Ken Williams Gets Back to Nature

Ken Williams, of Golden, BC, is an outdoors man. He is one of those rare artists who is equally at home looking down the sights of his rifle, flyfishing, or painting the panorama of the country he loves.

Ken painted the above work on the shoulder blade of one of the moose he had bagged.
Take a good look at it. You will see in an instant, that Ken knows his stuff when it comes to acrylic painting. He has great tonal values of light which move from dark foregrounds into light backgrounds and he has interpreted the colours of the foothills well, and he has deftly painted a group of bisons into the foreground of his work.

Ken invited me into his studio and told me about sculpting a big totem for the home of a friend. And, in between times in our conversation he hauled a huge piece of milled mountain cedar into his home. He brought it down from the mountains, and he figured that it may have been well over a hundred years old when it got caught in a fire. His plan was to take a large, frozen bullhead trout from his freezer, and set it outside in the snow, where he would measure it, study it, and then return it to life in a large wooden carving.

The Canada Council Art Bank

There are all kinds of banks out there; blood banks, organ and tissue banks, financial banks. So, it stands to reason, I guess, that there is a national art bank maintained by the Canada Council for the Arts.

The size of this bank is rather surprising. They have some 12,000 works consisting of Canadian paintings, sculpture and other works. And, the bank is some 40 years old.

The art bank is part of the federal purse, and there are times when its clasps are rather rusty and hard to open. And, its not without some political manipulation.
For instance, a work by Jean-Paule Riopelle was removed from the walls of the PM's Sussex Street home. But this is neither here nor there, for I don't have any abstractions hanging on the walls of my home. So, it was more then likely a matter of artistic preference. But, even worse is the fact that the butget for the art bank was almost eliminated by the Federal Liberals during a budget cutting period, and the Tories reduced the size of their budget by 50%.

That being said, pictures from the national collection, hang in the offices of our members of parlaiment and in public buildings and the bank serves an important archival and public role in preserving and presenting our country's visual arts.


Canada Council Art Bank: new acquisitions

Barry Ace, Ottawa, ON
Cashing In
Benoit Aquin, Montreal, QC
Sans titre
Arnaqu Ashevak, Cape Dorset, NU
Woman with Bear Cub
Miguel-Angel Berlanga, Ottawa, ON
La connaissance de la nature profonde de la pierre est le fondement même de la sagesse
BGL, Quebec, QC
Villa des Regrets
Kristin Bjornerud, Saskatoon, SK
Encounter with the Bear
Shary Boyle, Toronto, ON
Untitled
Paul Bureau, Montreal, QC,
Passage 12/13/14
Brian Burke, York, PE
Room No. 168
Paul Butler, Winnipeg, MB
Winnipeg without the Jets
Christine Carty, Masset, BC
Cedar Hat
Dana Claxton, Vancouver, BC
Tatanka Wanbli Chekpa Wicincala
Sébastien Cliche, Montreal, QC
Dans la solitude il n'y a pas de trahison
Catherine Collins, Winnipeg, MB
The Core (Salvation, Cold Beer, Hot Soup)
Robin Collyer, Toronto, ON
Regents Park
Carole Condé & Karl Beveridge, Toronto, ON
Not a Care, 1400
Marlene Creates, Portugal Cove, NL
Wind Gusts, Falling Rock, Alberta 2000
Michel Daigneault, Toronto, ON
Au Cœur des Choses
Chris Dorosz, San Francisco, CA
Stasis Series #9
Keesic Douglas, Toronto, ON
Product of Canada
William Eakin, Winnipeg, MB
Space (6034)
Joe Fafard, Lumsden, SK
Nicola 1/5
David Ferguson, L'Amble, ON
The last day of the Muskokas
Randall Finnerty, Montreal, QC
Wounded Moose
Adrian Fish, Halifax, NS
Stage 1-3
Jérôme Fortin, Montreal, QC
Untitled #6 from the “Screen” series
Daphne Gerou, Toronto, ON
We Are Betrayed
Lorraine Gilbert, Ottawa, ON
Here, There, Everywhere, from: Icelandic Walks, 2005
Greg Girard, Shanghai, China
Huashan Lu House #1
Sky Glabush, Edmonton, AB
Consultation
Jim Graham, Saskatoon, SK
Darth
Colwyn Griffith, New York, NY
Northern Lights
Toni Hafkenscheid, Toronto, ON
Alex Fraser Bridge
Marla Hlady, Toronto, ON
Proposition for Tracing a Conversation
James Hart, Massett, BC
“Sister” - Bear Mother & Twins
Greg A. Hill, Ottawa, ON
Post-card from Kanata
Richard Hines, Halifax, NS
Sliced Apple
Simon Hughes, Winnipeg, MB
Modular Ice-Fishing Tower
Pedro Isztin, Ottawa, ON
Nueva Armenia II, Honduras
Lizzie Ittinuar, Rankin Inlet, NU
Map of Rankin Inlet, Nunavut
Joanne Jackson Johnson, Whitehorse, YT
Air Show Whitehorse Airport 2005 Looking East
David Janzen, Edmonton, AB
Churchill Square Cameras
Marie Lannoo, Saskatoon, SK
Extruded Light #2
Manuel Lau, Montreal, QC
Le chat rouge et chiens jaunes
Bonnie Marin, Winnipeg, MB
Golden Boy
Anne McElroy, Saskatoon, SK
Off Centre
Peter McFarlane, Salt Spring Island, BC
The Messengers
Shawna McLeod, Montreal, QC
LFU 1
David Merritt, London, ON
Untitled (Heart Breaker)
Laura Millard, London, ON
Lac Des Arc: Skate II
Lauren Nurse, Montreal, QC
The Death of Love
Caroline Ouellette, Sainte-Julie, QC
Chardon
Roberto Pellegrinuzzi, Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, QC
Éléments Pour un Paysage (Arbre Bic)
Annie Pootoogook, Cape Dorset, NU
Series of Three Interiors
Michèle Provost, Gatineau, QC
Lou Reed - Perfect Day, from the Series “It's Only Rock and Roll”
William Pura, Stonewall, MB
Esker 2
Joshua Radu, Laval, QC
138 en Charlevoix
Joseph Reyes, Winnipeg, MB
Untitled
Paul Robles, Winnipeg, MB
My Beautiful War (triptych)
Larry Rosso, Vancouver, BC
Salmon Ovoid Panel
Jayce Salloum, Vancouver, BC
Sylvia's shop, cabinet, previous wares holding their own, Main St. (Cordova)
Amanda Schoppel, Davis, CA
Lined Paper
Karen Schulz, Winnipeg, MB
to be continued
Pat Service, Vancouver, BC
Summer Lake V (Flags)
Jaclyn Shoub, Toronto, ON
At This Point in Time (Landscape w. Trees - Large Version)
Gerald Steadman Smith, Stittsville, ON
Andrea Conroy
Steven Stewart, Ottawa, ON
Elementary School Gym
Derek Sullivan, Toronto, ON
Untitled
Moy Sutherland, Victoria, BC
Barnacle Paddle
Jeff Thomas, Ottawa, ON
North American (Indian)
Denyse Thomasos, New York, NY
Dwelling-Well
Larry Towell, Bothwell, ON
Rafah Refugee Camp, Gaza Strip
(residents returning to their destroyed homes after Israeli invasion)
Henri Venne, Montreal, QC
One Last Time Before It Ends
Stephen Waddell, Berlin, Germany
Asphalt Layer #2
Carol Wainio, Ottawa, On
Decoding Rabbit
Carrie Walker, Vancouver, BC
Grey Squirrel, (Sciurus carolinensis) A bemused grey squirrel
Douglas Walker, Toronto, ON
Untitled #764
Eric Walker, Ottawa, ON
Dans le cœur de Montréal
Adrian Williams, Montreal, QC
Listen


