The surge.

Indian Point is past Fall now. The mossy rocks and undergrowth of salal shine vivid green in the wet, and the grey even light shines purely into places it hasn`t visited since the new Spring leaves of maples cast them into shadow. Those leaves are now plastered to the muddy ground except where torrents of water have swept the trails clear. It is now a time that is past regret for summer, well past, and we are launched into the winter rains that are themselves a dark reflection of summer`s drought. It feels good to be committed to action at last, immersed in the dark, stormy season of winter.

Walking along the cliff trail, stepping carefully over granite bones, I hear the now calm grey sea quietly surging against the fine gravel of the first beach. Is it breathing or a heartbeat? I cannot decide and try to avoid focussing on its insistent rhythm lest my own breath, my own heart, should synchronize and I be swept away. In this solemn season that does not seem improbable now that dark winter spirits have reclaimed the land and sea.

The beach itself has changed since the 60 knot south-easter of last week reshaped it. Old familiar logs are gone or flipped over into new configurations, the stream that slides out of the undergrowth now drops three feet over a new gravel bank and one must step carefully on slippery lumps of pulverized driftwood to get across more or less dry shod. Deep in the darkest part of the forest all is silent and sodden. A white shrine of shells on a stump has been here for years, constantly renewed: it is a naturally spooky place. The beat of the sea filters faintly through the trees to give this place a heart as well. I would rather it was a heart than feel it was something invisible and very big breathing down my neck. I quickly step out of the trees and back into the light.

The point itself is littered in logs and finely ground driftwood mixed with seaweed and flotsam. Left by the last high tide, a bright plastic bottle and a large square of blue foam pretend to be a natural part of the scene. In a way they are, as they swish in the backwash or rest awkwardly high up on the rocks. They will soon move along to other shores or stay and be ground up by waves and gravel.

Ahhhh! The surge breathes again, trying to catch me unawares. It is high time I hiked back out of here, before I am myself ground up fine and spread out along the shore.

Building a life # 15. Blowing things up, putting things up, putting up with things.

The first thing I must do to make a start on the main house is to create a flat building site where there is at present a long ridge of hard rock. We have decided that although we would like this house to be up above the shady forest floor, so important in the rainy winter`s low light, neither do we wish to blast flat the highest part of the ridge and thus destroy one of the nicest places for a garden. We decide to blast the end of the ridge and tuck the house into the hillside. It is an exciting week while the pneumatic drill chatters away making many deep holes and even more exciting when all of them are filled with explosive and the whole mass shatters in one great THUMP! The rock shards are pushed over the bank and I begin laying out the foundation form work. It is so frustrating having to work for wages too but this is the money that pays for the blasting and the concrete as well as looking after the monthly living expenses. We will build just as fast as the money comes in to pay for the materials. This can only work for us because we have no loan from the bank that would have imposed time deadlines and forced us to hire all the work out.

The winter is a snowy, cold one and we are glad to be in the log cabin, although the enormous space we experienced at first has shrunk again with all five of us bumping shoulders. This has certainly encouraged me to continue with our building schedule. We are reasonably secure in our log cabin but it doesn`t take much to shake our confidence. Once I get a terrible bout of flu and lie helpless in bed while Heather tries to manage things on her own and care for me. The final straw is when she runs out of split firewood and can`t handle the big splitting maul to make more from some big fir rounds. Neighbour Bruce finds her in tears of frustration in the snow and takes over from her and later a doctor makes a house call for me.

When winter brings even more snow, the school bus does not run, so we all go cross country skiing up and down our trails and it isn`t until next Spring when we have felled many more trees, had them milled into lumber by a portable mill and we have got a load of plywood delivered that we are ready to begin framing up the new building. We have designed a split level house this time with its main windows facing south and with Bruce`s help the frame goes up in three days. After the long labour of the log cabin, this is a big boost. Bruce also has a house worth of repossessed windows he will sell me cheaply so we design around those sizes. We have bought a logging truck load of cedar poles from a neighbour and will use them to build posts and beams into the interior of the building. The upstairs room layout is still undetermined at this point so I pace around the big two-level space, figure out two bedrooms, a bathroom and living room and then frame up the window spaces. Then the plywood sheathing is cut out with the chainsaw. An architect no doubt would scream at such a process but it is so much easier to walk around in a space and plan it by laying pieces of lumber on the floor and moving them around to represent walls and doorways. I build a loft room for one daughter with the other two occupying the bedroom below. Like the log cabin, the upstairs will have high cathedral ceilings, this time lined with our own cedar planks milled from our own trees.

The vision of Paul Gauguin #3. The birth of Venus.

‘The idea is the form of things outside of those things.’ Emile Bernard.


‘Gauguin demonstrated that the most disparate types of art - not to speak of elements from metaphysics, ethnology, symbolism, the Bible, classical myths and much else beside - could be combined into a synthesis that was of its time yet timeless. An artist could also confound conventional notions of beauty, he demonstrated, by harnessing the dark Gods ( not necessarily Polynesian ones) and tapping into a vital new source of divine energy...’
David Sweetman. ‘Gauguin. A complete life.’

