Elriggs Allen "Holy Creatures" — Navajo Deer with Heart-Line & Shield Motif, Oil on Canvas, 2006

Three deer in profile move across a field of ochre and burnt sienna, their forms rendered in the flattened, graphic vocabulary of Diné pictorial tradition — heart-line arrows tracing from mouth to chest, antlers cast in pure silhouette, eyes set with the dotted pupils of sandpainting imagery. Above them floats a quartered shield disc in red, cream, and black, the four-direction motif framed against a turquoise mountain-sawtooth horizon. The artist's verso inscription names the work and its intent: "In the Navajo tradition the deer is considered the peace keeper. He is All that is Kind."

Signed Elriggs Allen on the stretcher bar and dated 2006, with an artist's cipher worked into the lower-right corner of the composition. Oil on stretched canvas, painted gallery-wrap edges, unframed and ready to hang. The palette — copper, gold, oxidized green, lampblack — pulls directly from the mineral pigments of ceremonial sand and the weathered surfaces of canyon stone, while the heart-line deer motif appears across centuries of Pueblo pottery and Navajo weaving as a symbol of the breath-path linking spirit to body.

About the Artist

Elriggs Allen was born in 1977 in the canyons of Arizona to Carl and Rosey Allen, a Navajo family whose deep connection to the land shaped his eye from the start. By five he was drawing in self-imposed silence, studying the structural geometry of the world around him — insects, animals, the layered formations of canyon country — rather than simply looking at it. That habit of close observation earned him multiple awards through elementary and into high school, where he took district and all-state honors in the San Juan school district across New Mexico and Arizona, and later won the northern Nevada all-state competition. His father Carl's death before Elriggs's sixteenth birthday silenced the work for nearly a decade. He re-emerged in the early 2000s as a full-time artist, and in the years since has produced work at a pace of over a hundred paintings annually — supplying collectors, galleries, commissions, and juried art shows. Now into his second decade as a working artist, Allen has extended his practice into sculpture, carrying the same formal vocabulary of his paintings into three dimensions.

Significance & Rarity

The heart-line deer is one of the most enduring images in the Pueblo and Diné visual canon — a motif that appears on ancient Mimbres pottery, Zuni fetish carvings, and Navajo textiles across many centuries, always signifying the breath-path, the life-force, the bond between the physical and the sacred. Allen does not simply borrow the symbol; he builds an entire cosmological field around it — the four-direction shield, the sawtooth mountain horizon in turquoise, the autumn-leaf canopy overhead — situating the deer within a living ceremonial landscape rather than isolating it as ornament. At roughly 24¾" × 40¾", this is a substantial canvas, painted with conviction and signed and titled in the artist's own hand on the verso.

CONDITION

Excellent. No damage observed. Canvas is taut on the stretcher; paint film is stable with no flaking, abrasion, or in-painting noted.

DIMENSIONS / SPECIFICATIONS

• Overall: 24 3/4" H × 40 3/4" W × 1 1/2" D
• Medium: Oil on stretched canvas
• Signed: Lower right (artist's cipher) and verso on stretcher bar ("Elriggs Allen")
• Titled verso: "Holy Creatures"
• Dated: 2006
• Format: Gallery-wrap, unframed