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Bad picture of the war bond (at the bottom of the article): HYPERLINK " interview with Phillip White Hawk: HYPERLINK " Expo: HYPERLINK " paintings:EncoreAny of the burros from “Leanin’ Tree Greeting Cards” — might be cute to have one peeking in from the side of the page or something, was not a big part of her legacy, more a bread and butter gig.River of the Moon (not referenced by name in the article but was mentioned repeatedly in conversation and was one of the main paintings around the Kootenai story. Is probably still in Bonners Ferry in the house of the Trice’s.)I reference the Jimi Hendrix painting but in a later conversation Rainbow asked that I not mention her friendship with Hendrix, for purposes of keeping her clientele broad. I will be sending her the article to read and approve and ask if she minds us using any Hendrix images.Katherine is Rainbow’s email correspondant “Emilie “Rainbow” Touraine—To Make A Long Story Short”Five minutes into my conversation with Emilie Touraine, I realized I’d stepped through a wardrobe into a sprawling forest of stories and experiences. This last year she turned 79 (“I’m 79 going on 12…” she tells me). I call her hotel and ask the manager to put me through to her room, where a gravelly and playful voice answers and very quickly recognizes my name and intent (“I read your bio in the Chowder and you and I have a lot in common…”). With no warning or preamble, no hint of dry formalities, she is mid-narrative and I’m awash in layers of images and retrospections, getting a verbal metaphor of the very way she paints. We talk for two hours and I hang up and think, “My God…How do I write this article? What journalistic ship to sail through the universe of the life of Rainbow Touraine?” Touraine, whose work has been described as “psychological warfare”; Touraine, who was adopted/initiated by the Hopi in the southwest; Touraine, who helped end a war with art. “You can’t make this stuff up,” she says on the phone. It’s overwhelming, has as much depth as breadth. Very much like her paintings.Rainbow’s paintings are like a visualization of how memory functions: you might see a painting in a gallery of a horse, a bison, or a warrior—and like anyone looking at art you begin to imbue the image with your personal impressions, the emotions and events of which you are reminded by the brushstrokes. Touraine’s work, however, dares you to take that phenomenon a step farther in when you suddenly realize she’s begun the process for you, sneaking hidden faces and silhouettes into cloud formations, or clumps of hair or grass, or the billowed wing of an eagle. These interpolated renderings are less developed, more subliminal, and yet distinctly recognizable. Once you visually fit those implied memories into the more obvious picture, like a “Magic Eye” puzzle, then you may take in the painting with your own mind. Does she have an agenda or is this just how her brain works? The answer is Yes.Her broker, Spokane local Jay Moynahan, tells me she would paint extremely big and extremely fast, “She’d go crashing into it…” She worked ambidextrously, painting with both hands at the same time, as if she couldn’t get the image out fast enough, barely eating or sleeping for days. She’d start at the top of a 4x6’ masonite board and work down, layering images upon images between swaths of glaze, giving each life-sized piece a feeling of looking through water, or space. It wasn’t realism (though she could do that), and it wasn’t quite surrealism either (though she did that too). You could compare her to Salvador Dali, Georgia O’Keefe, or even Frida if you like with a nod to a life being a genuine stance. But Touraine is independent, adaptable, informable, and tends to focus more on universal themes than introspective ones.Symbolic Americana, for example, is the name of an art form she began creating in the mid 1960s with the help of her friend Phillip White Hawk (“He was 6’3”, played guitar, very good looking, stunning, had a voice like an opera singer—the cameras loved us…”). Phillip was a slave to lyrics, working sometimes several hours on the arrangement of three or four words, knowing that with intention and care, many layers of meaning could be wrought into one sentence. For these two, a complementary social commentary project which combined Touraine’s oil paintings with White Hawk’s original music was inevitable. Sometimes Phillip would write a song and Rainbow would paint it, sometimes Rainbow would paint an image and Phillip would write a song about it. It was living multi-media. Over the next few years this creative practice developed into a collection of