Petrowolves, and a vision of a greater world.

On winter nights in our village, on the outer fringes of the universe, the S.U.Vs. slink down from the hills and gather hungrily around the gas bar.
Coming out of the grocery store the other day I stepped out into the parking lot, watched my chance and skipped between the cars to my van. A familiar act, performed many times over the years. This time was different, as though a veil had slipped from my eyes.

All those massive steel cars, the reek of exhaust, those shadowy figures hunched behind steering wheels, all totally strange and totally obscene. My familiar way of life held up to a mirror and seen in a nightmare light. Sure we all are aware of the problems associated with fossil fuel use, we may even somehow know how recently the world has become dependent on it, but to see it so clearly and unexpectedly, as in a vision of the future, is unnerving.

Visions are not usually thought of as being like this. The Lady comes wrapped in light to comfort us, we see a hopeful picture of our future, not this old testament kind of revelation of ‘woe unto you’. So where does one go with something like this? I cannot see myself giving up the van right away, and besides, I had a sense that the mental leap was not just about transportation.

That shift in the parking lot spoke to a complete world view: my culture, my outlook, language, words, concepts. Everything I thought and how I did it was called into question. How does one even think or exist, be human, without that framework that has been abuilding since I was born? We all, no matter what our culture, what world view, swim in a stream of life among our fellows. We may be able to imagine life in other streams, other cultures, but to imagine the valley, mountains, the deserts beyond, would take an imagination formed somewhere outside of streams. I have just leapt briefly out of the water, glimpsed the shore and understood the water and my place in it for a moment. Do I put aside this disturbing thought or use it as a springboard to see further out beyond my stream? Of what use would that be? Crazy making. Ah, but to see a greater world, wouldn`t that be grand!

The Shroud

The shroud.

Another rainy day and I am back in the studio with my camera and sp600 Speedlight flash unit. I have been thinking since the last session about what else I can do using myself as the subject. What do I have as a costume that would move me forward in combining lighting practice and expression? I reach for the coloured backdrop fabrics. I`m off on another rainy day adventure with my camera.

There is a long art history of figures wrapped in draperies, not only are the folds and fabrics interesting in themselves, but the figures clothed in them become monumental and formal - there is greater potential here for expressive composition. After yellow, ( a Buddist monk?) And black, ( Auda, the Beduin tribal leader?) I reach for the white length of cloth. I `m getting better at this quick wrapping and posing between tripping the 10 second delay shutter and the flash that bounces off the white reflector panel beside me, and the results seen on the little LCD screen on the camera back look interesting. How instant a learning feedback there is now, compared to film days.

Later, I have a good look when my mornings photos have been downloaded onto the computer. Yikes, Bill playing the silly fool wrapped in fabric, better not let these see the light of day! It had seemed so reasonable a thing to do back in the studio. I did learn a lot in the process but social ridicule about ‘dresses and gowns’ or ‘religious’ quips would be hard to take. I shake it off and get down to seeing what I can gain from the images in this next creative level of making pictures. The first thing that sticks out for me is how simple it is to create different moods and personalities with lighting, facial expressions and a simple costume. I have what could be a collection of National Geographic folk from around the Middle and Far East - anywhere a piece of wrapped fabric is considered normal clothing. My personal face has merged into the faces of the world. That old man in white calls to me.

This man, wrapped in his burnoose, leaning forward with his eyes lowered reminds me of the photos my dad took during the First World War in Egypt and Palestine and with which I had spent a lot of hours last winter trying to bring the yellowed, brown, faded images back up to a higher quality to illustrate the story I was writing of his war time experiences*. I knew now that I was going to follow that familiar trail again, but in the opposite direction! I set out to convert this crisp colour photo into a replica of the hundred year old images that I had found so evocative in the family album. Perhaps it was the thought that I would never show this photo anyway that made it so easy for me to wade against the stream of photographic tradition. Degrade a good photo? Horror! I was on a journey to express something with this image that went well beyond a ‘good photo’.As yet, I did not know how far that would be.

I send a copy via E-mail to a friend, -I do need after all to get to the last level of showing the final result to others, and the next day hear back on the phone. After we have transacted our business I hesitatingly ask, "So, how about the photo I attached to the message?"

