The vision of Paul Gauguin #1. ‘Keep your eyes on the prize.’

                                                                           A point of view

A word of advice: Don`t paint too much direct from nature. Art is an abstraction! Study nature, then brood on it and think more of the creation which will result, which is the only way to ascend towards God - to create like our divine master.
                                                                                                               Paul Gauguin.

I have been reading lately about the life and art of Paul Gauguin, that colourful character who died just over one hundred years ago in the Marquesas Islands and who revolutionized the development of the visual arts. While sailing around the Pacific several years ago I had planned to visit his grave and was disappointed to be headed off by the weather to another island in the group. So much has been written about his vivid life that his actual writing and painting is generally comprehended through the constricted lens of ‘morality’. By questioning the assumptions of the superiority of European culture, by actively seeking a simpler life close to nature and ‘going native’ he scandalized the morals of his own era and even of our own today. In visiting the island landscapes and peoples through the South Pacific where he painted, printed, carved, and wrote during his last productive years I began to see clearly that although his life and work are intimately connected, his value is more correctly appreciated through his paintings and the landscape than through the ‘morality’ of his life.

Gauguin was already a talented man when he began painting back in France. He quickly mastered the major new themes and techniques of his time and then proceeded to keep on pushing the envelope, pressing on with an art that filtered the world through his personal vision. It was an approach to life that emphasized the value of emulating the creative force of the Creator rather than following in footsteps already pressed into the soil by others. It is an important distinction and helps to explain the antagonism of his society, the freshness of his work and its value to us today.

Gauguin`s use of colour, line and shape as a visual kind of music that directly affects the emotions, his insistence of the freedom of the artist, that there is nothing that art cannot be free to express, are commonplace ideas today. Where Gauguin gets interesting for me is in the realm of the interaction between myself the observer, and his creative works that are left to us. Putting aside his theories and the development of art over the last hundred years, how am I directly affected by one of his paintings? If his paintings affect some of us deeply, then he does have a kind of immortality and we have found his door into the dark and fecund place of the creative spirit. That would be not a bad trick for a man now held in poor regard in the narrow court of public morality but who spent his life first creating a tool set of skills and theories and then putting them to use to express the transcendent.

The first thing I noticed in Polynesia was that I was seeing the islands through his eyes: the shadows, the fallen yellow blossoms, the black volcanic beaches, lush vegetation and red soils. A man galloped his horse down the road, smoke drifted up from smudge fires, children washed their horses in the surf, some women bathed bare breasted in the lagoon with their children - the raw materials that he used for subject matter were all around me, part of a whole universe of hot sun, crashing surf, and palms rattling their branches in the Trade winds. His challenge was to find the visual symbols that would convey all of this and its transcendent meaning within the narrow two-dimensional world of his canvas. As a symbolist painter he was uniquely qualified to take up this challenge.

Gauguin understood that a painting was an abstraction: that it could be an equivalent for the deeper meaning that all the elements of the landscape were expressing in a riot of form and colour. ‘Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?’ is the title of one of his enigmatic paintings: enigmatic on purpose, so that we are forced to participate in the unfolding. He asks the observer to enter into his painting in order to touch deeper meanings. When one realizes that he had all the skills to produced the standard commercially profitable paintings of the day that would have lifted him out of poverty and given him the esteem of the people around him, it is all the more impressive that he kept focused on his struggle to express something that was so difficult to grasp and for which he earned nothing but ridicule from the French Colonials and indifference from his Polynesian neighbours whom he portrayed with such sympathy. He had his eyes on the prize - his place in the development of art and its ability to express the ineffable.

The many paintings he has left us can be viewed from so many different points of view. His challenge to us is to partner with him as we enter through the picture frame. How we frame the world, how we understand it, determines how far we can go into the paintings. We must park our everyday rational mind at the door, accept the challenge and drift through on our emotions, at first not seeking to understand as much as to feel. This is a journey into the unconscious, the unconscious is in its essence the whole universe, and we can experience the truths that Gauguin painted about human kind and our place within the rest of the natural world. He sacrificed his well being for something great and spend his Polynesian years with his artist`s finger on the pulse of being.

Building a life #11. ‘Raise high the roof beams!’

                                               The cabin without its lid.

