The New Indian Art is written by David Paladin, Phoenix Magazine, April 1975
“While some decry the new (Indian art) movement as destructive of ancient and sacred tradition, they must somehow be made to recognize that if art is to become great, it must be allowed the freedom to evolve.”
David Paladin: Altered States, catalog, published in conjunction with an exhibition organized by the University of Arizona Museum of Art and curated by Joshua Goldberg, September, 1988
"David Chethlahe Paladin envisioned the presence of other worlds next to this one. The hidden dimension to reality and the events or happenings abounding in the apertures between the worlds led to his vocation as artist and shaman. Paladin was someone who could draw us backward with his works to the main body of our ephemeral past, to its very head and source. Healer, artist, shaman and dreamer, Paladin produced works which absorb the contraries of secular illusions and hieroglyphic truths." Joshua Goldberg
Paladin: Dream Image Painter, by Barbara Perlman, Arizona Arts & Lifestyle, Spring 1980.
"I began to discover painting as a transcendent state. I was lucky because I was able to keep a direct enough focus to paint and at the same time not even be aware of what I was doing. Once I hit that point everything just started to pour. I remembered the little bits and pieces, things I’d seen on cave walls, feelings I’d had herding sheep up on the mesa, words around a campfire, feelings at a powwow, love, loneliness. Emotion became much more a part of my art. That’s when I really began to know I was an artist."
The Shamanic Art of David Chethlahe Paladin by Anne Hillerman, Shaman’s Drum, A Journal of Experiential Shamanism, Winter, 1987-88, Number 11
“There is a joy of unbridled exploration, an unlimited source of inspiration and a feeling of freeing myself from the technological limitations of the more traditional approaches to art….I flow with the creative spirit, allowing it to affect me at all levels.” David Paladin