On the Occasion of Commander Hadfield’s Return to Earth

I have written elsewhere about my inspiration as a youngster watching Neil Armstrong stepping down onto the Moon, the same event that put another young Canadian boy on the road to command of the ISS.  I have written elsewhere about the writings of Carl Sagan leading me to the great Irish mystic poet Yeats.  I have written elsewhere about how obvious it seems to me that science and art are fundamentally the same thing, that both inspire and move us, the both change us and our world and, perhaps most importantly, both science and art, and all the wonder they stir in us, are accessible to all of us.  I have always known this to be true.  I have always seen supporting Science and supporting the Arts as obvious obligations of individuals and society. But I am very aware that many friends and acquaintances have never been able to see through those lenses.

Over the last five months I’ve often thought of Spider and Jeanne Robinson’s Stardance in which art comes to a space station as dance. And, of course, I’ve thought of the paintings of astronaut Alan Bean and of cosmonaut Alexey Leonov.  While Bean and Leonov’s art is exquisite and inspiring, they painted after they came home. And the Robinson’s so wonderfully imagine making art in space, but they never did it.  But, perhaps because they lacked the internet, these artists never caught the larger public’s attention.  They never joined, on a grand scale, science to ordinary people through art.

I realized tonight as Commander Hadfield’s new video of Space Oddity went viral, that this fairly  unassuming gentleman from Sarnia has done it.  He has shown ordinary people art and science meeting together  And the people get it!

Using social media and the biggest stage possible – the sky – Hadfield has had us watch him rapt for five months as he shape-shifted from rock star to zero-gravity chef to science teacher to science fiction character to military commander, and, finally, to a fifty something man with a crew-cut and moustache who actually pulls off a self-shot music video of his own acoustic cover of perhaps the most iconic Bowie song.  Whatever the flaws of adaptation or performance, Hadfield has capped his inspiring public Space Odyssey with a piece of art that captures the tension apparent in his earlier collaboration with Ed Robertson, the tension between the to most  unknowable joy of looking down on Earth from a home in the sky and the universal human joy of standing at home on the Green Hills of Earth.  No longer the story of an ominous malfunction of Major Tom’s capsule which leaves the astronaut stranded, Hadfield’s revised Space Oddity is a bitter-sweet lament for the end of his stay on the Space Station and his final return to earth. He is facing an inversion of Bowie’s original conceit of the Marooned Astronaut  –  Hadfield knows that it is to Space, not to Earth, that he will never return. With this recording Hadfield has turned a once inconceivable  Space Oddity – a Canadian kid from Sarnia becoming the tweeting rock star commander of the International Space Station opening hailing frequencies to Captain Kirk – into an Odyssey of Space very true to the spirit of the Greek epic poem.  Although at last he stands on the shores of Ithaca, he can’t help but look longingly back at the Cosmic Ocean he has sailed.

Hadfield has put himself up there and made a point of making art with us and for us from that tin can he’s sitting in.  He makes us all feel like we’re there with him, doing science, looking down on our blue home, feeling wonder at the speed and the vastness.

And we can’t help but sing along.

Thank you, Commander Hadfield.

We can hear you, Major Tom!

Safe landing!

My Village: the Paintings I’ve Been Working On for So Long

The place I live has been a city for over a century. For a while before that, it was two cities. Before that it was two towns. For a very long time before that it was a village, often seasonally, down in what we now call Rossdale. Today, five times as many people live here as lived in Shakespeare’s London and there are about twenty Edmontonians for every citizen of the Rome Michelangelo knew.

But, as far as I’m concerned, I live in a village. My Village is made up of the people I see each day, the Butcher, the Restaurant Owner, the Poet, the Neighbourhood Children, the students, artists, merchants and, yes, strangers with whom I share my days. No matter how large our city grows, I think we each still live in a village. My new  paintings are portraits of and tributes to some of the people who share My Village.

My hope is that when you look at My Village you will feel an urge to consider and honour Your Village.  And, together, every day, let’s continue to celebrate, build and live in Our Village.

The opening reception for My Village will be held from 6 to 7:30 pm, Thursday, May 23, 2013 at Holy Trinity Anglican Church in the heart of Edmonton’s welcoming Old Strathcona community.  My Village is a part of ArtSpirit, a new, exciting and wide-ranging community arts festival.  More information is available, and more will continue to be posted, at My Village‘s Facebook Event page. Everyone is invited. All thirty-five billion of you living in this country named “Village” in a lost Iroquoian language.  And all seven billion of you in this Global Village. But maybe don’t all show up at once: Holy Trinity is beautiful and big, but not that big.

 

Update March 28, 2013:  ArtSpirit’s Facebook Event page is up and running.

On listening to Q from Edmonton (finally)

On the evening of November 22, 2012, the Myer Horowitz theatre on the University of Alberta Campus in Edmonton was filled to the rafters with people who payed money to see the taping of a radio show.  For the first time in its decade of broadcasting, the show with the mysterious name “Q” was visiting Edmonton after multiple visits to every other major city in Canada.  For those of you who live outside of Canada and the many parts of the United States which receive Q, Q is two hour morning radio show which is broadcast on CBC Radio One every weekday.  Oddly, it is also a TV show once a week.  And a YouTube channel.

The host of Q is one Jian Ghomeshi, a UK born Iranian-Canadian former drummer in a rock band, former TV host, best-selling author — in other words, a fairly representative Canadian, if there ever were such a thing.

Q, like its host, is a fairly unclassifiable thing:  in-depth interviews with writers, musicians, film makers, actors, politicians and panel discussions about politics, national and international and live music — Q is a cultural omnibus and, in fact, a national treasure.  The show generally is produced in Toronto, but regularly has journeyed around the country to various cities for live-to-tape episodes.  But in the six years or so of the shows run, as I mentioned, Q had never come to Edmonton.

On the morning of November 23, Q from Edmonton was broadcast and I sat listening carefully and happilly.  Jian had as his guests (or perhaps was the guest of) singer/songwriter Colleen Brown, band Shout Out Out Out Out, sketch comedy troop The Irrelevant Show, Novelist Todd Babiak, filmmaker Trevor Anderson and an all-Edmonton media panel.  It was, of course, exciting to hear these locals on National/International radio, but I couldn’t help feeling some of the same chippiness the guests seemed to be feeling as Jian kept trying to probe into Edmonton’s “identity”, which really seemed to be about finding an Edmonton “Brand”.