Information for this entry was drawn from 'Politicians Have Access to Inventory of Canadian Art.', Toronto Star. Please click here.

The list of recently acquired Canadian Art, can be found on the
Canada Council for the Arts, website. Please click here.

John Parson Arm Wrestles with the C Devil

Readers of 'The Portrait' may recall the work of John Parson. John lives relatively close to me in this part of Ontario. John produces exciting oils, and when you journey through his galleries, you can see that he has a deep love for nature. His picture 'Fiona' is typical of his works.



John's been on my mind a lot in the last few months, and I thought it was about time to recycle his works on the blog. You know how it is with these things, when you think of someone a lot, they send you a surprising contact. I got his email this morning describing how he was emerging from a recent fight with throat cancer. That hurts when you think that John is a non smoker.

In February I was diagnosed with throat cancer (with enlarged lymph nodes as well…!!!) and I didn't even smoke... cigs!!??..they(Dr's) treated me fast and well , once they knew what I had , my supporting friends were amazing as we waited on all the tests, to find out spacifics. Then once the Dr's decided what had to be done I stayed in Toronto (at Princess Margaret lodge a special low cost cancer hostel ) for seven weeks of radiation and chemo (not fun I don't recommend it …lol) And a the final result is we beat the bastard ,…atleast for now…it looks very good ! The side affects from the treatments have left me without saliva and my taste buds aren't up to scratch (and I've lost 35lbs), but it could be alot worse

….



I am impressed by John's tenacity. The two pictures we see of him were taken on one of his snowshoeing expeditions.

John makes his way through life alternating between New Zealand and Ontario. To see more of his exciting works, please check out his website by clicking here.

John McEwen, Sculptor

Heaven and Earth

Nowhere to stand in the rain? This work was created by sculptor, John McEwen, who was presented with an honourary degree in 2008. Read about this man's accomplished life, below.

Extracted from the Ditwald website. Please click here.

Sculptor John McEwen Receives Honorary Degree at 2007 Fall Convocation
For his substantial, enduring contributions to Canadian arts and the cultural ecology and quality of life in communities in Canada and beyond, The University of Lethbridge is proud confer upon sculptor John McEwen the degree of Doctor of Fine Arts at the 2007 Fall Convocation ceremony on October 13.

Through large-scale public works and small-scale private works, John McEwen�s sculptures have made significant contributions to Canadian arts and have furthered the appreciation of art in Canadian communities and beyond.

Born in Toronto, John McEwen studied at the Ontario College of Art. After his graduation, he and some friends began a gallery called A Space. A year later he worked for a veterinarian in Cookstown, and made some sculptures from cow hide, showing some of them in an exhibition.

Deciding that he wanted to sculpt in steel, in 1972 John McEwen bought an old blacksmith shop in Hillside, Ontario, learned welding skills at George Brown College in Toronto, and taught himself blacksmithing skills. A friend of his, a blacksmith, later rented the front part of the shop, which had become known as Hillside Iron Works.