Spring is just around the corner, and the cabin walls are up. The original little 20x30 foot plywood platform now looks big with its log walls containing the space that we will live in by the Fall. The next step is the roof and for that I have some long logs set aside to make the ridge pole. One clear dark night I take the hurricane lantern up to the building site and contemplate the splendor of it all: the shadowy walls, dark overarching fir trees and brilliant star filled sky. This may be simply a construction project, but for me it is a form of art that I am making here: it`s called architecture and, having designed the cabin on paper, I am now making it real.

                                              On a cold clear winter`s night.


As I raise the center post and its cross beams I am paying special attention to the world above the cabin, the birds, the swoosh of the wind in the trees and the first slight smell of Spring in the air. Soon, if all goes well I`ll be raising the rafters, nailing down the cedar shakes and enclosing this open-air space that I have occupied during the winter months. I will miss it.

Raising the ridge poles goes smoothly with the help of my powerful neighbour John Bok who walks up the ladder with the end of each 20` log on his shoulder and places them on top of their posts. The rafters and strapping are a cinch - anything that simply involves dimensional lumber seems so simple after all the picky work with logs and chainsaw.

While preparing for the roofing project I am also reading ahead to plan for the electricity and plumbing. I have had to pre-drill all the holes in the log walls for the electrical wires and outlets as I went along. The water line from the well is already under the house, the electrical wires loop above the hillside from the utility pole to a temporary pole. There are a lot of interlocking elements in construction and I have to plan and co-ordinate all these even as I am doing the repetitive log building work. Thank goodness all the necessary information lies in books and these are very straight forward to learn from. This is exciting!

Building a life #10. The cabin project.

Building the cabin`s log walls.

For the past year I have read nothing but building books: concrete, reinforcing rods, spans for wooden beams, plumbing, electricity... the list is endless as is my capacity to learn from them. That, in the end, is the real legacy of my years in university: I can read and learn from books and do not have to rely on partial knowledge gleaned from conversations or from working in a particular trade. Neither do I have to hire someone and reduce our small building fund still farther. It is a little like a marathon though, with a steady push to keep moving forward. I am certainly getting in spades what I had dreamed of while I was teaching. Teaching... that already seems like a distant dream from another galaxy.

Once the sill logs are in place and the plywood sub-floor nailed down it is time to begin the job of building the frame and walls of the cabin we will eventually call ‘Swallow’. I have decided to use an old Quebec style of building a log house called ‘piece en piece’ - a post and beam structure with the open wall spaces filled with scribed and fitted logs. This takes advantage of the small diameter ( 6 to 8 inches) lodgepole pine logs I have cut in the Okanagan which I can lift and handle by myself without needing machinery. I make a special pair of saw horses that allow me to work with the chain saw at waist level and some log dogs ( giant staples) to lock them into place while I cut the tenoned ends ( to fit into the morticed slots in the vertical posts) and cut the long V slot in the bottom of each log that I have scribed to fit the lower log. All very labour intensive and repetitive, but each day`s work in the cool winter weather sees solid progress. Compared to teaching, I can see the results of my creativity each day. At the end of each day we can read in the evenings about how Pa is building his log house on the prairie as we sit warm and toasty having the bedtime story.

War crimes and other atrocities.

                                 S*C*A*M*P.

‘I have seen the enemy and he is us.’ Andy Capp.

In the following piece I am drawing on my own experience of rowing among the Gulf Islands and having time to think about things as I go along. I was intrigued by the idea of waves that spread out behind a boat being like an event in the past that has reverberations that drag behind it to arrive some time in the future to disturb the surface of the mind. In the story, the real event of the waves in the calm sea opens a window into a hidden and repressed time from the past. The ripping sound of the breaking waves is the final tug at the blind which zips up to expose a wartime atrocity.

What I found interesting was the idea of continuity. A personality which has a past in wartime atrocities, I imagined an incident in the ethnic cleansing conflicts of the former Yugoslavia, but there are plenty of other possibilities, must always hide parts of itself within ‘normal’ society, but certain basic structures continue, in this case a preoccupation with efficiency. I think this person is a monster like those that ran the death camps for Germany during WWII, but the horror is even greater if we realize that much of this death and destruction was carried out by ‘regular folks’ who could fit right in with the rest of us when conditions changed once again. As Little Abner said in the Andy Capp cartoon, “ I have seen the enemy and he is us.”

                      
             Continuity of personality.

A motor yacht plows a deep furrow as it travels south among the islands. It`s wave pattern spreads out behind, forming several rows of steep, sometimes breaking waves in the calm sea. They sweep toward a lone man in a rowboat headed north.