There was talk of Calgary vs. Edmonton.  I can’t help think of the tired old Canadian Identity question and the stupid insulting facile answer “not American”.  Sure, there’s a rivalry with Calgary on various issues from sports, which was touched on, to politics, which was touched on more lightly, but I don’t have any sort of impression that Edmontonians define themselves as “not Calgarians”.  Todd Babiuk’s term “Magpie City” was mentioned, as was the well known “Dirt City” nickname, but those names by no means indicate that we are a city of dirt or dirty birds.  Variations on “Do it” came up a few times, and I think that suggestion may reflect a little of Edmonton.

But for me, Edmonton was all summed up in the winning entry of the “Win a Trip to Edmonton” contest, and the audience’s response to that entry.  Listeners from outside Edmonton were invited to submit a six word reason they should win a trip to Magpie City.  Many submissions praised Edmonton either highly or faintly, but the winner was an entry from Sudbury, Ontario: “Poor student. Sad Life. Need Adventure.”

The audience responded to this submission with huge, roaring, friendly and unanimous applause, in effect repeating inarticulately and earsplittingly warmly the words on the old plaque on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor . . .”  But we’re not an American-style melting pot — we’re a fermentation vessel. As Babiuk mentioned, Edmontonians (when they’re not politicians) kind of sneer at phrases like “world class”.  We are more interested in getting together, working, playing, building, creating, writing, singing, painting, sculpting, acting, talking, helping — living, than we are in self-promotion.  Edmontonians are the people who are born here, who come here, who stay here, who leave here and who come back.  We’re uncomfortable telling people we’re the best because we’re absolutely certain that Edmonton isn’t perfect.   But we are equally dedicated to the crazy thought that we can and will help each other to make it better.

Sort of like Canadians.

Many years ago I coined a phrase in a very different context, but I think it applies here:  When you own the street, you don’t have to piss on the fire hydrants.  We own a pretty damn fine street full of fascinating and varied people.  We know what we have, what we want and we’re going to make it.  We’re not wasting our time bragging about it being world class.  That’d just be pissing on fire hydrants.

Decades ago I came here from Sudbury (by way of Windsor) and I have never imagined  leaving to live anywhere else.  To the winner from Sudbury, who’s name I won’t try to transcribe from what I heard on the radio, Enjoy your adventure in Edmonton. I bet you’ll be back.

And, Jian, great show.  Thanks for coming.

I bet you’ll be back.

An Appreciation of Paddy Lamb’s “Memory of Absence”

Paddy Lamb’s art is about ‘place in time’.  Through an evolutionary abstraction, he both recapitulates and continues the natural process of change, of decomposition, of erosion and overgrowth – nature’s insistent and patient agenda of vibrant transformation in contrast to any perishable human desire for an unattainable static perfection.  Humanity builds hard-edged interruptions onto the landscape and, after a time, unsatisfied, abandons its buildings, walls, fences and gates.  Nature quietly moves in, indifferent to productivity, statistics, and the relentless pursuit of economic efficiency which leads only to downsizing, to roofless factories, schools and churches in empty villages .  Nature slowly dissolves the abandoned marks on the landscape.  These half-reclaimed monuments of humanity’s desires are the jumping off point for Lamb’s art.

The artist’s gaze falls on the loneliness, the emptiness of the west of Ireland (and, in other works, of the oddly similar landscape of Canada’s Prairie) and finds the signs, the fading tracks of human occupation constantly being taken back by nature.  He grasps these human discards and continues the work, stripping them down to basic monumental forms of light, dark and colour. And yet the finished image always retains a palpable connection to this landscape and the marks of human interruption.  As well, each image retains a far more obvious link to the one which preceded it in the development process.

For Lamb the art serves as a record of a potentially endless organic development and evolution.  Unlike the mouldering constructs which spur it, his work never assumes perfect completion.  Each work is the seed of another and has itself grown from a previous image, whether in paint, charcoal, sketchbook or in the landscape itself.  Lamb gives us story boards, frames from a film.  The fullest, most satisfying appreciation comes through viewing a series of these developing images, the tracks of the artist’s progress.

A surprising result of this process of gradual and preserved abstraction is that, when examined leisurely, the images of decayed human structures at times become anthropomorphic. There is an allusiveness to both human beauty and human violence.  Hooded figures converse with each other in whispers, faces peek from the darkness, the empty landscape is repopulated with shadows, ghosts, sometimes ominous revenants of memory.

And here perhaps is the heart of his work.  These pieces are explorations of the memory of a place and of the memory of absence.  Lamb now lives and works far from Ireland, far from the sea and its headlands, far from the stone bones of his native land.  But in his recent work away from Ireland, through the longing of separation, he returns to his memories of the signs made by others themselves now absent from Ireland.  The broken and overgrown structures in the empty Irish landscape are, in fact, the land’s memories of people who have passed.  And Lamb’s images are most simply his own memories of passing through that landscape, memories explored very deeply and made visible to us all.

The above was written for the catalogue accompanying Paddy Lamb’s upcoming exhibition, Memory of Absence, which will run from January 24 to February 17, 2013 at the Custom House Gallery in Westport, Co. Mayo, Ireland.

Back in Canada,  Mr. Lamb will be doing an artist’s residency at the Gushul Centre in Blairmore, Alberta in May and then in November-December he will be part of an exhibition with Robert Dmytruk and Les Graff at Gallery @ 501 in Sherwood Park, Alberta.

More about Paddy Lamb and his art can be found at paddylamb.ca

“Think Small” Shows Big Thoughts at the Visual Arts Alberta Gallery

I discovered the Visual Arts Alberta Gallery by mistake.

With just a few shows and sales under my belt in my intermittent career as an artist I found myself downtown one afternoon and noticed this Harcourt House building that claimed to have a gallery in it.  I thought, buoyed by a little success and positive response, I might as well do a cold call.  I climbed the stairs to the third floor, walked straight ahead into the VAA gallery, not realizing until much later that there was that other, bigger gallery across the hall.