" My daughter says it looks like you are dead, wrapped in a shroud." she laughs.

Whoa, I never thought of that! But of course, if one thinks of it as me, not some historical person from long ago and far away and an autonomous work of art, then that is exactly how it seems. I have accidently touched a powerful topic, death. My faded photo has a great deal more resonance than I had planned, but how lucky that as soon as a creation goes out of the makers hand it become open to a larger audience to participate in its new life. Of course, now I wonder if that was what part of me was headed for all the time.

* http://billsgreatwar.blogspot.com
　

Building a life # 19. There is a laugh in everything.

                                                           Big fish.

I am milking the goats in the barn when our visitors arrive and I quickly finish up and go out to greet them. I havn`t seen Pam, a fellow art teacher, her husband Mike and family since I left teaching in the Okanagan two years ago. They look no different, but I must be a surprise with my big beard and scruffy work clothes, stepping out of our rough plywood barn with a pail of milk in my hand. It is at times like these that I realize how far down an alternate path we have been wandering. And working so hard to get there!

They camp in our bottom field, and the next day I take them out in our big rowboat ‘Swallow’ on an expedition to Portland Island. It`s a lovely sunny day and Mike`s fishing line is out. This is what summer in the Gulf Islands is all about, right? Well, perhaps for visitors. I`m thinking how seldom I have actually been out in the boat, that months go by with my nose to the grindstone working to build us into some state of security. Security, wasn`t that something I had willingly left behind?

A sailboat crosses our wake and shortly thereafter the rod bends and the reel screams. Not a wopper fish, no, we have snagged the keel of the sailboat! There is no way he will reel it in so the line breaks and the lure is lost. Mike is furious! I start to laugh which does not help the mood in the boat. I am laughing at his loss, and at the sheer chance that brought this all about and also at what seems to me to be a disproportionate expenditure of emotion.

Once, I too might have reacted in outrage at what now seems a trivial and amazing coincidence. I resume rowing and the incident is passed over. Soon we arrive at Portland Island and walk the beautiful trails of the park and I privately review the fishing incident and what it has to tell me. We are leading a hardscrabble life still and learning many new skills in the process. One I hadn`t noticed `til now had crept up unannounced, the ability to simply deal with daily problems and reverses as they come along without throwing in a supercharge of negative emotion as well. I would be a nervous wreck if I indulged myself in that way because each day has it`s list of problems. The one luxury I allow myself is to carry on a feud with the goats and that seems OK because they are always trying to get my goat! If cussing has ultimately failed me, I have learned to laugh. As my favourite film character, Forest Gump, says, “It happens”. Some things have changed in my life for the better after all.

The vision of Paul Gauguin # 6. Vairumati.

                                        My version of 'Vairumati'


“ She was tall, and the fire of the sun`s rays burned in the gold of her skin; all the mysteries of love breathed in the black night of her hair.” Paul Gauguin.

I wonder as I begin this painting if perhaps I have already gone about as far as I can go with the re-imaging of Gauguin`s paintings. Not that he has exhausted himself, but that my own thoughts can not stretch fast enough to keep up with him in this ‘resonating’ process. One more, I decide, but much bigger this time, and even then on my largest piece of paper I will still only be one third the size of the original. How splendid the real painting must be! I grid off the colour plate I am working from and transfer the lines of the painting to the textured paper.

I then use charcoal to outline the main lines and shadows and later switch to oil pastel and rough in the areas of colour: the first stage in the build up of layers of pigment and varnish. “Ahhh, nooo”, I think, as the pastel picks up on the raised texture and just sits there. I grab the spray can of varnish and wet down a section, start rubbing into it with a finger tip so the pastel combines with the varnish and spreads smoothly over the paper. Now I can see the white of the paper shining smoothly up through the colour. This is more like it!

I have chosen what I think is a particularly beautiful painting to work with this time; ‘Vairumati’, that combines the beauty of a Polynesian woman with imagery from ancient sculpture and a symbolic white bird stepping on a lizard. Such a conglomeration, so effortlessly synthesized, with the symbolic spiritual colours in red soil and yellow bed blazing forth. This is holy ground! There is so much to work with here.