An artist with persistent vision, John McEwen�s evocative, critically-acclaimed body of work depicts large-scale objects of steel, bronze, or stone, embodying complex, interwoven themes of communication, transportation, and Canadian cultural history. His sculpture reveals many themes associated with the Canadian experience including, as he says, �the idea that culture and ecology are inextricably linked.� John McEwen�s work often uses animal forms, especially dogs, in an exploration of what animals represent to humans.

His striking large-scale sculptures have been installed across Canada and the United States. Examples of his work in Alberta include the sculpture Western Channel, a notable and essential part of the exterior of the U of L�s University Centre for the Arts; Horn and Weaving Fence, which graces the front plaza of the TransCanada Pipelines building in Calgary; and the complex piece One and One, on display in the Southern Alberta Art Gallery.

Outside Alberta, John McEwen�s work has been installed in downtown Toronto; the harbour front, Toronto; the National Aviation Museum in Ottawa; and Queens, New York. John McEwen�s work has been featured in major national collections such as the McLaren Arts Centre in Barrie, Ontario and the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinberg, Ontario. Overseas, he has exhibited his work in France, Germany, Japan, and the U.K.

In addition to being an important Canadian artist, John McEwen is a respected educator who shares his insight with artists, students, and the public. He has taught at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute and the Ontario College of Art.

From the University of Lethbridge website. Please click here.

Sa Ga Yeath Qua Pieth Tow, or “King of the Maquas' and the culture of painting.

This work is part of the collection of our National Archives and it was painted by Joseph Verelst in 1710 Verelst lived in the years between 1648 and 1734.

I chose this one of the set of 4, because it features Peter Brant, possibly the first of the baptized Brant, family.

When I look at this work, the first thing that captures my attention is Brant's garb. First off, we see Chief Brant wearing a ceremonial red blanket. The red blanket has historical significance as it was traditionally presented as a gift to native peoples by the English, and this blanket may have been presented by Queen Anne.

Brant's toga is a rather unusual garb and it gives him a larger then life historical image. I stumbled over Brant's seemingly gift wrapped feet, but my faithful blog assistant editor, Mo Bayliss assures me that she has seen picture as of men wearing such traditional footwork in early pictures.

When I look at this work, I see the face of a white man. And, horror of horrors - were his breasts really this large? And, what about his tattoos? Has the artist, reworked Chief Brant's painted body designs into tattoos? Is this accurate? I am unaware of North American natives sporting such elaborate body markings but I am no student of Native cultural history.

I am intrigued by the way John Verelst plays with the background light and branches to give Brant a sort of natural halo.

The work appears to have touches of artistic cultural manipulation given the toga and Brant's features, but it is important that we get this straight. We weren't dealing with men who were awestruck by a handful of coloured beads. These were proud native leaders, and this occasion was ceremonial and tremendously respectful. I would suggest that Sa Ga Yeath Qua Pieth was called King, because he was treated as a King and this is the only word the English understood for him. The Mohawks were never, a conquered people and they were certainly not vassals

To visit the site this picture was extracted from, (The Society of 18th Century Gentlemen), please click here.

You may wish to check out these sites for addtional information.
1. Wikipedia. Click here.
2. Flicker. Click here.
3. Canada's Got treasures. Click here.
4. Library and Archives Canada. Click here.

Hang onto Your Hats - This is Paul Rupert at his Best

I am putting this entry up, as a follow up to Ron Morrison's entry.
What a contrast this work presents. What a work of realism.

I captured this work off Paul's website. Take a look at it. Are you ready?
Paul has painted it by pallete knife. It defies the imagination to know how anyone can create such exquisitely soft textures.

Paul's website can be viewed by clicking on his name in the list of featured artists on the right column.

Laurie Near's, Journey into Art via You Tube

Its good to be able to present F-A featured blog artist, through this media.
Enjoy.

Viewers are welcome to visit Laurie's website. Laurie also produces an art newsletter. Please click here.

Ron Morrison

There are times when you are drawn short and take a deep breath when you see a painting. There is something about it that gobsmacks you. This is one such painting by Courtenay artist, Ron Morrison.
Lets begin with the sky - a wet on wet waterfall of colour that flows down the painting to the reflective metal roof of the building.
In some ways the roof is a continuation of the sky, a tin slide for the light to flow down onto the collection of old vehicles.

Look at Ron's play with shapes and movement. See the flow of white in the lower sky above the building. It leads to the back half of the building. Now, slide down the roof and see how the assembly of cars opens like an inverted V. Talk about design!

The picture is vibrates with activity. The tree branches spike into the sky, the foreground suggestion of grass dances with a variety of improbable colours. Then there are the unpainted sparkles which surround the work and that surprising flow of red in the upper right.

Where does it end? Ron's creative sparkle and vitality has carved him a unique and important place in the Canadian watercolour scene.

To see more of Ron's dramatic watercolours please click here.

Helen Parsons Shepherd 1971

Still Life: Oil on Masonite, 55.9cm x 66cm.

Painted by Helen Parsons Shepherd, the first Newfoundland Student to graduate from the Ontario College of Art.

Please visit the Newfoundland Heritage site to see this work, by clicking here.

Alex Colville, Horse and Train

Having tried and failed to be wilfully scornful of the triumvirate of Great Canadian Painters Bateman, Danby and Trisha Romance, let’s now cast aside the bow and arrow for a look at someone modern and, you know, Canadian, who’s actually matched the spirit of the Group of Seven.

