3 x 7: Springtime in Edmonton is for Canadian Art Lovers

It truly is an embarrassment of riches this spring in Edmonton.  Yes, the economy is in the tank. Yes, the Oilers are out of the playoffs.  Sure Edmonton continues to chug along in a better economic state than Calgary and the rest of the province, and the Oilers will get to make a new start in the fall at the new Rogers Place, or, as I prefer to call it, Iron Foot Place.  Bright and hopeful civic joys are these, but the most stunning wealth Edmonton enjoys this spring is best enjoyed by lovers of Canadian Art and Art History.  Right now, within a stretch of five downtown LRT stations, Edmontonians and visitors can immerse themselves in three magnificent exhibitions of works by and influenced by two Canadian Groups of Seven.  In a single relaxed afternoon, travelling by LRT or, better, a pleasant stroll through Edmonton’s Downtown Spring, one can lose oneself in the works of fifteen of the most influential artists in Canadian history.

Maybe start at the Borealis Gallery in the Old Federal Building on the Alberta Legislature Grounds, where Alberta and the Group of Seven is showing until May 23.  Alberta and the Group of Seven is actually dominated by Alberta, in my opinion.  Only a few of the Group are represented, and they by small works.  The show is really about the Alberta artists who were (perhaps) influenced by the Group of Seven.  Personally, I find that my favourites in the show, Annora Brown and H. G. Glyde, had roots removed from the Algoma Seven, Glyde’s in the Mexican Muralists and Brown’s in the Italian Futurists. Mais n’enculons pas des mouches.

In any case, Alberta and the Group of Seven is a gorgeous and thought provoking gem which I fear is being overlooked.

After savouring “Alberta and the Group of Seven”, head over to Grandin Station and take the next northbound train a few stations to Churchill.  Or, better, walk north to 100th Avenue and then east to where it curves north to become 102 Street. Here you’ll see the view captured by H. G. Glyde in one of my favourite paintings.

Turn right (east) on to Macdonald Drive and enjoy the river view until you turn north on 100 Street. Continue to the southwest corner of Churchill Square.  Diagonally across the Square is the Art Gallery of Alberta (that thing with the silver ribbon).
  In the AGA you’ll have your socks blown off by the other two exhibits on this little itinerary.

On the ground floor (a little past a tiny work by yours truly)  we have Out of the Woods: Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven, an eye-opening  show curated from the AGA’s own collection.  Some of these works are the reason I was excited about the AGA’s rebuild, hoping there would be a room dedicated to rotating the Gallery’s collection out of its warehouse and onto display.  Look at Thomson’s “Fisherman”! The ripples in the pool! And Carmichael’s “The Valley”! And Lawren Harris’ Futurist drawing and print of a Toronto Street!

The works in Out of the Woods, because the Edmonton Art Gallery (predecessor to the AGA) was a little late to the Group of Seven collecting game, are not the popular works which sold well from the beginning.  These are works passed over as less approachable, more difficult, transitional, and exploratory.  In short, these are works most important for an understanding of what Thomson and the Group were trying to do.  On its own, Out of the Woods is a show to make springtime in Edmonton a Heaven.

But, go upstairs to the second floor.  Go into the little RBC New Works Gallery and savour Britney and Richelle Bear Hat’s Little Cree Women and know that if not for the giant, heroic, woman-of-myth Daphne Odjig, whose works you will soon witness, the Bear Hat sisters would never have been allowed to show their art outside a handicraft shop.  Pause for a moment and consider what might have been — what has been — lost.

Now. Take a deep breath. It’s time for 7. The most important Seven. The seven members of Professional Native Indian Artists, Incorporated. Daphne Odjig and these six men changed the world of Art, in Canada, and around the world. In a single decade the shattered the colonial and academic chains that had bound professional art for generations.  Odjig and her colleagues completed the work that other Group of Seven had tentatively started.  These seven people in the heart of Turtle Island tore apart the European vision, they huffed and puffed and blew away the European academic straitjacket.  More than any one person, I would argue, Daphne Odjig, “Picasso’s Mother” in Norval Morrisseau’s words, more than any one group, Professional Native Indian Artists, Inc. broke the European Academic cycle of dominance.  They made Art, with a capital “A”, something not just European, but something universally human.