Facing south, at the oars, he can see the yacht receding far down the channel. He can hear the waves when they finally arrive and turns his skiff to face into them. Up and down pitches the skiff while he balances it with his oars held steady in the water. The waves are smooth except when the crests tear open with a ripping sound and foam escapes to race down the wave fronts. The waves pass, the calm returns and he resumes his course, his mind, once again, free to wander.


“That beamy boat plowing along - all that energy being used to make waves.

Inefficient!”


“Those waves that came up behind me: they sounded like torn cloth when they broke. Riiiip! Or a machine gun.”


The sound of gunfire echoing behind the mountain ridge from the village in the next valley. A fusillade of rife shots, the ripping sound of a machine gun.

“Such a small village. The men had been told to conserve ammunition. Amateurs, anxious to get it over with. They will learn.

Inefficient!”

                   
Update.
On the radio this morning there was discussion about the conviction in Canadian court of Desiree Munyaneza for atrocities in Ruanda and of the war crimes trial in The Hague of the former Serb leader Radovan Karodzic who lived incognito for many years, just like the character in this meditation, before being caught. What I found difficult to deal with while writing this was that I was describing myself and the train of my own thoughts up until the final deeper memory of the massacre and even that was an easy and logical imaginative leap to make. While it is important to point the finger at those who cross the line into barbarism, it is also useful to recognize how adaptable human beings are, for better or for worse, and that all of us are part of this bloody species and share emotions like anger and the need to ‘defend’ ourselves, our families, or our ethnic and national identity. It is important that we do not bury these ugly attributes so they will grow in hidden and twisted ways, but admit them into our understanding of what it means to be human so that we can balance them up with the more socially positive aspects of humanity of which there are many. It is that struggle for the unity of our real selves that makes us fully human.

Building a life #9. ‘All work and no play.....’

Building the log cabin moves forward steadily throughout the winter months. We also must live from day to day in rough conditions and keep ourselves and our children happy and healthy. This is just as well because it is a temptation for me to focus twenty-four hours a day on the building project. I try to, but the other needs of the day drag me out into the larger perspective. Pacing is important, and we are launched on long term projects.

Our dog Saffi is killed one morning as I drive the children ( we are late) down to the school bus stop. She has been in the habit of running beside the pick-up truck as I haul loads of logs up to the building site and this time she darts in front of the van and is run over. It is a sad business, but she has been a stupid dog from the start and that caught up with her.

We are getting to know our neighbours. Heather has started volunteering as a Girl Guide leader
and the girls have made friends at school. We are not alone in our ‘back-to -the -landing’ on Saltspring. All around us are other families building and living rough, raising goats and chickens, learning archaic skills. We begin to get together for pot-luck parties. While the children play, the women trade experiences of their non- suburban life style while the men get deep into technical building discussions and the ways to get around the building inspector with his residential codes best suited to city subdivisions.

We have a memorable children`s birthday party in the pumphouse that first winter. A hoard of girls fill the little building. They play complicated games that lead them up and over the furniture. This is so like the essence of the ‘Little House’ books. That our girls all have ‘Holly Hobbie’ pioneer frocks and poke bonnets adds to the impression. The girls all get (second hand) baby carriages for Christmas and parade up and down the paved road which has little car traffic. Our property is rough, muddy and covered in building materials so the road is their cleanest play area. Thank goodness we have the washer and dryer in the pumphouse or just keeping clean would be difficult.

Christmas it turns out is problematical for Gwynnie. She writes in her letter to Santa that we are living both in the trailer and the pumphouse and to please leave the stocking presents in the trailer as his ‘Ho Ho Ho’ would be too frightening in the tight confines of the pumphouse. Like the girls who are leading parallel lives in the ‘Little House on the Prairie’ our girls get tin mugs from Santa this year. Santa always leaves an illustrated shakily written letter for the girls each year to show that they are in his thoughts. He appreciates the sherry and shortbread that is left for him in the trailer and the carrots for his reindeer.

Building a life #8. The Little House in the Big Woods.

                                    The little house in our big woods.

It is cold, dark and snowy outside our snug little pump-house cabin. We are all tucked into the big double bed and are reading the first book of the Laura Ingalls Wilder series, ‘ The Little House in the Big Woods’. The wind shakes the boughs of the overhanging firs and down thump big puffs of snow onto the roof, but in our imaginations we are off in the much wilder world of the Ingalls: Mary ,Laura, Ma and Pa are living in the big woods of Minnesota during real pioneer times. How brave they are and how much they care for each other. How warm and cozy we all are in the our own big woods. How real their lives feel. We are living parallel lives.