Alex Colville, seen here in a detail from a famous portrait by Arnaud Maggs, was yet another Ontarian, but his folks got him out of there early and took him to someplace real instead, Nova Scotia, when he was still only nine. He showed his gratitude by getting very, very sick, but convalescence in those days meant crayons, and an artist was born in fever. Great stuff.

During that big fight with the Nazis, Colville was a “war artist”, just like some of the Seven, and likened the experience to a novelist training as a police reporter. These war artists were supposed to give the folks back home an accounting of how their tax money was being spent overseas, and it’s likely that many tax bills were promptly paid when Jacques and Gilles Canadien saw Colville’s paintings of the mass graves at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

This business of obtaining and hanging on to freedom, which cropped up in Hitler’s Europe and doesn’t seem to be getting resolved in Bush’s Iraq, got a reading in Colville’s “Horse and Train” in 1954, shown at the top of this post. Hooves pound toward destiny, but unless this nag is mesmerised by the engine’s beacon, surely he can leave that track, right?

Or is the horse being brave? Pig-headed? Stupid? Am I the horse? If so, can I or should I alter my course? If not, does the death of a horse matter to me, especially if its salvation means disrupting the train’s well-planned course?

Extracted from 'The Dali House', please click here.

Work in Freefall: a Deconstructive Landscape Painting by Holly Friesen

Jim Larwill in Cultural Shifts


Landscape painting historically has been directly connected to the exploitation of the environment. Paintings of Canada’s natural beauty opened up our land culturally to the phenomenon of real-estate development; from sea, to sea, to sea. The CNR and CPR as major early patrons of the arts set this trend and painting’s landscape trajectory has followed those tracks up until this very day. The message of grand vistas framed was to create pre-determined ornate views for tourists. Travel by train. Come and see. The call of nature’s vibrant raw colours, repeatedly captured on canvas, marched the masses into cattle cars. Emigrate by rail. Conquer, and then settle.



Landscape is real-estate. Paintings of the “natural” world are travelogue posters evoking a time and place that no longer exists. The world is no longer divided between the town and country. The planet is now Uber-Urban and Sub-Urban. Today within the economic “reality” of global capitalism landscape painting is nothing more than the evocation of the large suburban lot, where you know you are rich when you cannot see or hear your neighbours. It is a home in the Disney World fantasy of the individual’s natural place surviving untouched and uncorrupted by the corporate collective communism of pollution. Landscape painting is the iconic mantra of private property that lives in denial of the growing global terror of universal communism and its ever rapidly growing collective property - pollution. It spreads like an uncontrollable Stalinist storm of fire and ice across our Mother Earth unchecked.

Holly Friesen in her painting “work in freefall” captures the hope and horror of Omnigothic Neofuturism. Here the horizontal cubism of an environmental Geurnica of the groin finds spiritual threads reminiscent of feudal triptych iconography. Her images are more than just an Orientalist idealization of earth spirits. The pastiche of materials in this painting moves human energy through time and space. This heretical work of visual art has a beginning/middle/and end. Words crawl up and down the flowing spines of hot and cold like kisses of wet spent love turning the viewer’s eye into a licking tongue filled with the sensual taste of raw lust set free from the constraints of consumer society where sex is endlessly sold like bland boiled potatoes to the hungry in a spiritual famine. Pass the salt, and if I could only have a little cabbage broth on the side, then I would be apocalyptically happy.

The raven to one side perhaps says it all. We are doomed. The pure virgin dragon of scientific discourse crashes. Its face is dismembered human fertility. It flaps its angelic wings of material promise, but down it goes anyway. The moon spits human kind back down to earth. Technology is swallowed. We fossilise into a whirling dance of orality as our mouths blister with the collective lies that silences our souls. Yet the cancerous flame of our wonton consumptive desire ignites a spark. With in the split alienation of our cloven existence a fire burns deep and it will rises up like a whore of words howling in the night. The yin and yang will twist and turn. The vaginal face of a wolf will speak. The landscape will burst alive with the language of fire.

To read the article at source please click here.

Fishing Camp, Newfoundland by Kenneth Gordon

This painting by the late Kenneth Gordon of Winnipeg Beach, Manitoba caught my eye for a couple of reasons.

I like Gordon's way of "softening" his work. The rocks are generally rounded and there is a certain intimacy and tenderness in the way they surround the harbour. And, his colours have been softened and muted and this compresses it into a mid tonal range.

When the artist eliminates the power of strong lights and dark tones he mutes the emotive reaction of the viewer and creates an almost nostalgic mood. And, this is well suited for capturing a scene from a province where there has been a shift from its small outer communities.

Take a look at the way he brings sunlight down onto the houses. Its a little like looking througha gauze covered lens. There's a dreaminess about it all.

This painting was extracted from the Pegusas Gallery website. Please click here.

18th Century Painting of Sa Ga Yeath Qua Pieth Tow, Mohawk Chief

Sa Ga Yeath Qua Pieth Tow (baptized Brant), King of the Maquas, 1710
John Verelst (circa 1648-1734)
oil on canvas ; 91.5 x 64.3 (support).

Custodial history Commissioned for the court of Queen Anne, the paintings appear to have passed from the Royal Collection into the collection of the Petre family of Kent, sometime in the 1830s, and thence continued by family descent to the vendor.