Having decided that my little paintings could speak for themselves I pulled a couple of my Apellean Sketches out of my backpack for Sharon to look at.  She responded in the familiar but no less gratifying positive way I’d come to expect.  I asked how one got to hang stuff on the gallery walls.  By fortunate timing, one of the VAA’s member’s exhibits and sales was coming up.  I gave Sharon the modest membership fee and I was in and some of my paintings were on the wall.

But this outfit, now VAA/CARFAC, the Alberta arm of Canadian Artists’ Representation/Le Front des artistes canadians, the non-profit national voice of Canada’s professional visual artists, is no vanity gallery.  VAA/CARFAC actively lobbies for artists’ rights in Alberta, communicates provincial, national and international opportunities to members, provides professional development, workshops, lessons and outreach to the visual arts community of the province.

Of course, at the time I just figured it was neat to have a place to hang some stuff.

Since that first day, I’ve contributed to pretty much every members’ show at the VAA as well as having joint show at the gallery with Linda Daoust.  The calls for submissions the VAA regularly forwards to all members have led to a number of solo shows.

That’s my personal shout out to Visual Arts Alberta.

Now, lets talk about what’s happening in the Gallery until November 24.

Think Small is the current members’ exhibition and show.  I see it as an opportunity for artist members to give a little back to the Association in a win-win way.  Each time there’s one of these shows it’s an adventure for the artists.  This time we have to work within a size restriction (12 x 12 inches or less). Other times the restrictions have been thematic, as in Energize or dictated by a VAAA provided object as in Xposition (a small wooden cross) or VBay (brass platters).  These restrictions provide a wonderful opportunity for artists to expand their visions, to stretch their skills, to grow by working outside their comfort zones.  This is professional development at its most fundamental.

The artists set the price for their work themselves, agreeing to split any sales evenly with the Association.  The artists profit and VAA/CARFAC gains funding which all goes back to programs of benefit to the visual artists of Alberta.  And the buyer goes home with some great art made by an artist they very well may get to meet and chat with at the gallery.  And, believe me, there’s nothing quite like meeting and chatting with an artist whose work you admire.

Because VAA/CARFAC members range across the career range of visual artists, you’ll see work on the walls at Think Small from students just starting out right beside the work of grizzled established professionals.  This show is the place to find gems by artists on the cusp of their professional career as well as marvellous pieces by established artists.  At Think Small (and the other VAA Gallery shows) you can buy art, shop local, secure in the knowledge that every penny you spend benefits the artists. And, unlike what you’ll find at many charity art auctions, these are not works that the artist has had trouble selling and wants to be rid of.  Most of the works in Think Small were created specifically for Think Small.

On the afternoon of Hallowe’en, I spent an hour at the Gallery making brief notes on the works of every artist in the show — except my own, nasty lumpish things that they are.  Not every piece appeals to me, but I can certainly see grateful audiences for most. Not every piece shows a fully developed technique — but then, what artist’s technique is every fully developed before death? But every single piece gave me cause for interest, most have my admiration, and a goodly number make me wish I had far more wall space. Because of the remarkably reasonable prices, no one should feel a wish for deeper pockets.

It would be very simple for me to transcribe the brief notes I made as I stood in front of each work, but I don’t think I’ll do that here.  If there seems to be interest, perhaps I’ll post them separately.  Rather, I’ll give a bit of an overview of the range of works and media in the show. The ranges are tremendous.

For the plastic arts we see clay fired raku and various other ways, glazed and unglazed, representative, decorative and functional.  And then there are the majority of the works, the ones I am loath to call 2D. We see pastels (Shirley Adams’ lovely, painterly land/skyscapes), countless oil and acrylic pieces on every concievable ground, loads of beautiful watercoulours, a number of most interesting mixed media/collage pieces, digital art, various types of prints . . . the only thing I can find missing that was in previous members’ shows is an electolytically etched piece, and that’s just because I didn’t get around to making one this time.

As for what’s actually going on in the pieces:

Botanical/Floral pieces share with landscapes the numerically dominant position.  Some, like T. Michelle Leavitt-Djonlic’s watercolour roses are meticulous portraits, like classic botanical illustrations.  Others, such as Leona Olausen’s acrylics and Sharon Moore-Foster’s Tulips are approaching abstraction while remaining readily identifiable.  There are impressionistic lilies reminiscent of Monet by Lijun Theberge and Amy Loewan’s black ink pieces somehow hovering between old Japanese minimilist and ‘sixties design.

The landscapes are all identifiably Alberta, from Sophia Podrylula-Shaw’s bold and briliantly bright boreal forests with a Group of Seven flavour, through Laurie Bentz’ almost-abstract orange arial farmland landscapes to Patricia Coulters absolutely beautiful, economical Alberta landscapes in watercolour.

Greg Pyra offers pop art faux-fifties ads while Bernard Hippel presents colourfield pieces in terra cotta and jade.

The collage and print work I find to be generally very impressive. Wendy Gervais’ Road Trip pieces are very evocative as is Shane Golby’s “Notes from the Nightshift”, a beautiful multimedia composition in yellow, blue and black.  Wet pavement, streetlight light and shadow. Charalene Denton’s three prints, one in red and two in gold are wonderfully intriguing.

I must mention the many little pinback buttons also on display.  These are themselves unique art works from the hands of VAA/CARFAC members.

These comments are just a snapshot of the big things going on in Think Small.  That I haven’t specifically mentioned many of the artists is not in any way a reflection on their work.  I want to get this post up as quickly as possible in order to get as many people down to the show as my small effort can spur.

Think Small runs until November 24 at the VAA Gallery, 3rd floor, Harcourt House Arts Centre, 10215 112 Street, Edmonton, Alberta, T5K 1M7

A new image from the show is posted each day at the VAA Visuals Blog — but viewing images of art online is, at best, a supplement to, not a substitute for a visit to the real thing.

A Visit to the Janvier Gallery, Cold Lake First Nations, Alberta

During repeated visits to the recent Alex Janvier exhibit at the Art Gallery of Alberta, I heard conflicting things about Janvier’s Gallery in Cold Lake. I knew that a number of years ago he had opened his own gallery in downtown Cold Lake, but now there were rumours of a new gallery, of a move, perhaps incomplete, that the new gallery was open, that it wasn’t yet.  .  .  .  Well, I decided that on the last day of August I’d make the drive out to Cold Lake to see for myself.
I’ll settle the rumours at the outset:  The Janvier Gallery has moved; the collection is not completely settled in, but the new gallery is open.  Most important for potential visitors:  at the moment visits are by appointment only.  I made my appointment by email the night before my visit.  Jacqueline Janvier responded remarkably promptly and the appointment was settled on in no time.  Mr. Janvier’s official web-page has current contact information for both email and telephone and I will repeat them at the end of this post.

