Access to Western art materials (such as easels, watercolors) gave Native artists a new means of self-expression, as well as a new way of recording history and daily practices.
[citation needed] The Studio style, as taught at the Santa Fe Indian School, first by Dorothy Dunn and later by Gerónima Cruz Montoya (Ohkay Owingeh), built upon the accomplishments of the San Ildefonso school of painters and Hopi painters such as Fred Kabotie, who were successful "Flatstyle" easel artists in the 1910s and 1920s in Arizona and New Mexico.
[5][dead link] Collectively, these three Flatstyle movements were sometimes derided by Native artists in the 1960s as "Bambi Art," which has been criticized as nostalgic, sentimental, and limited in scope.
[12] The year 1938 is given by artist Ruthe Blalock Jones (Shawnee/Delaware/Peoria) as the date the Bacone School of Indian Painting was established,[13] although some would say it should be 1935.
Paintings were aesthetically pleasing, with contours of a certain hue often surrounded by outlines of lighter tints, to emphasize the spiritual nature of the subject.
Figures were brilliantly colored with backgrounds of a "subdued palettes of greens, blues, and browns," as Ruthe Blalock Jones writes.