It is when I start work on the two shadowy figures in the background that I begin to really transition through the picture plane. Two women form a kind of chorus section in the shadows: one carries a tray of offerings, the other is singing and signing this painted story with hand gestures. In memory, I am back on our sailing travels through the islands of the South Pacific. We have stopped in New Caledonia during ‘The Festival of the Arts’, a gathering for all the indigenous peoples of the South Pacific, and we are watching a group of young people from the isolated islands of Wallis and Fortuna sing and act out a traditional song of fishing on the coral reef. One girl catches my attention, her graceful hand movements, the shy glances she takes at the crowd gathered on the grass around her group captivate me. In her person she distills all that we have experienced in the months it has taken us to traverse the South Pacific, all the islands with their reefs and lagoons, the high volcanic mountains and low coral atolls all swept by the Trade winds. I know now why Gauguin has painted his particular girl into his canvas. She too represents all that immensity to him.

When Gauguin described Vairumati in his book ‘Noa Noa’ he chose the easy road - a sexy young woman- but there is little of that in this image of her or really of any of the other women he painted. Yes, many times he paints them completely or partially nude, but typically as in this painting they, at the very least, represent an exalted image of sexuality, something ancient and of the spirit. The reds and yellows, the bits of temple architecture, the gold of her body and the worshiping choir behind her all say in picture form what he could not express in words. That girl I saw was Vairumati also and the song she sang, Gauguin heard too,   -his painting is just another version of this great thing that sings through all our veins. The world is not just God`s creation, the spirit is in us and all around us, all is holy. Vairumati is beautiful, she shines, we all worship her.

Making pictures.

                                                         Twins: through a glass darkly.

At what point does one know how the image should turn out, - what its story is? Sometimes I find I know even before I go out with my camera, - I have been cooking up a feeling and it is just a matter of going out and finding the ingredients. While I am out I may find variations on a theme, but rarely will I stray far from the ruling impulse of the day.

The subject itself may be the ruling principle at other times. The tall up-reaching form of an arbutus tree will speak so clearly that there is no turning away for me until the image is safely in the camera. And then there are the times I am simply playing with the camera, collecting images as though they were bits of rock and driftwood only to discover that something there calls to me, half hidden things that jump out of the image saying that they can speak through the forms that I have captured all unawares.

It was a rainy wet winters day, really no fun to be out of doors, and I was using my dry studio to experiment with artificial lighting. If I were a sober citizen I would have kept to a sequence of shots and recorded each step to be able to duplicate it later but while I did try to follow a routine I could not help throwing in variations. My creative side is used to being dominant when I have a camera in my hand. I used a mirror, different coloured backdrops and a flash unit and eventually started prancing around in front of the camera which sat on its tripod with the shutter set to a 10 second delay. Way too many variables to keep control of. Using myself as model and being focused on all the details of the photographer at the same time led to an interesting effect: the picture sequences soon showed a side of myself I did not know. It was as if a stranger, - myself stripped of my social face- was showing up in photo after photo. An intense inner person, not well know at all. Those coloured cloth backdrops were also setting a powerful mood in each picture.

When I abandoned all but the mirror and started another sequence - the camera now resting on the table top -I found my inner self face to face with my mirror image. There were three of us in the room, ordinary me the photographer, my model me, and his reflection who seemed different again. Hilarious, I thought and snapped away. Only later as I sorted photos on the computer did I realize that those twins in the mirrors were something close to my personal history. My identical twin died at birth and I have always felt myself to be living double lives - living for two in this life and also living a parallel life with my other half over in the shadowlands. After some work on the computer to clean up the bits that interfered with the force of the image and converting it to black and white I had a photo that depicted a real depth of feeling for me. “Unsettling, disturbing,” people said on first sight, as if that was a mark against it as a work of art.

Now, I was pleased with this picture because it was unsettling and disturbing, it broadened the range of my expression beyond the usual crop of beauty oriented images. Then I remembered that most art that people see is designed to please the viewer, to hang on a wall and sooth the tired businessman and colour co-ordinate with the furniture: a kind of opiate, not a bugle call to wake up and think. Certainly not to disturb. Back in the days over a hundred years ago when the Impressionists and those who followed them were struggling to be accepted, the buying public had a settled idea about what was proper art, cloying historical and literary types of images, and also what they really wanted from the new art of photography - pleasing photographs of themselves. These days consumers want variations of the same thing. We live in a consumer society where the customer determines the product and many photographers, themselves consumers and sellers, have accepted this. All those talented people producing decorative images to be placed in galleries and sold to beautiful people. I bet most of them carry a second line of un-sellable images that reach towards a wider and wilder expression of the world.