‘Emotion first! Understanding afterwards! My dream is intangible, it comprises no allegory’. Paul Gauguin.

For my second ‘translation’ I decided to leap in with both feet and chose a complex synthesis to work with. Once again I found that the pencil drawing opened the painting up to me: my hands were brighter than my frontal lobe. My reading of the notes that accompanied the colour reproductions I was working from showed me that no one had more than skimmed the surface. The various elements could be identified to some degree, but Gauguin`s painting was more than a collection of its parts and the ultimate ‘meaning’ seemed purposely shrouded in mystery. Its quite possible that even he was not completely aware of what he was creating. There was plenty of room for me to wander in and do my own exploring.

I am partially red-green colour blind so have always tended to view the world from its shapes rather than its colours, and yet I was stepping into paintings that carried much of their message in their colour relationships. A remarkable part of my journey was that I discovered that if I really concentrated hard I could differentiate between blue and purple, I could see the light green leaves on a pink background. I had simply taken the easy road in the past. This was exciting! What passion there is in colour!

This painting was designed like a stage set and a ballet of sorts was being performed to the music expressed in the colour harmonies. The more I looked as I drew with pencil and oil pastels the more I discovered. I could see the waves breaking on the coral reef, the rattling pandanus palms, and the volcanic mountains of Tahiti in the background: the setting was recognizable as were the figures with the wind off the sea flapping their clothes. Other elements like the ‘savage Idol’ and the three figures in the foreground were symbols to carry what the artist felt was the deeper meaning embedded in the landscape. The interlocking colour shapes in the lagoon in the foreground were fascinating, they could represent reflections of clouds, the coral reef in the shallow water, or forms adapted from ornamental friezes from some other culture. Or all three, and more. For me it was the font of all creation, star foam, into which the central figure was still dipping her feet. As she was wringing out her hair I knew that she and the other two figures still uncurling from the fetal position had just been born from the mind of the creator. She was Venus herself, fresh out from the foam, with a numinous green halo surrounding her to indicate she was a Goddess

For Gauguin I`m sure she was also his own creative self, the slim female spirit hidden within his powerful male body who could surface and walk the earth while he painted.

Building a life #14. ‘Dreams can come true. It can happen to you....'

The bright light of a harvest moon floods through the high windows of our completed log cabin. Heather and I lie on our couch-bed looking up at the wooden cathedral ceiling and pine beams. The flickering light from the wood stove glints on the log walls. Over in the shadowy corner behind a screen our three precious children sleep all unaware of their parents sense of wonder. After over a year in the pumphouse and trailer we are finally living inside something that started as a big dream and now is reality. This is heady and potentially dangerous stuff. We have learned that dreams can be made to come true and if this one, why not another, and another?

Not only have I laboured hard through almost a year of seasons to complete this project, I have gained a long list of skills that I can put to use on the next big project. Not that I am enthusiastic right now about beginning the big house back beside the orchard on the other side of the stream. It seems too much to even think about right now and besides we are low on money. I need a job, and on this little island with a plethora of back-to-the-land ex-teachers looking for work it will have to be associated with one of my new skills. The secret of island work is to be multi-talented and ready for whatever is needed. My curse of having a million varied interests and abilities can start to pay off for us at last.

I begin work as a plumber in a house a friend is building for resale and it is just a slight bump in the road to become the electrician as well. Bruce says to me, “Look Bill, I don`t mind you looking things up in the Readers Digest book, but hide it when we have inspectors and prospective buyers come around eh?”

I take on building the kitchen cabinets and am finally left to do all the trim details on my own when the crew moves on to another house start. I have the prospect now of full time work but little time to build for myself. Catch 22.

The vision of Paul Gauguin. #2. Namaste.

In art, we have just undergone a very long period of aberration due to physics, mechanical chemistry and nature study. Artists have lost all their savagery, all their instincts, one might say their imagination, and so they have wandered down every path in order to find the productive elements they havn`t the strength to create; as a result, they act only as undisciplined crowds and feel frightened. Lost as it were, when they are alone. That is why solitude is not to be recommended to everyone, for you have to be strong in order to bear it and act alone. Everything I have learned from other people merely stood in my way. This I can say: No one has taught me anything. On the other hand, it is true that I know so little, which is of my own creation. And who knows whether that little, when put to use by others, will not become something big?.... Paul Gauguin.

It felt a little strange with Gauguin`s words ringing in my ears to settle down to walking down his path for a while by copying some of his paintings just like the art students of Gauguin`s time used to do as part of their training ( including Gauguin himself). I reasoned that the most intense way to view his works was to draw and paint them, taking several hours over each, - so much longer and careful a participation than a mere looking at and reading about them could accomplish. I had already read what other`s had to say, I had looked at his paintings as I read, I knew what others said I should look for, but as yet I had not really entered into them fully. Here was my real beginning.