Now, to the road trip and the visit:

Wrangling an eighteen year old with special needs is a challenge at the best of times.  With an appointment 300 kilometres away over an unfamiliar route and with said eighteen-year-old already fed up with summer road trips and not in the best of health, the morning’s preparations can be, in a word, stressful.  But, we managed to get on the road by noon for the 4 pm appointment and happily learned later that none of the things we had left behind proved indispensable.

Anxiously (well, I was anxious) we worked our way through construction on Fort Road and under the Anthony Henday (speed trap under the overpass — we were right on the limit) and then north and east on Highway 28.  Inevitably we took some whimsical detours: a cruise through Radway, which sadly seems on the verge of ghost town status; a quick drive south from Smoky Lake, the Pumpkin Capital of Alberta, to the peaceful Victoria Settlement Provincial Historic Site on the left bank of the North Saskatchewan River.  Also innevitably, the words “Bathroom Break” were uttered just after the beginning of the long stretch of “No Service” east of Bonnyville.

Despite all, we were approaching Cold Lake around 3:30 and it was time to pull out Mrs. Janvier’s final road directions which, although they struck me as incomprehensible the night before, even with the help of GoogleMaps, made absolute clear sense on the ground.

The new Janvier Gallery is not in the town of Cold Lake.  It is, rather, in the heart of the northern section of the Cold Lake First Nations, in beautiful aspen forest a stone’s throw from the lake that gives the First Nations and the town their names.  Mr. Janvier has hand lettered a little sign at the end of the residential road leading off English Bay Road.  With the benefit of Mrs. Janvier’s directions, we arrived only a few minutes late and were greeted by three very friendly dogs.  Mrs. Janvier welcomed us at the door with totally unnecessary apologies for the unsettled state of things after the move, bringing us on a tour of the entire building, including areas one would expect to be behind doors sternly marked “Staff Only”.

The New Gallery is a Douglas Cardinal design, warmly curved and coloured in earthy red and yellow ochres on the exterior.  It is beautifully at home in its setting.  Inside the gallery space is bright, and the art fairly glows and leaps off the clean white walls.  Some might quibble that the space is too small considering Mr. Janvier’s vast output over his long career, but I would argue it is the perfect size for a visitor to admire and react to Mr. Janvier’s work’s different sizes, themes and palettes without being overwhelmed.  With Mrs. Janvier’s experienced advice and memory, I was able to appreciate a large number of works on the walls and perhaps an equal number brought out of the vault for me to consider.

In short order I had arrived at a pair of pieces that were the sort of things that balanced my desires and my budget.  Mrs. Janvier went back to the vault and found three more pieces of the fairly unusual sort I had noticed.  In the end, I settled happily on the original two.  My daughter managed to come away with a number of reproductions, cards and a key-chain with a tiny reproduction of Morning Star on it as a generous bonus.

 

 

An hour or so into our visit, Mr. Janvier arrived looking well rested after what I’d been told had been a late night of painting.  He had fresh paint still on his hands from the day’s session.  We had a most enjoyable chat that touched on Expo’67, rodeo, Peter Lougheed, the great potential of Alberta, and, now and then, Art.  Mr. Janvier expressed strongly his feeling that Alberta is the place to be for artists (and every other occupation).  With our business and our visit coming to an end, we all walked outside into the incomparable aspen forest, Mr. Janvier chuckled over his dogs a moment and then drove off with a wave to check out the rodeo on the south side of the Reserve.  We waved goodbye to Mrs. Janvier and drove off to find some dinner in town.  I felt like I had just spent a couple of hours with old friends in their very comfortable and beautifully designed home.  The Janvier Gallery is one of the warmest and most peaceful place I’ve ever had the good fortune to visit.

Unfortunately, I was so stressed on arrival and so comfortable during the visit, and floating so high as we left, I never took a single picture of the Gallery, inside or out, despite having two cameras on my person through it all. That fact is my only regret of the trip.

Next time.

A few hours later, night had fallen and we were again in the traffic of the construction of Fort Road with another twenty minutes or so ahead of us to get across town home.  I was struck forcibly by the contrast between the absurd bustle of Edmonton’s streets, in which I felt so at home, and the peace of the woods beside Cold Lake, where I also had felt so comfortable.  I had realized earlier in the day, and commented on it to Mrs. Janvier, that I feel strongly that the Janvier Gallery, now that it is on a quiet residential road beside the Lake on Cold Lake First Nations land, is in exactly the place it should be.

Again, the new Janvier Gallery on Cold Lake First Nations #149 B is open, and it is a quietly unrivalled destination for any lover of Canadian Art.  When I told them that I would be writing about the visit, Mr. and Mrs. Janvier both asked me to emphasize that for the the time being, until things are more settled from the move,  visits are by appointment only.  Please call or email before making the trip.

The Janvier Gallery can be contacted at:

Phone: (780) 639-4545
E-Mail : info@alexjanvier.com

A Shout Out to the Planetary Society

It’s been about half a year now since I started throwing my thoughts out from Behind the Hedge (someday I may explain the blog title) and apart from a few hints and passing references, something fundamental has been missing:  Science.

When I was just tiny, a few years before watching Neil Armstrong smudge his way down that shadowy ladder with the really big step at the bottom, I poured over my father’s National Geographic Magazines, enthralled by two things:  the explorations of the sea, mostly by Jacques Cousteau, and the planned exploration of space, mostly by NASA.  When I moved out on my own, one of the first things I did, remembering the excitement of my childhood, was to get my own subscription to National Geographic Magazine.  Sometime later, my father handed over all his back issues stretching back to the mid-1950s.  Now I have almost sixty years of the things and I remain subscribed, although the sense of adventure has faded quite a bit.  Over and over I say to each month’s issue “You climbed a whole mountain!  Wow!  Did you know there’s a bunch of old men over there who WALKED ON THE MOON before you were born?!  And they got there in what amounts to little more than a  Volkswagen Kombi with a bunch of big bombs strapped to the back of it!!”