The frozen lake.

                                     Along the margins of the lake

My sons in law want to go fishing on the lake on this sunny crisp winter afternoon, one of the last days of the year, and I decide that here is my chance to make some interesting photos. The old wood and canvas Chestnut canoe is lifted down from the cross beams in my studio, my little Zodiac inflatable raft comes too and shortly we are launching just down the road at Weston Lake. The lake is almost completely frozen over with the thinnest of triangle patterned ice, like what you might find on a mud puddle on a frosty morning, but this end of the lake is still open and gently rippled in a fitful breeze. The canoe drifts to the center, and the fly rods are soon in action. I follow, awkwardly propelling myself and camera with the ridiculous set of little oars that came with the raft.

I get some lovely shots of the canoe and then drift towards the shore with the breeze. The winter rains have raised the lake level a foot above summer standard and I can see water lilies suspended below the surface on their now too short stalks as I drift by. The leafless willow bushes that line the shore reflect across them in a beautifully complex pattern. I came for the canoe, but here are riches indeed.

Soon I am ready to head home to warm up, but my eyes have seen the most amazing things along the forgotten margins and across the icy surface of the glittering lake. Who say that love is only warm? I have felt Winter`s icy heart today and know it too supports this beautiful world in its cold embrace.

Building a life #18. Total bloody war.

                          'The lights are going out...'

I am exhausted and very frustrated. Our two pigs are ready to be taken to the butcher and the intelligent creatures seem to know this very well indeed. No matter what, they are not going up the ramp and into the pick-up truck. I have run out of options when an old prairie farmer drops by. After rolling around laughing for some while, he picks up a plastic pail, pushes it over the first pig`s head, and backs it up the ramp. Just so. I do the second one. Off to the abattoir.

Beside our regular exciting life with the goats: a foot in the milk pail, eating our fruit trees, eating our neighbour`s fruit trees, and our laying chickens: off lay, eaten by eagles, racoons and mink, we have also begun to raise meat birds. It takes a fine bit of guesswork to decide on the correct day of reckoning for them: too soon and we have rather light weight birds, too late and they start to die or become crippled. It is my job to do the killing and Heather`s job to do the dressing. The children and their friends help with plucking. There are the occasional shrieks as one child chases another with bits of chicken guts. Death and destruction is such good clean family fun. So much of farm life has death as its prime objective. Its not really life on the farm at all.

After one long day of slaughter we have buried the chicken remains under a big cedar tree and later that evening hear the oh too familiar sound of upset chickens: coons, we say and out I go with a flashlight to find a whole family of racoons have been digging up the remains and are now scrambling up the cedar. Many little dots, like Christmas lights, reflect down from all over the tree. They are up there, looking down. Perhaps it is the sound of jeering laughter from above that sends me to a neighbour to borrow his shot gun. With the flashlight held to the gun barrel I start shooting my way up the tree. The lights go out one by one and bodies start hitting the ground. “The lights are going out all over Europe.”, it feels like that sometimes. Total bloody war.

Blue moon.

                                                   Happy New Year.

Tree sailing.

                                                       Tree sailing.

As a child in England during the Second World War I discovered a special little game I could play by myself called ‘lining things up’. Through a slight movement of my head a fly speck on the window could be placed on the top of a tree outside, the line of the edge of the table before me could be extended into space to pass precisely between the heads of the adults who were talking to me. They were talking sure enough, I could hear the distant murmur of their voices, but I was off in a visual world of my own. If I had been born twenty years earlier that developing skill might have made me a sniper or bomb aimer but others performed that task and many died that I might grow in peace and eventually become through that little habit of mind an artist and photographer.