Collection consists of four portraits by Dutch artist (working in England) John Verelst. Commissioned by Queen Anne, they depict four Haudenosaunee delegates, who travelled to London as ambassadors of the Five Nations Confederacy. They are: Tejonihokarawa (baptized Hendrick), named Tee Yee Neen Ho Ga Row, Emperor of the Six Nations; Onigoheriago (baptized John), named Ho Nee Yeath Taw No Row, King of the Generethgarich; Sagayenkwaraton (baptized Brant), named Sa Ga Yeath Qua Pieth Tow, King of the Maquas (Mohawk) and Etowaucum (baptized Nicholas), named Etow Oh Koam, King of the River Nation.

Please click here to view the source, 'Library and Archives Canada.'

Taking all this a step further, you may wish to check the website 'Vanishing Tattoo.Com. Please click here. The editor of this website states that the subject is the grandfather of Joseph Brant, respected Mohawk leader, whom the city of Brantford, Ontario was named after.

Canadian Navy Centennial Art Selection

I chanced upon this painting by Richard Rudnicki, on the Canadian Navy Centennial Page. This is one of a group of Navy Paintings by a number of artists.

On October 15th, 2009 the six centennial paintings commissioned from Canadian renowned marine artists for the Canadian Naval Centennial were unveiled in a ceremony headed by the Chief of Maritime Staff, Vice-Admiral Dean McFadden, OMM, CD. The paintings reflect significant eras in Canadian naval history have been selected. Admiral McFadden was joined by the four artists and they helped him to unveil their respective work of art.

Kudo's to the Canadian Navy to turning to painters to help them celebrate their centennial.

Please click here to view the works on the page. click on the paintings to expand them in size.

Nude in a Landscape by Edwin Holgate

Nude in a Landscape was painted by Montreal artist Edwin Holgate. Montreal artists had a greater sense of liberation when it came to painting nudes then did their compatriats in Toronto. The above work was done in 1930 and it would have created quite a stir had it been painted at that time in Toronto - or at least publicly shown in 'Toronto The Good'. But it wasn't.

The website, Cybermuse, reports that Hogate had been invited by AY Jackson to join the Group of Seven, but he chose not to join.

A.Y. Jackson first approached Edwin Holgate about joining the Group of Seven in 1926 during their trip to the Skeena River, 12 though he was not actually invited to become a member until 1930. While not a reluctant member of the Group, 13 Holgate did recognize its limitations. The Group's concentration on landscape, he felt, left little room for the figurative work that interested him. Moreover, Holgate's formal interests were quite different from those of the rest of the Group.

'Nude in a Landscape,' has some interesting characteristics. Firstly this is a picture within a picture. There are two pictures here. There is the landscape, and the nude, and both of these separate entities within the work play off each other.

Holgate makes his nude a part of the Canadian Shield by making her curves, mounds and contours a natural extension of the landscape. The colours of the rocks on the left are picked up by the hues of the her upper body and and she is postured in such a way for the contours of her body to provide a visual pathway for the eye to travel into the landscape.

There is an essential contradiction here. While the curves of the sitter's body gives us a route into the work, the nude's face and eyes look across the painting, and not specifically into it. Its not surprising as we look more closely at the nude, to see that she has no interest in hills, rocks and trees. She has other things on her mind.

Lets take a look at the tonal values of the nude. The lighter tones give way to the darker upper shadows which push her face into the background. Is this a morality statement? Is there a dark inner secret? Most certainly she gives the impression of spent passion. Her foreground arm and her face are flushed.

The language of shapes give rise to human emotions. For instance, the rolling hills of the langscape inspire gentle emotional responses. As we move down the painting, we find that the sheet below the nude is crinkled into a network of lines and fragmented shapes which a create a more emotional response.

Source: Information by Christopher Rolfe.

Christopher Rolfe is University Fellow and Honorary Director of the Centre for Quebec Studies, University of Leicester, UK, and a former President of the British Association for Canadian Studies and of the International Council for Canadian Studies.

Please click here to visit Cybermuse.

Emily Carr's Trees: essay, part 2

She continued, adding her intent to try to find words for the great pines, because "trying to find equivalents for things in words helps me find equivalents in painting. It is an interesting inversion of Lawrence's great skill, translating from the language of the eye to that of the ear. The search for equivalents also touches on O'Keeffe, who with Stieglitz thought deeply about the issue; unlike Lawrence or Carr, however, O'Keeffe found them most often in photography or music, not words.
To find a visual vocabulary for what she felt about Canadian trees, Carr launched into a series of large studio drawings in charcoal on paper, based on trees but exploring form in a conceptual manner. Though Carr had long practiced drawing as a record of what she saw and thought, this 1930-31 series constitutes what Doris Shadbolt has called "the refined product of a period of study, which she seems not to have repeated at any other time in her life." That this extraordinarily free body of work followed directly upon Carr's visit to New York invites speculation that it was undertaken in response to her conversation with O'Keeffe, who had also used drawings particularly large, expressive studio charcoals during her own breakthrough period in 1915. Had O'Keeffe recommended such liberating exercises? Carr's journal entries indicate a readiness for new ideas: in January 1931 she is weary of past directions, writing, "My old things seem dead. I want fresh contacts, more vital searching." Her words are curiously reminiscent of O'Keeffe's two years earlier when, about to make a fresh beginning in the Southwest, the artist complained of her recent work, "It was mostly all dead for me." Carr seldom stretched for abstraction as much as O'Keeffe, but the 1930-31 charcoals seem to have furthered her movement away from preoccupation with native imagery and toward a search for nature's formal equivalents.

