Daniel McCoy (Muscogee Creek/Citizen Band Potawatomi) applies lessons learned in Oklahoma to the Northern New Mexico landscape he’s been surrounded by since leaving the Sooner State for his first stint at the Institute of American

Indian Arts over 30 years ago. McCoy grew up in tiny Olive, Oklahoma, a place so small locals considered Bristow, Oklahoma, “town.”

McCoy’s ambitions and interest in the arts quickly outgrew the area. He went off to boarding school in Tahlequah,

Oklahoma, by that time being run by the Cherokee Nation. There, he met a matriarch of Native art in Oklahoma, Mary Adair (Cherokee).

McCoy took multiple classes with Adair, learning about Bacone School “Flatstyle” painting and artists like Woody Crumbo (Citizen Band Potawatomi). She gave him the confidence to enter student art competitions and to apply to the Institute of American Indian Arts.

“When I first came out here to art school, I crashed and burned,” McCoy admits. He returned to Oklahoma to “be an adult” and raise his first son. And learn another valuable art lesson. “I was a billboard painter and a musician in the evening, and I learned how to mix color—what colors vibrate against each other,” McCoy says. “You get your fundamental courses from college, then you apply it to advertising, and you know what really works in the field.”

McCoy’s colors make a dramatic first impression. High-key and heated up. See for yourself during a solo show featuring the artist’s landscape paintings, Scenes Along the Rio Grande, at Hecho a Mano gallery in Santa Fe, August 1 through September 1.

“I’ve been really fortunate the artists I’ve worked for, the art I’ve handled. Some of the painters have taught me little secrets here and there about how to get this color,” McCoy says.

McCoy didn’t let his second bite at the apple in Santa Fe go to waste. He was serious. Grown. He slowly concocted a unique artistic stew melding Flatstyle elements with the 1960s psychedelic music posters his father loved, as well as comics and 8-bit graphics video games like “Tetris” from childhood, alongside Cubism, Pop Art, the Taos Society of Artists and quilting.

He initially applied this to figurative painting. Landscapes are a recent development fueled by his need to get out of the house during Covid.

“I never really painted landscapes. I always avoided them actually—never really thought much of them,” McCoy says. “During the pandemic, when I would go hiking, that’s when lightning struck and I realized how beautiful this area is. I always knew, but it never was something to make artwork from.”

The area he’s referring to is just outside his back door in La Mesilla, New Mexico, about 25 miles north of Santa Fe. His family moved up there in response to Covid as well. He’s 100 yards from the Rio Grande in Santa Clara Canyon.

“I use that spot endlessly,” McCoy says. “I get up and look at it every morning, and I always feel like there’s an event going on in nature that I can’t comprehend because I’m an earthbound human.”

In addition to large-scale landscapes, Scenes Along the Rio Grande will be interspersed with smaller Flatstyle pieces paying homage to the Oklahoma artists who inspired him, Joan Hill (Muscogee/Cherokee) in particular.