Shortly after the moon landing, I took Charles Coombs’ Project Apollo out of the school library and then made my father order me my own copy from some bookstore in downtown Sudbury, Ontario.  I still have that book.  I spent my days making.  I made sharks out of plasticene and (strangly square) Saturn V rockets — complete with lunar module concealed in the top of the third stage — out of Lego.  And I craftily built the lunar module upside down so that it could dock with the command module.

Guess how I was turned onto the poetry of Yeats when I was in junior high school.

An epigram to a chapter in Intelligent Life in the Universe by Carl Sagan and I. S. Shklovskii was a bit from Yeats’ “Song of the Wandering Aengus”:

Though I am old with wandering
through hollow lands and hilly lands
I’ll find out where she has gone
and kiss her lips and take her hands
and walk among long dappled grass
and pluck till time and times are done
the silver apples of the moon
the golden apples of the sun

And wither the threads from that poem through my life?

I reverently lifted one line for one of my few published (very obscurely published) bits of verse:

. . . on broken roads which lead nowhere
I search for unknown goals
through hollow lands and hilly lands
sun burning on my back . . .

I suspect that Yeats, together with a well timed visit to the banks of the River Wye, lead me to Wordsworth who was so obviously a pleasant uncle (but not a “funny uncle”, despite Ken Russell’s Clouds of Glory which quite probably led me to Tom Stoppard, charmingly guided by Felicity Kendall) to the child who was the father of the man I am.

And what about art?  I suspect that a strange meeting in my adolescent mind between Jacob Bronowski’s Ascent of Man, Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, and David Hardy’s The Challenge of the Stars put me on that road.

As a barely-past-tween, when I privately decided that painting was to be one of my lives, my first purchase was a big tube of Mars Black, because all I was going to paint was David Hardyesque space scenes.  Now I buy huge jars of titanium white and very, very rarely buy a small tube of some very traditional earth pigment, and hardly ever use black.  On the surface, my painting owes more to pre-modern traditions than to the Space Age  But, when I honestly consider things, scientific exploration — which I consider art- and literary-criticism to be — is the only thing that makes me passionate. High School acquaintances told me later in life that they thought I’d follow a science path.  Nope.  Anglo-Saxon poetry for me.

Where did that come from?

A long, long time ago I held a copy of  The Lord of the Rings in my hands in a Public Library in Windsor, Ontario and said to myself “This looks like a cheap rip-off of the Narnia stories.”  In hindsight, I was an idiot at that moment, but, fortunately, my mother reintroduced Tolkien to me for a third time — I had, without making the connection, spent a moment with “Smith of Wooton Major” in some elementary school classroom.  Tolkien made me learn Old English and learning Old English vastly improved my understanding of language and poetry.  After five years, two degrees, and a couple of publications, I left formal academia behind, again to the surprise of professors and colleagues.

Now, decades later, I subscribe to five publications:  The Old English Newsletter, which arrives at odd intervals; Canada’s History (formerly the Beaver) which comes bimonthly as near as I can figure; the comfortable old National Geographic; Scientific American; and the increasingly infrequent Planetary Report, which is a part of the real point of this post.  Except for the Old English Newsletter, I read every issue of these magazines from cover to cover.  In fact, I first subscribed to Scientific American after reading Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss’ mention that he, too, read that magazine from cover to cover every month.  To me, all five magazines are about understanding the world and my place in it.

But, the Planetary Report is a voice from and to my childhood.  If you haven’t heard of this wonderful little publication, it is the newsletter of the Planetary Society, a think tank/lobbying organization/fanclub/cult/bunch of really varied and smart people founded by one of the smartest, Carl Sagan and two friends three decades ago with the sole and noble purpose of teaching people that space exploration is beautiful, inspiring, artistic, fascinating, gobsmackingly neat and absurdly inexpensive considering the wonders, both practical and human, it returns and, even more, considering the insane obsenities we spend obscene amounts of our labour and humanity on.

Early supporters were Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Ray Bradbury.  Bradbury, before his death intervened, was scheduled to be a part of a little Planetary Society get-together in a few days.  The Planetary Society is perhaps the ultimate geek club — “I’m making space exploration happen!!!”, but for over three decades this bunch of ordinary and extraordinary people has quietly, soberly, and doggedly pushed governments to push the boundaries of knowledge and pushed the boundaries of knowledge themselves during times when governments have been remarkably loathe to learn much of anything.

Today the Planetary Society’s CEO is Bill Nye (yeah, that Science Guy) and has a remarkable  board of directors, including Niel deGrasse Tyson, Director of the Hayden Planetarium and the coolest astrophysicist ever (“that black guy from PBS” as one friend of mine describes him.  Sometimes Canadians can be a little too blunt.)

Some of the Advisory Council of the Society are artists, writers, Star Trek actors and, yes, one of them is an old man who has WALKED ON THE MOON!! After travelling there in what amounts to a Volkswagen Kombi with a bunch of bombs strapped to the back!!

The latest issue of the Planetary Report closes with a poem and a beautiful piece of art of the sort my thirteen year old self dreamed of painting.  Inside there are stories about urban Dark Skies efforts, about the Mars Science Laboratory which should land on Mars in a few days (it’s about the size of a Volkswagen Kombi, but the technology has advanced a bit), about near-Earth asteroids and extra-Solar planets.  And there are projects for kids.

Projects for kids.  One of the finest things the Planetary Society has done over the years, finer than sending digital copies of classic Science Fiction literature and art to Mars, finer than launching member-financed space missions, finer even than sending my name (and those of thousands of other Society members) to Saturn — about the finest, noblest thing the Society has done is to encourage young people to dream, to learn, and to achieve.  The Planetary Society provides grants to young scientists, to amateur scientists around the world.  The Society has provided brilliantly creative teenagers the opportunity to conduct real scientific investigation with robots on mars — hands on!

Although U.S. based, the Planetary Society is Planetary, with members around the world and making efforts to work with space agencies of all countries.  The societies grants are available to any nationality, its student outreach is global.