Up on the hill on the other side of the stream, piling up with snow is the log cabin. There is not much to see as yet, some short posts on concrete pads and skinned logs stacked nearby that we have cut on the building site, but we are underway and the snow, heavy and wet as it is, will soon turn to rain and I will be back to work with the chainsaw.

During the mornings, Gwyn is the only child at home and Heather is anxious to help move this project forward. She sets Gwyn up in the trailer in front of the TV watching Mr. Dress-Up and Sesame Street and hurries up the hill. One morning I am placing the big sill logs on top of the cedar posts that raise the building high enough for a crawl space underneath. The final 30 footer has a curve that must be adjusted for and then I lever the smaller end up in place: easy. The butt end however is heavy and I sweat away, raising and placing blocks and wedges with Heather`s help, as it inches upward. Finally I call to Heather, “Take your hands away from the other end. I`m going to roll it on now!” Being curved, it moves slowly as I lift with the peevee until suddenly, passing the tipping point, it rushes to complete the roll. Heather`s hand is crushed as it rolls over her fingers!

There is no time for recriminations. We rush down the hill, put her hand in ice, gather Gwyn up and drive for the hospital, twenty minutes away. So far it has not hurt, but after the doctor has pulled each finger to check for damage it certainly does! Nothing broken, but this is a good reminder of how close we have been skating to an accident. Back in the other little house in the big woods we bet that Ma and Pa would have been more careful: not only was there no hospital for them, but an accident that crippled either of them would have life threatening consequences for their family`s ability to survive way out on the real frontier. Our life here may be rough and ready by normal standards, but it is only play acting compared to that of those folks in the big woods over a hundred years ago.

Building a life # 7. 'Who could ask for anything more?'

The Pumphouse is framed up.

Feeding the goats in their temporary pen. The chainsaw has the milling hardware that helps to make squared timbers for the barn.

The completed barn with Maggie, Muffin and probably Alice.

Most pump-houses are the size of an outhouse, but we plan a multi-use building - a 16x16 foot pole frame sheathed in plywood on a concrete base. Here we can all sleep in our proper beds, have a washer and dryer and use electric heat. With batt insulation and plastic vapour barrier lining the walls and ceiling, the walls lined with our drapes and with carpets on the floor this should be quite comfortable ( luxurious, compared to our tents).

Some friends come over and camp beside us for a few days and we quickly raise the frame. How proud we are! Once the roof and siding is on and I have poured a concrete floor, my next great challenge is to install the electricity; mains service, panel and wiring for the pump, washer, dryer lights and outlets. I have my bible - a Readers Digest book on everything to do with building and a little red book with the electrical code. A lot to learn in a short time, but the local hardware store is very helpful with consultation and diagrams and eventually the inspector, on my second try, gives me the ok . We seriously watch him drive away and then - WOOPEE!

We move the trailer beside the new building, stretch a tarp between the two and we are in business for the winter. We now have light and heat, running water and a telephone. Who could ask for anything more?

The next urgent item is the barn. It needs to be a larger version of the pumphouse, so on the other side of the driveway I level a 16x32 foot piece of ground - it always looks so small at this point - and pour another small concrete pad just for the milking area. The rest of the uprights sit on concrete blocks. I have an attachment for the chainsaw bar that allows me, with a lot of sweat and noise, to trim round logs into squared timber. The longest log (36') is the ridge pole, and it is a great day when we skid it up and lock it into place. It is very nice for this project not to have to use the generator every time I need power for my tools - a chain saw cannot do everything ( almost, but not quite all.)

Now we can unload the ‘pup’ trailer and store our furniture ( minus the beds, lamps, dressers and washer/dryer) in the lofts, move our goats and chickens in and regroup for the next really big project -the log cabin.

It is now time for Anne and Elaine to start school and fortunately the bus comes right past the end of our street. The first afternoon after school we tow our big dory ‘Swallow’, that I had built back in Okanagan Falls, down to Ganges, our island town ( with it`s clapboard buildings and wooden sidewalks) and go for a sail in the harbour. This day would usually be the beginning of a busy school year for me as well and it feels liberating to be sailing instead. It has been a terribly busy summer but we have met our targets and are ready for winter.