That habit grew and grew through time. At first the lining up of things became more challenging: as I walked I could I see potential complex line-ups as they developed and “fire’ with a quick twitch when the magic moment arrived. For it felt like magic. Then it was shapes in three dimensions: the garbage can in the foreground became the base of the building behind it and the cloud in the sky would balance for a moment on the mountaintop in I waited just a minute. Fortunately for me this never developed into a mania as it could have done if I had lived a difficult and stressful kind of childhood. Instead the family moved to Canada after the war and I lived on a little ocean bay on the west coast of Canada. The family was preoccupied with making a living and I , the youngest of five, was overlooked to wander the shores and woods alone. I began a romance with the wild that would last me forever and combined that with the keen observation I had learned in my childhood game. Now my world was a familiar, constantly shifting constellation of relationships. The top of the cedar tree I was clinging to in the gale for fun danced in concert with its fellows and the waves in the bay echoed that in an interesting complex rhythm. The low clouds rushed close overhead and spoke in a kind of grey visual language. I started to draw.

Nowadays when I take my camera for a walk I not only still see those complex relationships but look within those forms for what they are saying in their visual language. In this I share something with other artists down through time who have striven to record this in their art, whether in music, dance, or in pictures and sculpture. I think back to the cave paintings of Southern Europe that were striving to portray the mystery ten thousand years ago and know myself to be in good company. That little childhood game was not so crazy after all, just my portal into the realm of a reality that underlies and informs our knowledge of what we call ‘ the real world’.

Landfall.

Landfall

                                                                             Landfall.

Here is a memory of our Pacific voyages in Shiriri. The moment when the squall drifts off, the sky clears and land can be faintly seen ahead is a high like no other, especially if the crossing has been a nasty one. We are going to live after all, we feel, and then immediately snap our tired minds back into focus for the tricky bit of winding through the reefs that stand between us and a safe harbour. At the time we think that the safe harbour is the ultimate goal but in the end it is this moment in the midst of life with all its dangers that will remain most vividly in memory.

The vision of Paul Gauguin #5. Frog Woman.

My sketch of Gauguin`s painting.

‘...in the avoidance of the anecdote, the substitution of a situation that is equivocal and suggestive, demanding the imaginative co-creation of the observer,....’ David Sweetman. ‘Gauguin. A complete life’.

The woman in Gauguin`s painting kneels forward, knees apart, propped up on her elbows in what seems an awkward position. She fills the frame, supported by simple bands of white and yellow sand. The background is a thin, barely differentiated wavy strip of land and sea. Here at last I can settle down to a simple figure study.

I focus, trying to get my drawn lines to be precise to the original figure. Usually my drawing is not accurate to nature but here, with a figure, any straying from the truth will look awkward and false. OK Paul, but why have you chosen that pose, it cannot be normal for this woman to pose like that? She looks like a frog!

I begin to get a woozy feeling that once again I am sliding into a symbolic painting and that this is no simple figure painting at all but a synthesis of ideas. I proceed through the layers of colour, blending one layer on top of another, sometimes scraping pastel away to expose some of the lower layers: the hours pass like seconds. I am deep in the process when the power of the painting begins to take over, my clever little mind gets passed by. I am part of the scene, part of the woman and of the beach, part of a universal truth.

Gauguin is calling upon my imagination to see her as the present embodiment of the eternal woman who carries life forward through time , the mother of us all. Her breasts dangle beneath her, nurturing the earth, she spreads her legs and births everything into existence, dreaming us up as she stares off into space and time. Her strong brown legs and arms support her firmly on the earth. She is Frog Woman of my local West Coast First Nations traditional mythology. First creator, maker of the people, Eve.

The Choir. A moment to remember.

Transition.

Heather is a member of a new community choir on the island and tonight, just before Christmas, is their first concert in the Anglican church which they have borrowed for this occasion. It is a large choir ( 60 people) and looks splendid on the risers in front of the altar and pipe organ. With this many members they could pack the church with relatives alone, but in fact the community as a whole comes out on several cold winter evenings like this to support not just this choir but another of similar size and several smaller ones. And that`s just choirs! It is a very lively place, this little island of ours.

I sit well back in the pews to get the full range of sound and as the program unfolds I begin to look carefully at the individuals singing there. Some are young or in mid-life, but many I recognize from thirty years ago who were here when we ourselves first arrived. Then they were in their twenties or thirties, now they are so grey, their faces set into the forms that tell of personalities and their life journeys. Others are more recent retirees from around the world determined to throw their enthusiasm into their new, and perhaps last, island home. The spotlights angle down onto faces that seem so vulnerable, caught up as they are in the singing. I am planning to take my photography into a study of people next year and already I am taking the first steps by focussing on personality, faces, and the angles of light that will bring all this to my camera`s lens.