You’re pretty lucky to be standing here, in Amiskwaciwâskahikan, before Daphne Odjig’s Mother Earth, a little way from Alex Janvier’s Cold Lake Sunset, Norval Morrisseau’s Christ,and so on. You stand surrounded by pivotal works in the history of Art.

Enjoy!

Alberta and the Group of Seven is at the Borealis Gallery until May 23, 2016.

Out of the Woods: Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven is at the Art Gallery of Alberta until April 17, 2016

Little Cree Women is at the Art Gallery of Alberta until July 3, 2016.

7: Professional Native Indian Artists, Inc. is at the Art Gallery of Alberta until July 3, 2016.

A Personal Meditation on “7: Professional Native Indian Artists, Inc.”

It’s just those moments that wasn’t about being Native or not, it was about doing stuff [and just being].
– Richelle Bear Hat, quoted by Angela Marie Schenstead in Brittney Bear Hat & Richelle Bear Hat: Little Cree Women (Sisters, Secrets & Stories)

 

Friday evening (March 4, 2016) I had he great and long awaited pleasure of experiencing 7: Professional Native Indian Artists, Inc. at the Art Gallery of Alberta.  This visit to Edmonton is the final stop of the tour of Regina’s Mackenzie Art Gallery‘s magnificent exhibition of works by the “Indian Group of Seven”.  Curator Michelle LaVallee writes:

 

7: Professional Native Indian Artists Inc. is not a retrospective exhibition, a simple look back, but rather a retro-active exhibition. This is what could have happened , and should have happened, forty years ago.

– from the exhibition catalogue, p. 13.

This is an exhibit that should have toured forty years ago, but its arrival in the time of Idle No More and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is a most well-timed example of “better late than never.”

Anyone who knows me well or has read much of what I have written here knows of my life-long fascination with the art indigenous to the continent that has been home to eight generations of my family. I have written here and here of conversations I’ve had with Alex Janvier. Through acquaintance as a young man with Jackie Bugera of Edmonton’s Bearclaw Gallery I have been fortunate to enjoy the works of a number of indigenous artists, including one of the 7, in my home for over thirty years. 7 is the exhibition I have been waiting for for half a century, since I was a child, since before PNIAI was incorporated.

Two of the three living members of PNIAI were present at the opening reception.  It was good to see Alex Janvier again and to tell him of my excitement when I heard of his commission for the Iron Foot Place mosaic in Edmonton’s new arena.  Mr. Janvier was resplendent in a personalized Edmonton Oilers Jersey and his signature white cowboy hat. After a moment of chatting (about hockey), I moved away to let others have time with the artist. Joseph Sanchez, in contrast to Mr. Janvier’s casual-comfortable is a stunningly dapper dresser, with careful moustache curls that forever put the lie to the myth that Native guys can’t rock facial hair! The youngest member of PNIAI, Mr. Sanchez appropriately spent a lot of time posing for smiling selfies with gallery members. After mingling  and opening remarks from curatorial staff and sponsors, we made our way upstairs for the main event.

The works included in the exhibition are absolutely stunning. My first impression on walking into the second floor gallery was “they’re bigger than I expected.” Indeed, most of the pieces are quite large, to be measured in feet rather than inches. And the range of styles is remarkable. There can be no confusion over which artist is responsible for which work.  Certainly Morrisseau and Ray are of the Woodland School, but Ray’s focus on earth tones instantly distinguishes his work from his mentor’s.  Janvier’s curves are, of course, unmistakable, as are Odjig’s sometimes-faceted swirling compositions. Beardy takes a different Woodland direction, largely eschewing the black outlines so prominent in Morrisseau and Ray. Sanchez has a distinctly South West, arid, desert quality, in consonance with his Pueblo and Spanish heritage.

Eddy Cobiness’ work is something remarkable to me. He shows a stylistic variation made more startling by his absolute confidence in each work.  Consider the drawing “Wild Rice Harvesting”, the painting “Let There Be Life”,  the symmetrical abstraction of “The Four Winds”, the brilliant stylization of “Caribou”, the detailed study in “Two Herons, and the skilful portrait, “Medicine Man and His Vision”. It seems Eddy Cobiness was a consummate stylistic shape-shifter!

Of course, the works must be seen. If you are in Edmonton before July 3, 2016, be sure to visit the Art Gallery of Alberta and spend time with some of the greatest and most important Canadian art of the twentieth century.