At least one of these drawings may be directly responsive to Lawrence and O'Keeffe. Untitled [Formalized Cedar] and two closely related oils, Red Cedar (1931; Vancouver Art Gallery) and Tree Trunk, are particularly striking as answering motifs. With their central, upward thrusting trunks, these paintings suggest that O'Keeffe's The Lawrence Tree and her jack in the pulpit series, which Carr had also seen during the New York trip, had shown Carr the power of a symbol embedded in a reductivist image. Carr's responses, particularly her Tree Trunk and the formalized cedar drawing, demonstrate a new simplicity in her work, as well as the strong possibility of sublimated eros - a suggestion that would have horrified the prim Emily, simultaneously repelled by and drawn to Lawrence's nature based sexuality.

Perhaps it was Lawrence's characterization of the pine as a "passionless, non-phallic column, rising in the shadows of the pre-sexual world" that made Carr feel she was on safe ground. In any case, she was fascinated (like O'Keeffe) by Lawrence's attention to the darker side of nature, a symbolism of death as well as life. If O'Keeffe had acknowledged that shadowy zone in Dead Tree, Bear Lake, Carr painted it in Old Tree at Dusk. The tree's spiraling trunk and downward drooping branches are strongly reminiscent of O'Keeffe's dead tree, a painting Carr might also have seen during her New York visit.

What Carr definitely saw in New York was an exhibit of Arthur Dove's work at An American Place. On display were twenty-seven recent paintings by the romantically inclined Dove, whose explorations of abstractions derived from nature parallel those of O'Keeffe. A work such as Dove's charcoal Thunderstorm uses angular geometries to suggest the crackling energy of lightning. O'Keeffe had used similar zig zag or sawtooth shapes in works from the Line period. Early in the 1930s, whether in response to the increasing abstraction in Lawren Harris's work (as suggested by Carr scholars) or as I would argue with Dove's or O'Keeffe's angularities in mind, Carr introduced stronger geometric forms into her painting. Grey, discussed above, and an untitled black and gray forest interior from 1931-32 show Carr moving into the most abstract phase of her forest paintings. Zig-zagging shafts of light, a reductivist palette, and strong geometric patterning reveal Carr's interest in cubist derived form.

Equally abstract, but far less angular, is Carr's sweeping Abstract Tree Forms. Great ribbons of color undulate across the surface of the painting; the red in the foreground encloses a deep tunnel form, like the sinuous wrapped shapes in O'Keeffe's paintings of music. Inside this space, however, is a dark bulbous form perhaps a tree stump, a fragment of a downed totem pole, or even the form of the artist herself. The freedom of the work owes as much to materials - thinned oil on paper - as to formal conception. It began as a practical effort: Carr needed to cut her expenses for materials, and she wanted to be able to work large and rapidly. She bought big sheets of inexpensive manila paper, which yielded paintings of consistent size that were simpler to frame and exhibit. To transport the paper and paintings, she made a folding drawingboard. And for paint she chose good quality white housepaint thinned with gasoline, which could be supplemented with oils, if necessary, on her return to the studio. Most days Carr could produce three of these paintings, which she tacked on the walls of her caravan or cabin overnight. A friend who often painted with her remembered that Carr liked to study her previous day's work in the bright morning light.

Working large, she thinned the oil to admit light and air into the composition. Its quick drying capabilities gave her some of the fluidity of watercolor yet provided more opacity and solidity. Not least, the materials were so cheap that she could afford to be profligate in her experiments. Carr made many of these oil on paper works between 1933 and 1936. About them she wrote: "I've learned heaps in the paper oils - freedom and direction. You are so unafraid to slash away because material scarcely counts. You use just can paint and there's no loss with failures. I try to do one almost every day."

Carr sometimes relied on dreaming to press her tree paintings into greater simplification and abstraction. As she wrote, "Last night I dreamed that I came face to face with a picture I had done and forgotten, a forest done in simple movement, just forms of trees moving in space. That is the third time I have seen pictures in my dreams, a glint of what I am striving to attain." O'Keeffe had also developed the capacity to incorporate dreaming into her landscapes, a practice that seems to have facilitated her own impulse to abstraction. In a letter to Dorothy Brett she referred to "that memory or dream thing I do that for me comes nearer reality than my objective kind of work." One thinks here of Gauguin's admonition to the artist to "dream before nature." For both Carr and O'Keeffe, letting go of direct, detailed observation was a key to finding other truths in the landscape.

Carr returned in the 1930s to tree subjects she had painted early in her career, and we can see in the comparison how far her conception of Sei Do had evolved. Her early sedate rows of trees give way to later ones, like Sombreness Sunlit, in which light, and perhaps wind, take visible form and become the real subjects of the painting. All is movement, all light, perhaps accompanied by sound. Carr wrote about these sensory overlaps, a concept known to modernists as synesthesia: "If the air is jam full of sounds which we can tune in with, why should it not also be full of feels and smells and things seen through the spirit, drawing particles from us to them and them to us like magnets?" Such sensory transfers had been made especially visible to Carr during her 1930 New York visit, when she saw the work of Kandinsky and Charles Burchfield; the latter artist was having an exhibit of his early watercolors at the Museum of Modern Art at the time. His brooding works like Church Bells Ringing, Rainy Winter Night exaggerate the expressionistic qualities in plants, buildings, and natural surroundings to make them seem alive with menace. As Ruth Appelhof points out, after seeing Burchfield's work Carr began "to employ rhythmic lines to denote atmospheric movement and as a formal means of unifying the compositions."