And, once a year they have this thing they call “Planetfest” in Pasadena and at science centres all over the planet.   A whole huge crowd of dreamers, scientists, poets, artists, writers get together to look up at the sky and say

“Wow.  Just Wow.”

And

“Thank you, Carl.”

This year Planetfest happens in just a few days, August 4th and 5th, timed to watch the landing of The Mars Science Laboratory.

I’ve never attended as I am, perhaps ironically in the context of the Planetary Society, a bit of a homebody, but if there were ever a crowd I’d have a laugh being a part of, it would be this one.  I’m not recruiting for the Society.  I’m not suggesting that anyone who might read this should run out and buy a membership (although that would be fine, if the fit is right).  What I am interested in doing is letting people know that the Planetary Society exists, what it’s for,  and what sort of person ends up as a member.

I am a working artist, a lover of theatre, a reader of poetry, and absolutely the most inspiring thing I can imagine is exactly what the Planetary Society was created to do and exactly what Art, Theatre and Poetry are for: to help us all to understand where we are in this inconceivably huge existence.

It’s a perfect fit.

Update, September 4, 2012:  A few days ago I was having a silly conversation about googling one’s self and I came across this brief blog post by Charlie Loyd in which Carl Sagan and I are associated through a fairly obscure aspect of Old English poetry.  It seems I have come full circle, in a sense: inspired to poetry  by Carl Sagan as a child and then associated with him through poetry much later in life.  It is a funny old Cosmos, isn’t it?

A visit to Dirt City/Dream City

It was raining this afternoon as I moved about the Quarters clutching my map of Dirt City/Dream City.  If you get the chance, rain or shine, turn a corner or go down an alley before the end of July and be surprised by a day-brightening bit — or lot — of art. Today the Quarters was alive with people quite obviously not usually there, people seeking out the art.  I understand Tix on the Square ran out of its free maps of the exhibition early in the afternoon.  I printed my own copy of  the one online.

I think I nearly found all the artworks.  Let’s see . . .

First up (on my route) is Jill Stanton’s parking lot sized painted pebble faux mosaic “You will be okay” — the title is the text — a huge statement of reassurance to a depressed and cloudy sky.  The colours are the colours of sidewalk chalk and I couldn’t help but think of “The Edmonton Remand Centre Newspaper” and Lindsay Bond’s photographic project documenting it.  “You will be okay” is a gargantuan shout of all the messages chalked each day on that nearby sidewalk it marvelous.  A marvelous and thought provoking piece of ephemeral art.

A little further west on 102A Ave is “Futile Fancy” by Jes McCoy.  From a distance I thought of the mini-golf set-up at Fort Edmonton Park.  Close up I thought of a playground but an oddly and intriguingly non-functonal and perhaps unfinished playground.  Then I realized it is an obstacle course.  Perhaps the apparent non-functionality and unfinishedness makes Futile Fancy a metaphor for the City itself.

Around the orner, beside the old Koerman Block, present home of the Hung Fung and the Alberta Kwan Ying Athletic Clubs, is Tiffany Shaw-Collinge’s “Garden Reflections”, a beautiful sudden garden of straw planters, beautifully complementing the old wall with its faded painted ads.  Despite the rain, I wanted to sit and enjoy the curve of the paths and the warmth of the soil. Having long been fascinated with Jeremy Bentham, I found the allusion to his Panopticon prison design both interesting and, in this context, thought provoking.

Up on 103A Avenue, there is a “Lonely Mountain” by Mackenzy Albright and Rachelle Bowen, although how such an inviting, stairway riven mountain could be lonely I don’t understand, especially with Jackson McConnell’s whimsical lollipop tree and cartoon city “Campsite” tent right at its foot.

At the far north of the exhibition space, on 104 Avenue, is Holly Newman’s lovely poem of loss and hope, “Crow’s Advice” on a series of banners.  As well there is a wall of tags on which to offer advice for mending a broken heart and tiny fabric hearts to take away as payment for suggestions.  “Crow’s Advice” surrounds Emily van Driesum’s “The Placebo Effect”, a grove of cut poplar saplings, literally (in a figurative sense) stitched into place, drying and fading as the days pass, a bit of a forest in the Quarters, but a placebo, not the real thing.

More than half of the large works in Dirt City/Dream City are concentrate at the corner of Jasper Avenue and 95 Street.  Nickelas Johnson’s “Ripped off and Red” is the most eye-catching, a huge, red-painted severed hand lying palm up in the green grass.  Nearby is Aaron Paquette’s beautiful “Everyone is Welcome”, an uncovered tipi frame sheltering an apple tree and surrounded by a flower garden. The whole is set on something of a medicine wheel.  The coloured cloths hanging from the tipi poles bring to mind a visit to the Rib Stones east of Edmonton, where similar but smaller bits of cloth perpetually hang from the branches of the poplar grove near to the sacred stones.  The Quarters, a very human place,  like every human space, is a sacred space.

Across Jasper is Destiny Swiderski’s monumental rope structure “Dream Catcher” completely prepared to catch some exceptionally big dreams.  I expect such dreams will come.

A number of pieces are on billboards and might too easily be ignored.  Nickelas Johnson’s “Tent City” is a beautiful, slightly abstracted design of tents in blue.  Matt Prins’ “Billboard for 91.2 FM The Mouth Hole” is a lovely parody of the many obnoxious ads for radio shows that litter every city.  As well, the billboard is a real ad for a fictional program on the real very low power radio transmitter (91.2 on your FM dial) that can be picked up in a very limited area around the Artery (9535 Jasper Ave.)

“My Heart is in Quarters” by Aaron Paquette is a truly lovely painting, an image of three peacefully sleeping figures, a family, in Paquette’s usual style of bright, solid colours, strong lines, and gold leaf.  I first encountered and was struck forcefully by Paquette’s work in the Narrative Quest show earlier this summer at the RAM.  For me, “My Heart is in Quarters” is a high point of Dirt City/Dream City.

Carly Greene’s “Simulacrum” is easy to miss:  clothes hanging from lines between buildings.  But the clothes are hung with iron pins, intended to rust and streak the clothing, marking them with history as the old buildings of the Quarters are marked with their history.  Certainly this day of rain in Edmonton will help complete Greene’s vision.