_________

Perhaps in my youth I had something of a “Wacousta Complex”, a desire to BE “Native”. How could a bookish Canadian boy with my name escape the possibility? But a comment from a fellow White Canadian when I mentioned my desire to go to the opening of “7” — you remember ur white right?” gave me reassurance that I’m not following in the footsteps of the character in Major John Richardson’s foundational Canadian novel.  I’m pretty sure I’ve come to the point where, despite and because of my privilege, I can never forget that I am white.

The night before the AGA’s members’ opening reception for “7” I read the marvellous catalogue for the show.  I had ordered it some time ago from the Mackenzie Gallery in anticipation of one day seeing the works in person.  It is a magnificent exhibition catalogue with exceptional reproductions of the works, informative (if slightly repetitive) essays, and moving words from the artists themselves.  Particularly poignant in our time of attempted reconciliation is Jackson Beardy’s poem “A Main Street Indian” on page 108:

. . . As I walk the dismal streets of this city,
Kicking a tin beer can ahead of me,
I think bitterly of that invisible government
That took me away from my folks so early,
Only to be used as a psychological sop
To relieve society’s major hang-up.
They denied me the right to experience
My identitiy and my culture.
They denied me the right to experience
The intricacies of the White world,
While they stripped me of my pride and dignity
In a secluded government boarding school
During the crucial twelve years of my life.
I emerged a learned man with a hollow soul.
After a few faltering steps, I fell flat on my face —
I had never learned to walk in either world.
I was born of the noble Indian race,
Bred in the confines of a government test-tube,
And released a zombie.

The seven artists, Daphne Odjig, Alex Janvier, Joseph Sanchez, Norval Morrisseau, Carl Ray, Jackson Beardy, and Eddy Cobiness came together at Odjig’s gallery in Winnipeg in the early ’70s and decided learn themselves and teach others  how to walk in both worlds. They rebelled against the “craft” view of “Indian Art”, against the criticism of Odjig that her work was “too influenced by Picasso” and “not Indian enough”. They stood together against pigeon-holing and insisted on being true to themselves and to their art.  In short, they insisted on being seen as professional artists, and by so doing, they forced a revision of Canadian Art more radical than the legacy of The (White) Group of Seven.

And yet, just as gallery owners said “you remember ur Indian right?” to Daphne Odjig in 1970, a White guy in 2016 who enjoys the art of Janvier and Morrisseau is asked “you remember ur white right?”  Thankfully, the AGA’s Catherine Crowston opened and closed her remarks on Friday night with acknowledgement of Treaty, now a routine acknowledgement at public events in Edmonton.

But still: “you remember ur white right?”

Somehow that question is linked in my mind to something Alex Janvier said to me the first time I chatted with him: “Maybe someday they’ll let us be Canadians.” As long as being excited about an exhibition of the art of some of the most influential Canadian artists of the last (and this) century is seen as “going Native”, as long as there are people not letting indigenous artist be Canadian, there’s a long, difficult road to Reconciliation, to the place where life is “about doing stuff [and just being].”

Edmonton’s Iron Foot Place (AKA “Ice District”)

Okay, peeps, chill!

That Katz guy just renamed a couple of buildings in Downtown Edmonton (as he has every right to do), he didn’t rename Downtown. This is like when Edmonton Centre (a stupid name) and Eaton’s Centre (a stupid name after Eaton’s went belly up) got a snappy new pedway connecting them and some suit said “let’s call the two buildings Edmonton City Centre!”  Nobody calls it that.  Some call it “City Centre Mall” and some call it just “City Centre”.  Or like when the Coliseum got renamed “Skyreach Place” or “Rexall Place” or . . . .  No one is at all confused if you say “meet me at the Coliseum.”  And after 37 years of name changes to the arena, that LRT station that serves the place is still called “Coliseum”.

Out of convenience we’ve been calling a vague area around the under-construction arena “the arena district” for a little while. I expect when it’s all done and the “Ice District” signs go up, we’ll all call it whatever seems convenient. I imagine people will say,

“Let’s go Downtown to the arena.”
“Where should we meet?”
“At the Cineplex” or “In the Winter Garden by the Janvier mosaic” or at the front door of Stantec” or “with all the other White people in that video”.

Some time ago the City put up “Arts District” signs around Churchill Square. Has anyone EVER said “let’s meet in the Arts District Friday night!” Of course not! It’s a silly, artificial thing and it’s properly ignored.  People meet in Churchill Square or at City Hall, or the Library or at City Centre Mall.

