what the end of the tool is doing. Ultimately if a piece doesn't feel right to him, he'll tear it up, perhaps salvaging a single arm or leg. Laurie, his wife of 23 years, tends to take the work away before he destroys it in a fit of perfection.
0ver the last 30 years, Naranjo's sense of touch has been refined by contact with the masters. Once he was invited to examine Michelangelo's DAVID in Florence, Italy. At the Louvre in Paris, on a day when the museum was closed to the public, he was allowed to feel the Medici VENUS.
Through projects like the touring touchable exhibit he organized at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Naranjo seeks to share with others what he views as a transformative opportunity to have direct contact with art. He and his wife have established the Touched by Art Fund at the Santa Fe Community Foundation to enable public school students in New Mexico to visit galleries d museums.
SOUTHWFST ART - APRIL 2002

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