Andrew Buzschak’s “Pulse Points” are scattered throughout the Quarters, easy to miss blue signs on poles, a little like slightly shortened street signs.  But, look more closely:  Buzschak has used phrases from the City’s urban renewal boosting literature in an ironic and cautionary contrast to the current state of some areas of the Quarters.  The signs are lit in the evening by solar powered lights which will certainly make the pieces, and their message, stand out very well.

Unfortunately I didn’t see Adam Waldron Blain performing on his violin.  what a wonderful addition to the exhibition his music would be.  Together with the soundscape provided by 92.1 FM, live music makes Dirt City/Dream City an inspired moment in the history of the Quarters.

And history is something that runs through the entire exhibition.  The history of the community that has been here, that is here today, and that will continue to be here in the future, whatever the bulldozers and builders may have in store.  Dirt City/Dream City is a gentle warning, a firm reminder, and, from what I saw today, a much visited statement that the Quarters is not terra nullius.  This is a community, a community of communities with a rich history and a vibrant present.  Both must be recognized and respected if future redevelopment is to be itself something living rather than just a dead pile of concrete, steel and polystyrene.

 

It’s summer.  Go down to the Quarters and have a walk around.  See the art.  See the communities so often ignored.  Think.  Consider.  Remember.

And know that no Dream City ever becomes real without a Dirt City to live in.

Update, July 31: it’s just been announced that Dirt City/Dream City has been extended to the end of August.

Alex Janvier at the Art Gallery of Alberta

As a very young high school student, both while it was still a work in progress and after it was finished, I had the great good fortune to regularly see Alex Janvier’s mural in the grand stairwell of the Strathcona County Municipal Building.  I had been hooked on aboriginal Canadian art — and Canadian art in general — since childhood.  I know that in the summer before my sixth birthday I must have seen Mr. Janvier’s work at the “Indians of Canada” Pavilion at Expo ’67  — I still have my stamped Expo passport –

and I’d been exposed to Inuit soapstone work since infancy.  But there was something very memorable about seeing such a major work as it progressed to completion.

Since then I’ve followed Mr. Janvier’s work as part of my more general interest in Canadian Art and Art as a human phenomenon.

The current state-of-his-art show at the Art Gallery of Alberta raised great anticipation in me and now that I’ve visited countless times and made pages of notes I have to say, it’s not as great as I expected or hoped — it’s far, far greater!

The show occupies the entire third floor of the AGA, arranged in four “rooms” and what I think of as a “Corridor” and contains works representative of Janvier’s entire career thus far, from the Residential school to his 2011-12 tribute to the Indian Group of Eight.

The smallest room, inside the west entrance, contains Janvier’s earliest works, mostly monochromatic black-on-white abstractions in what can easily be seen as the roots of his mature style.  The curvilinear abstractions seem to have sprung almost full grown in Janvier’s early years.  The three figurative line drawings from 1962, “Thinker”, “Stoic Philosopher” and “Mother’s Love”, initially reminded me of some of the drawings Hans Erni made to illustrate Fitzgerald’s translation of The Odyssey, but after a moment’s examination, the ever-present Janvier lines assert themselves. I was particularly struck by “Piston”, also from 1962, an ink on paper diagram of engine parts which is so much other than just a diagram.  Already much of the vocabulary which runs through Janvier’s ongoing life’s work is visible in the little picture of a recognizable bit of white man’s technology.

The next room follows Janvier’s exploration and expansion of that initial vocabulary through the 60s and 70s and also his exploration and expansion of his own politicization.  Here we see Janvier exploring colour both in his curvilinear motifs and in the negative space of the ground. “Untitled”, 1964 reminds me of Paolo Soleri’s designs for Arcosanti and his other Utopian “Arcologies”.  The piece is a foreshadowing of the large aerial-view abstractions soon to be seen in the Primrose Lake room.  In this room we can see some early exploration of a figurative sort and of colour fields.  The colour field work as well as his “unconscious” method may well have been influenced by a few of the Montreal Automatistes who were still working and exhibiting at this period while Janvier was living nearby in Ottawa. In this the overlap of the Janvier exhibit with the Automatiste Revolution downstairs is more than a little fitting. It is also in this room that we see the first circular pieces such a characteristic part of Janvier’s mature work.

As the second room transitions into the “Corridor” Janvier’s confidence becomes unmistakable.  Here we stand before such iconic works as “Lubicon”, 1988 and works on raw canvas or linen ground such as “Grand Entry”, 1980, “Colony of Alberta” 1980, and “Free to Go”, 1981. On the opposite wall from “Lubicon” hang “Four Colour Face”, 1974, a type-piece of Janvier’s mature figurative style, and “Nehobetthe”, 1992, a characteristic Janvier large canvas narrative/representational series of vignette bubbles containing landscapes, floral motifs and yet more abstraction. From this point on, Janvier’s confidence of expression is remarkable.  Certainly he continues to explore colour including the new pigments he found on his Chinese trip in 1985, which show up in “Liyan Gardens”, 1986 (notice the Chinese woodblock signature) and form and the tension between the ground and the ever-present curvilinear motifs.  But now the works feel not so much as though they were painted so much as they grew out of an inevitability.  Although Janvier’s style always has been something one might call “organic”, now each piece is stunningly unified and whole and clearly an expression of a living process.

Off the Corridor is the room containing pieces very much concerning Janvier’s homeland around Cold Lake and his family’s traditional trapping lands, now the Primrose Lake Weapons Range.  In the centre stands “Blood Tears”, 2001, a memorial of his and his people’s experience of the Blue Quills Residential School and of the meeting with White Canadian society.  The painting itself is typical — although perhaps more highly impastoed than some — of Janvier’s representational/figurative pieces but with a more sombre palette and the noticable addition of trails of red paint, the blood tears of the title.  On the back of the painting Janvier has catalogued the assaults of the school and of white society on him and on his people.  The painting stands as a monument, a painting made sculpture, in the centre of some truly beautiful portraits of the human landscape of Janvier’s people, both the one that was erased by the military and the one that vibrantly continues in, for example, “Denesuline Gathering Lac Brochet” 2002, a stunning aerial vision of one side of Janvier’s family tree gathered in the waters of Lac Brochet in Manitoba.  Another riveting piece in this room is “Spring Equinox”, 2002, a wonderful circular composition of biological solar flames in rose, violet, green and blue.

