W. Richard West Sr.

[1] His mother was Rena Flying Coyote, also known as Emily Black Wolf, whose parents were Big Belly Woman and Thunder Bull.

[1] His classmates at Bacone College included Terry Saul (Choctaw Nation) and Oscar Howe (Dakota).

West felt that Jacobson's active support of Native Americans helped him cope with the widespread racial prejudice that he encountered in the city of Norman.

[5] In 1941 and 1942, West lived in Phoenix, Arizona, where he studied mural painting under Olle Nordmark (1890–1973), a Swedish-American artist and sculptor.

In 1941, West began his first teaching assignment at the Phoenix Indian School, serving primarily Navajo students.

After the United States entered World War II, he joined the US Navy the next year and fought in Europe, serving from 1942 to postwar 1946.

His students included such successful artists as Joan Hill (Muscogee/Cherokee), Enoch Kelly Haney (Seminole/Muscogee), Johnny Tiger Jr. (Muscogee/Seminole), Sharron Ahtone Harjo (Kiowa), Marlene Riding In-Mameah (Pawnee), and Virginia Stroud (Keetoowah Cherokee/Muscogee).

A complete departure from that style was West's Indian Christ series, which were lush, allegorical oil paintings of New Testament stories with Native American figures, set in the Southern Plains.

[1] Although Flatstyle is what he is best known for, West also painted abstract and highly stylized works[1] in oil, watercolor, distemper, and gouache.

I have always felt that the term abstraction has been a part of the Indian's artistic thinking longer than most European contemporary influences and perhaps in a [truer] form..." —Dick West, 1955[7]