It is interesting though, how all the elder faces are so beautiful. One would naturally look for it in the faces of youth, but here it is shining out of these lined faces much more powerfully than one would expect. Partly, it is the music that is transfiguring them, - they are the song they are singing - and partly too it is the sheer polishing, like rocks in a streambed, they have achieved as they slipped through the years. As we all, in the choir and in the audience, slide closer to the end of our lives we are beginning to be transformed, not “In a moment, in a twinkling of a eye”* but through the much more sure and steady progress of living through the joys and trials that fate has brought us or which we have struggled to achieve. We are all the singer and the song and this is a moment to remember.

* Handel`s ‘Messiah’.

Building a life #17. Its all a matter of balance.

                                                                                           Oh, Jez.

It is time to raise the ridge pole into the peak of living room ceiling and as usual I am working on my own. I have the radio tuned to CBC ( Morningside, with Peter Gzowski) for company and am scratching my head to work out a system that will get the 20 foot cedar pole way up high in the cathedral ceiling -12 feet or more. At one end is a tall post with a space at the top and at the other a slot in the peak of the wall for the beam to slid through to the outer end of the roof line. Really, this is a job for at least a couple of hefty men and some staging but I decide to wing it. It is some time since I have fallen on this building site and cracked my ribs yet again. I am getting cocky.

I manhandle the beam into position below and lift the inside end onto a wooden plank nailed temporarily to the vertical post. Great! Now I lift the outer end onto another temporary step. The beam is now four feet off the floor. I repeat the whole process once again and then hoist the inside end up into a rope sling beside the top of the post. The beam swings ominously in its sling at a 35 degree angle even after I lift the low end to the top of a six foot step ladder. It is time for the decisive step! I will climb the step ladder, take the beam on my shoulder and just walk up the steps until I can slide the beam into place. Up I go, -as the beam approaches horizontal it seems to get lighter - and with a grunt lift it from my shoulder to over my head. Drat, still not quite high enough! I am standing on the very top of the ladder with a long heavy pole held in my quivering hands.

Now I realize that there is no going back. I could never reverse the process smoothly enough to put the log safely back on my shoulders and hence back to the ground. If I try to throw the beam to one side and leap for it, the ladder would just tip over and I would end up crushed by the beam on the floor below. How far down that floor seems! Very carefully I lift the log up onto my fingertips. Still not enough! AHHHH! I rise on tiptoe and, ever so delicately, it slides into place. Phew! I will wait a long time before I share this story with my family.

Ancestral memories on a moonlit night.

                                              Owl moon.

There are several degrees of frost tonight, the still air crackles and though the window the moon shines so white that it looks like snow coating the rocks, trees and buildings. I will have to step outside for an armload of large pieces of firewood to last the rest of the night. Whoever wakes later will go downstairs to stoke the stove some more, thereby saving us from a chilly morning kitchen. Somehow, as I step down the stairs through streaks of moonlight, these nocturnal trips are rather special, as if an all-night sleep is not really the normal state for humankind at all.

After my quick trip outside I stand for a while at the window to admire this white world, so seldom seen during weeks of cloudy, rainy weather. An owl calls and is answered from somewhere deep in the big woods. These are not standard owl calls, but shrieks and moans, -either someone has cold claws out there or they are plotting some very bloody deed. If it gives me the shivers, I can imaging how all the field mice must be feeling crouched down in their burrows.

Then I remember that far back in the remote past our ancestors were once small mammals too. They must have listened in the pine woods on moonlit nights like this to the dinosaurs calling from ridge to ridge as they planned their hunting. We must have shivered in our dens like these mice do today. Then I remember some more: those owls are the last descendants of the dinosaurs. No wonder they raise the hairs on the back of my neck tonight.

The vision of Paul Gauguin.#4. Sea bathing.

‘Wishing to suggest a luxuriant and wild nature, a tropical sun, which set aflame everything around it, I have had to give my figures an appropriate setting. It is indeed life in the open air, but at the same time intimate; amidst the thickets, the shadowy streams, these whispering women in the immense palace decorated by nature herself, with all the riches that Tahiti affords. Hence all these fabulous colours, this fiery yet softened and silent air.