beautiful, humungous, inseparable songs and paintings, which eventually featured in our own Spokane, WA in 1974. It was here that the governor of Nebraska was so inspired by it that he invited Symbolic Americana to be the official birthday present to the nation for the bicentennial in 1976. So two years later, White Hawk and Touraine presented their work, from the heart of America in Nebraska, as a gift really to the whole world, symbolically represented by a “rainbow” of 80 ethnically diverse children…and their children, and their children’s children. We should visit in more detail that Spokane show, because the event happened to be the first environmentally-themed World’s Fair—and at that time, ours was the smallest city to ever host an Expo. I asked Rainbow what she remembered of our town, and she said, “I love Spokane. Washington State is not a strange place to me, especially Spokane…What we had was unheard of, people couldn’t get enough of it. Trust me. It was incredible…” The U.S. Pavilion, the most massive display at the party at 179,250 square feet, was struggling to find an appropriate and prolific enough Western artist to represent the theme of the Expo, as well as the left coast and all its history. “Somebody piped up and said ‘Have you heard of Touraine?’ And they invited me. I had everything in there from bison to a painting of Jimi Hendrix. They put a picture of ‘Encore’ on the front page of the paper and everyone wanted to know where to come see it. White Hawk was there too, they invited us as a team. We made appearances in several other pavilions, like the African American Pavilion, the American Indian Pavilion asked for some of the paintings, the Iranians wanted something in their pavilion, the endangered species pavilion…The ’74 World’s Fair might as well have been the Emilie Touraine show…” 44 paintings were featured altogether.It was that same year, while they were still in our region, that Touraine got a personal call from a surprisingly human fellow over at the Department of Defense (“I didn’t know they had any of those in the Defense Department…”). “Is this Emilie Touraine?” “Yessss…”“Are you the one that drew the war bond?” She’d been making war bonds for the Kootenai Nation in Bonners Ferry which had dwindled down to 67 people after years of begging the federal government for aid, and in a last ditch effort to avoid extinction they had officially declared war on the United States. It was not a shooting war, they were mostly trying to raise help and awareness because their conditions were so poor. Touraine and White Hawk had heard their desperate story and volunteered to display some of their Symbolic Americana show in Bonners, in the nicest space the tribe had to offer—basically a tiny hallway in a house that was falling apart. “Look,” said the voice from the DOD, “we understand where your heart is. We’re not mad at you or anything, but this is causing so much heat here we’re having trouble. You shouldn’t be doing this.” “What are we supposed to do over here?” asked Touraine. “The Kootenai don’t want a war either, we just want to solve this problem. You guys won’t pay attention.” He thought about it and said, “Look, let me give you an idea…the bond is definitely an attention getter. Why don’t you make a peace bond instead? By the way, you’re a really good artist.” Lights and bells and whistles went off in Rainbow’s head. What a great idea, she thought. They’d been selling the bonds by the handful at the World’s Fair (“What a convenient thing to have going on at the same time…”). The bonds were about the size of a placemat and asked for a dollar donation for the cause. There was no reason a declaration of peace couldn’t accomplish exactly the same goal. They brought the proposal to the leaders of the Kootenai who unanimously supported it. The mayor of Bonners Ferry donated the town hall for hosting an arts and culture show, Rainbow traded some of her work for two living bison and one butchered one to donate to the tribe (and the tribe used the butchered one to throw a barbecue for the whole town), and D.C. finally started moving its feet. “We mean business!” Rainbow croons over the phone to me. “We’re Symbolic Americana and we mean business!”Compared to Touraine’s legacy, modern life seems a little two dimensional—Rainbow doesn’t have an email address, she doesn’t keep a mobile phone. Using search engines to dig up information or prints is like mining with a thumbtack. Yet she is in the last chapters of her life and still painting 16 hours a day. “We’re all human beings,” she says. “Art is what is. Are we what we are?” I reckon that’s a whole other story.

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