The final room is dominated by Janvier’s monumental tributes to the “Indian Group of Eight”, a stunning series of abstract portraits of the dominant Aboriginal artists of the last century, beginning with Norval Morrisseau and ending with Janvier himself. Although the tags say “2011″, rumour has it that Janvier was working on the finishing touches until just before the exhibition opened earlier this year.

To me, the “Portrait” of Morrisseau is brilliant.  I have the good fortune to live daily with a few of Copper Thunderbird’s works, purchased in my youth and in a period of Morrisseau’s health. Perhaps it is the colours, particularly the deep reds, more than the shapes in the Morrisseau tribute that gives me this feeling of “Yes, Morrisseau!” when I look at it.

I get a similar feeling from both the Daphne Odjig (check out the charming little bird way up at the top) and the Bill Reid tributes.  I’m less familiar with the other artists’ work so I’ll confine my remarks to a single observation about the Joseph Sanchez tribute:  It was only after a great many visits that I noticed the slightly abstracted — or perhaps even impressionistic desert landscape below the rainbow at the bottom of the painting, a marvelous little reference to Sanchez’ birthplace.

While the eight huge paintings might certainly occupy a visitor for hours, I would recommend turning around to see what I call the “disc series” of watercolours from 2010 on the opposite wall.  These six paintings are a visual exploration of speech and language through this bare symbol of the ochre coloured pierced disc.   Primary colours dominate the centre four while the two end pieces are very subdued, the rightmost, “Lost Disc” contains only the ochre disc.    I did feel on one visit that these subdued pieces were sadly ill-lit, but, please take some time to notice these very recent and beautiful works.

The final piece in the exhibit, “I Remember”, 2011, is a small circular composition of curvilinear motifs on a raw canvas ground.  The motifs spiral inward centripetally, drawing memories to the centre of the self. Or are they thrown outward centrifugally into the larger world.  Perhaps both are true of Janvier’s work.

Alex Janvier at the Art Gallery of Alberta runs until August 19, 2012

 

Update, August 18, 2012:  I was very honoured today to shake Mr. Janvier’s hand and chat briefly with him as we stood before his tributes to the Indian Group of Eight.  “They had a lot of guts” he said, and he was including himself, of course.  They did, and he does.  And I feel so relieved that they had the guts it took to show non-aboriginal Canada aboriginal visions, to help force First Nations, Metis and Inuit art to be recognized as Canadian Fine Art, and at last  to get Mr. Janvier to the top floor of the Art Gallery of Alberta.

And I’m so grateful that he came over to my daughter where she sat, not looking at his art but at her own, and said to her “Hi.  How ya doin’?”

Maskwacîs: a hidden gem at the Royal Alberta Museum

I’ve been meaning to go to the Royal Alberta Museum to see Maskwacîs (Bear Hills) for a while now.  Today’s heat gave me the push to take an air-conditioned break viewing another slightly unknown gem at the RAM.  Maskwacîs is a display of art pieces from members of the community of Maskwacîs, also known as Bear Hills, or Hobbema, Alberta.  Hobbema is in the news all too often with the sadly familiar tale of poverty, gang activity, and innocent, senseless death. Maskwacîs is a welcome tonic to the negative picture of this First Nation too often presented to the rest of Canada.

The pieces are arayed along the south wall to the left and right of the front desk, opposite the bronze sculptures of the pronghorns and the settler family.  I began my viewing at the east end, just outside Wild Alberta, making notes as I went.  The exhibit contains only about two dozen pieces, so these refreshing images of/from the community of Maskwacîs can be admired/studied on a quite brief visit, although returns would certainly be in order.

Clayton Saskatchewan’s “Whistle Stick”, a tremendous piece of bead and feather work is the first piece that caught my eye.  In a sense timelessly traditional in appearance, I can’t help but feel that Saskatchewan’s piece is something other and a very modern expression, although I can’t quite put my finger on it.  It seems another visit is quite in order.

Llorinda Louis’ “Never Hide” from 2009 is a mixed media piece — what used to be called a collage — made up largely of clippings from newspapers and magazines.  The influence of Jane Ash Poitras seems clear, but Louis’ piece is about more than just the state of her people.  The images particularly — models in underwear, Sophie Loren assessing Jane Mansfield’s cleavage, a Latin American peasant — make clear that this is also a feminist and anti-colonial expression.  “It’s not about the Laundry!” one phrase shouts.  Indeed, it’s about a whole lot more than that.

Felicia Standingontheroad’s 2009 photo “Free” is the overwhelming charmer of Maskwacis.  A young woman (Standingontheroad herself?) is held in mid-joyful-leap, her body twisted into a gentle arch and slight spiral.  Her light smile of pure joy peeks from behind the collar of her jacket.  Behind her, a child is walking toward her across the snowy field from which she has taken flight.  I could stand for hours lost in this image. What joy!  And what a joy!

Shawn Rabbit’s untitled piece from 2008 has the feeling of a contemporary petroglyph — handprints on a synthetic orange background.

Sandy Heimer has photos hung on both wings of the exhibit.  On the left is “The Carver”, a vivid portrait of a man intent on his work butchering a bison.  On the right side, “Portraits 1″ and “Portraits 2″ like “The Carver”, are evocative glimpses into the complex, vibrant, living community.

Another exquisite piece which on its own makes a visit to Maskwacîs worthwhile is Rusty Threefingers, Jr.’s monochrome gem “Drummer”.  The black ink work is executed with remarkable confidence and fluidity.  “Drummer” is a jewel of striking confidence and absolutely fascinating.

Please don’t miss the last two pieces tucked in the display case at the west end of the exhibit.  Myra Saskatchewan’s “Beaded Infant Moccasins,” 2006, “Beaded Crown”, n.d., like Clayton Saskatchewan’s “Whistle Stick” seems firmly rooted in traditional forms, but somehow they are also something other and more.  These works provide a powerful, thought provoking frame through which to view Maskwacîs.

“Hai hai”, I say to the community of artists of Maskwacîs, and also a “thank you” to Myra Saskatchewan for the curation and Sandy Heimer for coordinating the show.

Maskwacîs (Bear Hills) continues at the Royal Alberta Museum until September 3, 2012.