I really don’t find this little corporate naming-rights moment of any great concern. The fact that the promo video is all “White People only unless you’re the DJ”, however, is troublesome. It would be nice if our collective ‪#‎yegSpleen‬ were being vented over that bit of corporate propaganda rather than over the naming-yawn that is “Ice District.”

Personally, I’m gonna call that bit of Downtown Edmonton with that hockey rink beside the new Alex Janvier mosaic “Iron Foot Place”, “Tsątsąke k’e” because it was Treaty Six land before the NHL and before Katz and it still is Treaty Six Land and “Iron Foot Place” is a damn better name than “The Arena District” or the articleless “Ice District.

I hope Mayor Iveson and Edmonton City Council can come up with a way to make the official City neighbourhood placename of that bit of Downtown “Iron Foot Place”, whatever the corporate brand on the buildings.  It would be an easy gesture toward Reconciliation and a good description of a place devoted to strapping steel blades to our feet.  But even if it’s never the official name . . .

Let’s meet at Iron Foot Place.

Who’s with me on this?

Stereotypes Don’t Trump What is Right, Legal, and Good

I should be working on Christmas baking and my paintings but I got thinking this morning as both The Current and Q on CBC Radio got around to #IdleNoMore and I felt like getting some of those thoughts down. Please forgive the impressionistic disorder.

 

Remember South Africa under apartheid? I do. Well, I don’t remember it in the sense of “I was there”. What I mean is that I was an adult when Nelson Mandela was released, and the events were a bit close to me because a dear old friend from my University days lived and worked and fought apartheid and spent time in jail in South Africa for her activism. Christina Scott was a journalist who, after the end of apartheid worked tirelessly for the education, particularly science education of girls in Africa until her untimely and absurdly tragic death in a traffic accident a little over a year ago, shortly before a new edition of her biography of Mandela came out.

My family’s business accountant in those days was a South African ex-pat who once told us the story of what spurred his families departure from his birthplace.  As a young man, our accountant said to his family’s Black house boy “If the revolution comes, would you kill me?”

The servant looked shocked and answered “Oh, no, Sir!” and paused before finishing “I would ask my best friend to kill you.”

At the same time that Chris was marching against White Rule, a number of years after our accountant’s house boy’s honesty,  I had a customer who happened to be a South African ex-pat, a very polite, gentle-voiced white fellow. The one thing that sticks in my mind about that gentleman is the one time we discussed the situation in South Africa. “The thing you have to realize, John,” he said, “Is that those people will never be able to govern themselves . . .”  I didn’t know what to say.

But I do now.

It doesn’t matter whether you think they can or can’t govern themselves. They have the legal and moral right and duty to be a part of the government of their nation, for better or worse.  Apartheid was an abomination, whatever came after it.  When Nelson Mandela walked down that road from prison, historical wrongs began to be corrected, whatever the pain and turbulence the people — all the people — of South Africa faced and still face in their new adventurous experiment.

I know White people who routinely refer to First Nations people as “savages” and tell stories of the drunken Indians he’s encountered, who think the Government “gives stuff” to the First Nations and then it all gets pissed away in corruption and booze. When I hear these people, I hear “The thing you have to realize, John . . .” nervously calling from the wrong side of history.

There are street people in my neighbourhood. Some are native, many are White. When I think of White people, I don’t think of the bottle picker we affectionately call “The Old White Guy”. I think of Leonard Cohen, or Stephen Lewis, or my sadly missed friend Chris. When I think of Metis, First Nation or Inuit people, I don’t think first of the native bottle pickers in my back alley, I think of artists Aaron Paquette and Alex Janvier, of actor Lorne Cardinal and his political activist brother Lewis, of musician Lucy Idlout. I think of the thousands, the millions of aboriginal Canadians who are just as successful or as unsuccessful, as hard-working or as lazy, as happy or as desperate as their non-aboriginal neighbours.

And, when I think of Canadians of all ethnic backgrounds,  I think of #IdleNoMore.

 

#IdleNoMore is a call for all Canadians to move forward together into a truly shared future, a future founded not on bigoted stereotypes but on the very clearly laid out shared responsibilities and rights protected for us all by our shared country’s Constitutional documents.  When I stand with the others at a rally, I’m not calling for the release of some Canadian Mandela. I’m calling for the release of so many ordinary Canadians from the bondage of stereotypes they’ve been taught, stereotypes which isolate us from each other. I’m calling for people to educate themselves. And I’m hoping they can imagine the future we could have in the Canada envisioned by the Treaties.