I knew that I would not just copy the paintings, but find a way to participate as I felt Gauguin really demanded - a dynamic interaction rather than a faithful reproduction- so I chose a technique really quite different from the brush and oil paint on canvas that he used, in the expectation that in doing a kind of translation I would feel his creative process more directly: second hand yes, but closer to the original experience. Me and you Paul! I hoped that having walked in the same Polynesian landscape as the artist would help bridge the gap, not of years, because that was irrelevant, but directly from mind to mind. I did not so much wish to learn his techniques as to understand what he had to communicate.

The first painting I attempted was of two young women sitting on the sand. On first glance, it seemed the most straightforward. I first drew in the lines of the two figures and then used oil pastels to lay in the basic colour themes. I left the future dark areas untouched and applied white where it would be wanted in the finished piece. An overall wash of black ink was applied over the oil based medium and then wiped off again. Now I had a colourful picture with all blank areas still covered in black ink. Even at this preliminary point in the ‘translation’ I had discovered so much simply by drawing his simple bold figures and approximating his colours. The women had become distinct beings already, sitting in the dappled shade, one plaiting a hat. They were mysterious. What were they thinking, sitting so motionless, one looking up at the viewer?

What I had not fully grasped before was that even here in this seemingly realistic scene, the artist was using colour to communicate - the orange and pinks carrying their own message directly to my emotions, the yellow of the sand somehow representing the ultimate ground of being and the shadowy abstract line of the lagoon behind reminding me of eternity that lies always lapping around the edges of the present moment. I began to recognize that the figures, so monumental and solid, unified what we usually think of as two separate modalities. They were real Polynesian people and they were also Gods - transcendent beings: ordinary people sitting on the beach recognized for their immortal selves. Namaste.

By working so closely with his painting I am participating in his vision and what a powerful one it is. I could just as well be wrong in my interpretation but that does not matter, it is the process of interacting with the image that is important. The observer has entered into the idea being painted, was creating new meaning, and was no longer a separate ‘impartial’ viewer.

I continue to work into my translation with pastels and ink, varnishing to seal in the first layers and continuing with more pastels and then varnishing again. I am trying through depth of layers of pigment and films of varnish to achieve a surface that reflects the layers of meaning that still remain to be discovered.

Building a life #13. Buster gets our goat.

Driving Buster White.

Now the barn is completed and a fenced yard built behind it, we take our goats for a browsing walk in the mornings down the trail past Cat Hill. We are also now the proud owners of a castrated and de-horned young billy goat we have called Buster White. As we have milking goats, they have to be freshened and that means kids. Any little male goats get killed ( by me, a nasty job.) but Heather saved Buster with the idea that he could be trained to pull a light wagon. Cute!

Buster has his own leather collar, answers to his name, is aware of his protected status and is full of lively animal spirits. He likes to butt Gwyn and lies in wait for her to come by. We say to Gwyn, “ Stand up to him Honey. Let him know that you are the boss.” Buster is now heavier than Gwyn and has a harder head.

One day Heather is hiking up the hill to the cabin and Buster, hiding behind a big cedar, jumps out behind her and butts her hard in the bottom. That is something even I would not have the nerve to do and Buster quickly finds himself sitting on the front seat of the van watching the passing scenery in a manner that says “Ah, at last, I am being taken for a drive. Just what I deserve!”

A week later he came home from the butcher in brown paper packages and the family ate ‘ lamb’ for some time after. We got Buster`s goat in the end.

Building a life #12. ‘Dreams can come true. It can happen to you...’

The bright light of a harvest moon floods through the high windows of our completed log cabin. Heather and I lie on our couch-bed looking up at the high wooden cathedral ceiling and pine beams. The flickering light from the wood stove glints on the log walls. Over in the shadowy corner behind a screen our three precious children sleep all unaware of their parents sense of wonder. After over a year in the pumphouse and trailer we are finally living inside something that started as a big dream and now is reality. This is heady and potentially dangerous stuff. We have learned that dreams can be made to come true and if this one, why not another, and another?

Not only have I laboured hard through almost a year of seasons to complete this project, I have gained a long list of skills that I can put to use on the next big project. Not that I am enthusiastic right now about beginning the big house back beside the orchard on the other side of the stream. It seems too much to even think about right now and besides we are low on money. I need a job, and on this little island with a plethora of back-to-the-land ex-teachers looking for work it will have to be associated with one of my new skills. The secret of island work is to be multi-talented and ready for whatever is needed. My curse of having a million varied interests and abilities can start to pay off for us at last.

I begin work as a plumber in a house a friend is building for resale and it is just a slight bump in the road to become the electrician as well. Bruce says to me, “Look Bill, I don`t mind you looking things up in the Readers Digest book, but hide it when we have inspectors and prospective buyers come around eh?”

I take on building the kitchen cabinets and am finally left to do all the trim details on my own when the crew moves on to another house start. I have the prospect now of full time work but little time to build for myself. Catch 22.

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.