Trees figure importantly in the moody spatial evocations of both artists. A work like Carr's oil on paper sketch Chill Day in June employs those devices to great expressionist effect. By now the medium we saw introduced in Abstract Tree Forms about six years earlier had taken Carr's work in decidedly new directions. Although Carr herself referred to her more than two hundred of these oils on paper as "sketches," the term is somewhat misleading; they are finished works in their own right. It is true that she borrowed elements from them for later canvases; but what Carr discovered through the new medium was itself pivotal: in oil on paper she learned to join her means and ideas seamlessly. Great sweeps and washes of color, punctuated with seemingly careless dashes, flicks, and strokes, explore surface and depth simultaneously. Filled with light and air, these works break down the impenetrable wall of green seen in her early forest canvases. Moving beyond the Group of Seven, who had taught her something about vastness, she now opened up space even more in beach scenes like Strait of Juan de Fuca. And in an oil on paper work called Forest, color, air, and light chase one another with abandon. In paintings such as this one, Carr's exuberant paint application best expresses her belief in the unquenchable vitality of trees. Of the breadth and spontaneity her oil on paper technique afforded her, Carr concluded, "I feel I have gained a lot by its use. It is inexpensive, light to carry and allows great freedom of thought and action." Criticized by some for their large size, she justified the scale by saying, "Woods and skies out west are big you can't squeeze them down."

Carr's trees developed in many moods and moments. She never seemed to exhaust their expressive possibilities, probably because she identified so closely with them. Trees were the botanical counterpart of her own imagined existence in nature: varied, changing, joyous, despondent. In the latter mood, feeling alienated from people, she wrote of herself as "exposed to all the ill winds like a lone old tree with no others round to strengthen it against the buffets with no waving branches to help keep time." When the persistent efforts of loggers decimated the old-growth forests in certain areas, Carr returned to the idea she had first used in her 1905 cartoon: she anthropomorphized trees. Loggers were "executioners," she now declared; the stumps mute mourners or tombstones. These things she described, both in paint and in words: "There's a torn and splintered ridge across the stumps I call the 'screamers.' These are the unsawn last bits, the cry of the tree's heart, wrenching and tearing apart just before she gives that sway and the dreadful groan of failing, that dreadful pause while her executioners step back with the saws and axes resting and watch."

Significantly, the trees have a sex - female, in Carr's thinking; their pain is hers. Her paintings of stumps often continue the theme of scarred flesh; they read like amputations. Loggers Culls (1935; Vancouver Art Gallery), Stumps and Sky (c. 1934; Vancouver Art Gallery), and Swaying are three examples of such imagery. In the latter painting surviving trees stand like sentinels in a graveyard of stumps. On the other hand, when Carr entitles a painting Laughing Forest or Happiness (both c. 1939; private collections), we can be sure that she is projecting her own positive emotions onto the forest. The trees seem, at times, to be singing, a concept known to O'Keeffe as well. Georgia O'Keeffe wrote In 1915 of "the woods turning bright ... and the pines singing," but the words could as easily have been Carr's."

In their seasonal and annual cycles, trees offered Carr the constant prospect of renewal. She tapped their energy for her own work. Musing on reawakening her strength at age sixty-nine, she wrote: "I think I shall start new growth, not the furious forcing of young growth but a more leisurely expansion, fed from maturity, like topmost boughs reflecting the blue of the sky." A painting such as Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky expresses that vision of high waving foliage, reaching upward for release and renewal in nature.

Often release took the form of spiritual redemption for Carr, whose religious wanderings brought her eventualy to a highly personal form of Christianity. The forest as religious refuge is expressed in such paintings as Cedar Sanctuary and Wood Interior (c. 1929-30; private collection), which frame space as if it were within sacred precincts. The interiority there is the visual correlative of her own internal questioning: "Why do you go back and back to the woods unsatisfied, longing to express something that is there and not able to find it? This I know, I shall not find it until it comes out of my inner self, until the God quality in me is in tune with the God in it."

Carr's trees form the axis around which her work rotates. Whether she studied them as native totem poles, as foliage curtains in living walls of jungle, as whirling, spiraling young evergreens against the sky, as murdered stumps, or as pillars within her intimate forest sanctuaries, Carr's trees form the thematic and formal scaffolding upon which her whole oeuvre was constructed.

- From "Carr, O'Keeffe, Kahlo: Places of Their Own"

extracted from Art History Online. Please click here to see the article in its original context.

Emily Carr on Trees: essay, part 1

Emily Carr's Trees

Emily Carr experienced an ecstatic identification with the spirit of nature, particularly as she found it in British Columbia. There the cool, gray climate, the proximity of water and most particularly the presence of trees offered her endless opportunity for artistic reflection and growth.

To speak of Emily Carr's trees is to seize on the central subject of her work, both as metaphor and form. Like a great axis mundi, the tree centers and grounds most of her paintings. And as a mythico-ritual subject in Carr's work, the tree corresponds in importance to the centerpost often present in her paintings of the homes of native peoples in the Pacific Northwest.