And I call back through time to that gentle-voiced man saying “Yes they can govern themselves! And no one has the right to say they can’t!  It is their fundamental right!”

And I say to all Canadians, we all have obligations and rights under our Constitution and as members of the human family.  And the Governments are bound to certain obligations by our Constitutional documents.  It is time for respect, time for Governments to respect our rights, time for Governments to respect their obligations and responsibilities And it is time for us to respect each other and the sharing agreements, the Treaties on which Canada is founded.

Let’s move forward together, idle no more, with the sadly interrupted experiment that is the Treaty Nation of Canada. It’s our fundamental right, and no one can say we can’t do it.

 

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

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’?”

Rambling thoughts on Ross King’s “Defiant Spirits”

By the time I was eleven years old, I’d lived half my life in the Shield Country north of Algonquin Park.  When I tell people I was a kid in Sudbury in the Sixties they seem to look at me with sad sympathy.  “Black Rock” their eyes seem to say.  Well, my memory of Sudbury is all running through the forest and canoeing and swimming in the summer and in winter tobogganing on the hillsides and playing hockey and British Bulldog on the rink in the big open area in the middle of Laurentian Village or on the real rink (it had boards) over between Walford Road and Lockerbie High School.  It was over by the real rink there was some sort of winter festival with a costume contest for the kids.  One year I was Snoopy.  My mother made me a wonderful mask out of Papier–mâché (no doubt the spark which led to numerous outrageous Hallowe’en costumes I later made for my own offspring).  I don’t remember much about the competition or how I did, but I got to wear white thermal long underwear on the outside of my clothes — that’s a memory of the Sixties everyone should have.

One January I disassembled the last year’s calendar and taped the pictures to my bedroom wall.  I don’t know the artist, but some of the work of an Inuit artist of my generation, Ningeokuluk Teevee, shares some vocabulary with what I remember from that calendar.   In 1967, I felt like I lived in the True North.  My childhood was filled with Inuit images, snow, canoes, the Canadian Shield, Adventures in Rainbow Country on television when I wasn’t out having my own adventures in the real Rainbow Country.  Sure, by the time I was a teenager I was living in the Deep South, across the river from Detroit, and then a few years later in the warm, dusty West, in Edmonton — then in fact farther North than I’d ever been before, even when I took the Polar Bear Express to Moose Factory on the shores of James Bay.   But those years in Sudbury, on the Shield made me into a “Canadian” with an unbreakable nostalgia for the Idea of North and a severe Wacousta complex.

I don’t know when I first encountered the works of the Group of Seven and Tom Thomson.  In my memory, Tom has always been floating face down in Canoe Lake surrounded by solitary windswept pines and interlaced forests against paint blob skies and the other seven or eight or nine actual members have been blended together, except for Lawren Harris, who’s throbbingly glowing smooth mountains and icebergs have always stood apart, somewhere on the West Coast, wondering where Emily Carr might be.  And looking down on Carr and Harris have been the masks and poles of the Haida, and on the Seven and Thomson have gazed Norval Morrisseau and Alex Janvier and earliest of all, Inuit soapstone carvings.  These, the artistic vocabulary of the Pacific Coast, of the Arctic, of the Woodlands, both First Nations and Thomson and the Seven are my mother tongue of design.  Later I gained the school learning of European art (I love [and am sometimes embarrassed by] the Impressionists) and on my own I lovingly came to know a bit of Maya iconography.  And Alex Janvier was always mumbling around, and Jane Ash Poitras kept shouting at me, and they spoke so well!

As a child I lived in the natural world Morriseau, Thomson and the Seven painted, and later, in the political world in which Tecumseh and Pontiac and Brock fought. Today I live in Janvier’s and Poitras’ and Dumont’s and Riel’s world.  But the child is in me still:  I am a child of the Shield.  And so, at the end of the longest preamble to a book review in history, Ross King’s Defiant Spirits speaks to me very passionately (but with appropriate Georgian restraint).