‘___ but all that doesn`t exist!


‘___ yes, it exists, but as the equivalent of the grandeur, the profundity of that mystery of Tahiti, when it has to be expressed on a canvas a meter square.’      Gauguin.



While walking along the beach road on the island of Moorea, I caught a glimpse of a very white European woman quickly covering her breasts with a towel lest my ‘prying eyes’ should shame her. A minute later I found a couple of local ladies bathing waist deep in the lagoon with their children, completely natural in their nudity. The contrast was striking! There is a quality in Gauguin`s portrayal of women that is very refreshing, - they are like those women with their children, real people who are comfortable in their flesh. For Gauguin of course they also represent a tropical Eden before the serpent, or Tahiti before the missionaries.

I am thinking of that moment on Moorea when I select my next painting for exploration. In the immediate foreground there is a long passage of pinks, purple and oranges; sand, fallen blossoms, vines and twigs - one can almost hear the music from the orchestra pit. A tree trunk stretches darkly across the front of the stage and then sweeps up and branches. Two women prepare to swim; one is already splashing in while the other is removing her parae. They are strong, competent people, diving into the ocean. Out in the dark water I glimpse an outrigger canoe and a spear fisherman. Perhaps the swimmers are to join in with the harvest? Flares of light from the fishermen`s lanterns are like stage lighting on the dark beach. If there is a deeper message here I`m sure it has to do with what the sea represents to Gauguin. As in the two previous paintings, and as it was for us sailing across the Pacific the sea is the universe, eternity, the unconscious, that which birthed us all and to which we will return. He is orchestrating his painting so I can make the connection at a deep level. He shows us real actors on the stage of life living the mystery.

THE ROAD TO COPENHAGEN - We follow, the U.S. leads.

"Did we lose that Mr. Harper yet? "
"`Fraid not, Mr. President."

Building a life # 16. Cussing has its place.

                                 The interview.

The early 80`s see a big downturn in the economy and building activity wanes. I need to jump into new employment and I see that the Provincial Parks Department is looking for Park Rangers. I apply, and later, as I am cursing away while laboriously chain sawing a big cedar post in half lengthwise, for the house, I see a pair of brown shiny shoes out of the corner of my eye. My interview for the job has begun! My academic qualifications may actually count against me for this ‘man`s job’ but I guess my chainsaw abilities and cussing qualifications ( learned from the goats) are just right, so I become the new supervisor for the three provincial parks on the island. It is difficult adjusting to being a cog in a civil service wheel, I have lived a remarkably independent life so far, but I do adjust and at least I am quite confident at running the island parks with limited visits from head office in Victoria. The union pay is good and regular too which eases our financial worries. By this point the main house is framed and roofed so I can work on it as time from ‘Rangering’ permits.

                                        The Park Ranger.
24th of May long weekend.
In one dark park a once yellow schoolbus, now spray-painted with graffiti, is surrounded by a screaming multitude of drunken young adults. It is my new job to control this and I have no training, no idea what the rules are and it is just a tad risky to even approach this lot. In another waterfront park, a large crowd of drunken people have lit an enormous beach fire out of drift logs. Beer bottles fly about in the darkness. Now what do I do? It turns out that there is a good reason why this job was available!

It will take me several months to clean and prep the parks for the summer season, to study the Park regulations and to decide that, despite the general lawlessness of the majority of park users at that time, that I will begin to push back. Interestingly enough, my ex-teacher self is of little use here and occasional supervisors who wander by have few useful suggestions. I remember an American park ranger I met briefly as a child and decide to model my new park ranger self after that impression: friendly, fair and firm. Of course he had a proper uniform while I have a used green jacket, he had training and a large organization that was prepared to supporting him, but I realize that this is mostly a matter of acting. Until I really have the experience to professionally fill the role, I can confidently act as if I do. It works! Several exciting years would pass before the word gets out to all the youth, party and motorcycle crowds that things had changed on Saltspring and I will have lots of technicolour evenings on patrol to talk about. “What happened last night Dad”, would be how I was greeted by my children in the morning. “Well I had to call the RCMP again last night because...”.

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.