In 1935 Carr spoke before a literary society in Victoria about her art, a talk later published as "The Something Plus in a Work of Art." That "something," Carr explained, was what characterized great works of art - a kind of spiritual connection between the artist and an ideal. It was a connection that echoed Plato as well as the transcendentalists, whom she quoted. But it was more. Carr also brought the Japanese concept of Sei Do into her definition: "the transfusion into the work of the felt nature of the thing to be painted." Like Georgia O'Keeffe, Carr was receptive to principles and practices of Asian art. Carr's influences were received via other artists, particularly Mark Tobey, whose advice and teaching she had sought a few years earlier.

The felt nature of the thing - its essence, its distinguishing core. For a painter whose chief subject was trees, Sei Do was treeness, and the expression of it her life's work. Carr had begun to discover its power very early in her career, when she animated trees in a 1905 political cartoon for a Victoria weekly periodical. Captioned "The Inartistic Alderman and the Realistic Nightmare," the cartoon was accompanied by the following poem:

"Ye ghosts of all the dear old trees, The oak, the elm, the ash, Nightly those gentlemen go tease, Who hew you down like trash."

Carr, it seems, had already seen the dangers posed by unrestrained tree cutting, a cause she would champion all her life. Trees, she suggests, possess a life of their own and should not be wantonly felled. It was an idea that was rarely popular in British Columbia, where the logging industry yearly consumed ever more of the virgin forests. Cartooning could not hold Carr's interest for long; she was after something more deeply expressive in the forest. In 1934 she chastised herself for flagging in her work: "I am hedging, not facing the problem before me how to express the forest - pretending I must do this and that first ... but the other should come first; it's my job."

By that time Carr had spent years investigating the forest, absorbing all she could of tree existence. Her journals are full of her communion with trees, her admiration of them, and, ultimately, her close identification with them. Because Carr wrote so much about her life and her artistic struggle - unlike O'Keeffe - we can more readily see how she projected her feelings onto trees. Typical are her remarks "Trees are so much more sensible than people, steadier and more enduring" and "I ought to stick to nature because I love trees better than people." The latter statement echoes that of O'Keeffe to her friend Hartley.

In their paintings of trees both Carr and O'Keeffe made transcriptions from visual experience, and each artist searched out rhythmic patterning and movement within arboreal structure, although there is no evidence that either painter knew the other's work before 1930. Both often cropped trees, and both made much of the negative spaces between branches. Carr's work in the 1920S usually stayed closer to gritty, palpable realism, while O'Keeffe's toyed with space and pressed toward decorative abstraction. The differences are significant.

In 1930 Carr's and O'Keeffe's interest in trees intersected. That spring Carr visited New York, where, in the company of Arthur Lismer, an acquaintance who was a member of the Group of Seven, she sought out new painting. At An American Place a number of O'Keeffe's paintings were still on exhibit from her annual show. Most were based on her previous summer's visit to Taos, including The Lawrence Tree. Carr and O'Keeffe apparently discussed the painting at some length, during which O'Keeffe related the work's connection both to her experience at the Lawrence cabin and to Lawrence's passage about the great pine in St Mawr. Apparently these ideas lingered in Carr's mind, for later that year she copied Lawrence's description into her journal, though with a qualifying comment: "It's clever, but it's not my sentiments nor my idea of pines, not our north ones anyhow. I wish I could express what I feel about ours, but so far it's only a feel and I have not put it into words."

end of part 1

extracted from Art History Archive. Please click here to see the article in its original online context.

Huron Christmas Carol, by Father Jean Brebeuf

Thomas Lorraine Hunt

Boats at Dock. 1930. 71cm x 82cm. oil on canvas.

Thomas Lorraine hunt was born in London, Ontario, Canada on February 11, 1882 to artist John Powell Hunt. At a young age, Hunt began studying art first under his father, then with Hugh H. Brecknridge at the Pennsylvania Academy, and eventually in other various American and European art centers. To earn a living, Hunt learned about the construction business and moved to Cleveland, Ohio to be a real estate developer where he built and sold apartment buildings. During his leisure time, Hunt continued to paint. In 1924, at 42, Hunt moved to California where he continued to his work in real estate development in Hollywood and San Bernadino. He was very involved in the Laguna arts community and was a founding member of the Laguna Beach Art Association. He taught classes, painted, exhibited locally, and helped aspiring young artists financially and as a mentor. After his wife died in 1934, Hunt returned to Canada and then to Gloucester, Massachusetts where he had painted earlier in his life. He enjoyed his time painting his favorite subjects of wharves and fishing boats. 2-3 years later, he returned to Laguna Beach and died at the Santa Ana Valley Hospital on April 17, 1938 from an ulcer operation and is buried in Mountain View Cemetery in San Bernadino. While Hunt’s earlier works was influenced by Impressionism, his later works evolved into a distinctive form of Post-Impressionism. Using a highly colorful palette, much of his works revolved around harbor scenes, landscapes, and coastals.

Biography from: Sternfinearts.com. Please click here.

Painting: Boats at Dock, from Artnet. Please click here.

Barry Atkinson an Artist in Film

This film trailer was written and directed by Barry Atkinson, in Canada. It is available through Amazon Please click here. Barry also directed a short Film ("Into Darkness") which screened at the Sundance film festival in 1998 which is a bonus feature on the DVD. Besides this, he is presently writing a couple of film scripts and plans to shoot a short next year.

For those who are not familiar with Barry, he is one of our featured blog artists. Drop by his blog. Its a good one.