King was born almost in the same year as me.  I wonder if his childhood left a similar impression on him.  I find it suggestive that his Judgement of Paris was as comfortable to me as his Defiant Spirits was.  For me, The Judgement of Paris was an investigation of my (slightly more) adult artistic development while Defiant Spirits delves into the earliest of my childhood memories.  I was in a canoe in Algonquin Park within fifty years of Thomson’s death.  Is that a bias?   Almost certainly.  But it is a bias based on experience.  What is the rate of turnover of the water in Canoe Lake?  Did I touch water in Canoe Lake which had cradled Thomson’s lifeless body?

Of course, it doesn’t matter — Thomson’s art was my cradle.

So, what do I say to the youngsters who grew up with a different vocabulary in the air?  I don’t know.  Perhaps all I can do is point them to King’s book and to a few passages and let them make of them what they will . . .

Something that  struck me as new about King’s treatment of the history of the Group of Seven is the way World War One cast a shadow over everything about the Group.  I’m reminded of Wade Davis’ Into the Silence which similarly argues (and exquisitely painfully describes) the influence of World War One on the early British expeditions to Everest.  Before Davis, I’d never come across even a hint that the Trenches had pushed Mallory, and, I’d never even noticed the fact that some of the Group had been in the Trenches — even though I knew that some of them had been war artists.  Such was the lack of emphasis on the Great War in my childhood, although I knew a Grandfather who was I veteran of Passchendaele and taught me the joy of fresh caught perch fried in butter by the shore of a lake in the Shield.

“The Canadian landscape inspired fear, mystery, wonder and often frustration and disappointment,” King writes.  “One confronted not other people, or even oneself, so much as the forces of nature and the vastness of the universe.” (p. 17)  Guess what?  That’s childhood!  The Canadian landscape makes us face the world as children!  Yes, today the vast majority of us live in cities, but, for what do all people everywhere, everytime long?  A return to a childlike state.  And our childlike state is standing alone in the face of the landscape.  This is the Vision Quest for all of us, whether we actually follow it or not.

I was impressed that King brought up the German painter Freidrich (p. 33), another of my favourites later in life.  Friedrich certainly has something of the tone of the Group of Seven — the solitude, the human emptiness, the threatening power of nature.  But in Freidrich there is a melancholy, a fin de siècle tone which is absolutely contrary to the hope and light in so much of the Group’s work — even in the war art.  Yes, Freidrich holds some parallels, was perhaps even an influence, but his work has a Gothic decadence absent from anything the Group produced, even in the darkest days of the Great War.

King is very dispassionate about the shortcomings and failures of the Group’s doomed nationalistic ambitions:  how can this absurdly varied national landscape produce a single national style?  But he is very rightly passionate and, I think, entirely accurate,  in his final assessment of their unanticipated success.  In his last paragraph, King places A. Y. Jackson’s The Red Maple, J. E. H. MacDonald’s The Solemn Land, Harris’s Lake Superior paintings, Frederick Varley’s war scenes and portraits, and Thomson’s sketches of Algonquin Park beside the iconic photographs of the driving of the Last Spike and of Terry Fox on his Marathon in the Shield Country just before his personal hope necessarily faded while the Hope he inspired blossomed.  “Together” writes King “they have given us one of the best responses — however incomplete it must inevitably be in a country so differentiated and so vast — to that most difficult and most Canadian of questions:  ‘Where is here?'” (p. 421)

I have lived most of my life in Cree country far from Algoma.  I have spent far more time in Banff than in Algonquin Park. Last summer I looked again at the spot where Donald A. Smith drove the Last Spike.  I remember watching with gaping jaw Terry Fox’s Odyssey.  I could show you where the Blackfoot traders used to come to the North Saskatchewan River from the south, where they would ford the river, where stood Fort Edmonton, where the trading happened, now a disused bowling green.  What do the Seven’s paintings have to do with me?

I think King makes clear what I always knew in my heart:   the Seven put us back into the canoe that allowed this country to exist; The Seven showed us that Autumn is Fire and that Winter is not Dread; the Seven gave us the Idea of North long before Glenn Gould recorded it; and, most profoundly, the Seven showed us that wherever we are, from St. John’s to Moosonee to Estipah-skikikini-kots to Pangnirtung to Haida Gwaii . . .  We Are Here.

The Art Gallery of Alberta has a number of shows related to the Group of Seven’s influence on display right now and in a few weeks a major Alex Janvier exhibit will open.  As always, if you’re in or near Edmonton, my recommendation is:  Get down to the AGA!