bill bissett

     Although Bill Bissett is an important figure in modern Canadian literature, I had not heard of him until a couple of weeks ago.  This is probably because, although I got a thorough grounding in British literature, I am much more familiar, as a French teacher, with Canadian literature in French than in English.   I told Bill that when I met him.  He says he has French ancestry and also Micmac and American, so he is not only affiliated with Canadian English speakers.  In fact, although he did not bother to say so because it is such a well known fact, he makes reading his poetry as difficult as he can, since he groups his words into clusters of sounds spelled phonetically. 

     Reading his poetry takes quite an effort, but once you have made that effort, he reveals himself as very lyrical and spontaneous.  He was young in the sixties when he started writing and he seems never to have lost that youthful freshness and exuberance.  There is something so forthright and direct about his expression of his feelings that it seems quite childlike.  Jesus said that we had to become like little children and find the kingdom of heaven within us.  I do not know if Bill subscribes to any official religion and it did not occur to me to ask him, but he did tell me that he attaches great importance to practicing meditation.

     There is no barrier to getting close to his painting.  It is very spontaneous and direct, full of strong, bright colours, especially red, yellow, blue and violet.  He even uses quite a lot of gold.  They are painted full on without any compromise, often in squiggly lines which look as if he just picks up his paintbrush and launches a direct attack on the canvas without stopping to think.  I asked him whether he paints without planning.  He said that he often meditates before painting, but without making any preliminary sketches, and if anything interrupts the flow he stops.  I felt very sympathetic to this approach.

     People are portrayed in his show but there are very few depictions of human bodies.  Instead there are a great many faces in simplified, graphic outlines.  Some bodies under the faces are reduced to masses of squiggly lines in primary colours.  His pictures are quite large, allowing for the full sweep of the painter's arm.  Some of the faces look straight at us and some are profiles looking at each other, but what he seems to prefer is to show one profile impinging on another, forming an egg shape.  Something about this makes me think of Pre-Columbian art in its directness.  He seems very concerned with communication in its most genuine form.

     His use of colour is very strong, direct and emotional.   Besides faces, there are quite a few free hand circles enclosing circles in contrasting colours.  Although these circles do not contain geometric patterns but remain empty at the centre, I take them to be mandalas, which Bill does go in for.  They also make me think of the art of Zen.  But Zen art is freer, airier, less substantial and solid. 

     He also paints what one would be obliged to call abstracts, although they do not use geometric patterns but rather resemble thick tree branches.  However the colours are not naturalistic. 

     The paintings are what first catch one's eye, but there are also a number of small black and white drawings composed of small, circular clumps attached together to form designs that lead one into fantasy.  He uses them to illustrate his poems. 

     I am very happy to have met Bill Bissett who, in spite of being famous, is so friendly, natural and unostentatious in his approach.  He seems like a special human being. 

    

"Devolve" and "Scenes from Late Capitalism"

     "Devolve" is very impressive.  Everything in it is labeled untitled.  And yet these works do seem to convey a definite message in spite of the lack of words.  When I came into NAC and saw the array of huge flamboyant pictures, mainly in red, orange and yellow, by Wayne Corliss, it made me think of Indiana Jones and The Raiders of the Lost Ark, it was so suggestive of fire from heaven.  I would like to suggest that Wayne's pictures be reproduced as illustrations to Milton's "Paradise Lost", they seem so much like poetry about Lucifer's fall from heaven.  Light and fire and an awe-inspiring violence are all suggested in swirls of very definite downward movement.  And of course the massive size of these pictures also suggest something truly grandiose. 

     Each picture is different in spite of their basic similarity, like coming again and again to varied expressions of similar emotions in music or poetry.  The same theme is touched on in different but equally glorious ways.  As in the case of Milton's poem, Lucifer, the fallen Light Bringer, is still a glorious angel in his fall.  However the final picture in this series seems to show the calm, peaceful radiance which filled heaven after the rebel angel's departure.  I may be letting myself be carried away, but the two cubes poised on their corners which introduce and conclude this series and contain a lot of dark green and dark blue could represent Lucifer ruling in Hell after serving in Heaven.

     The equally poetic works by Amber Lee Williams follow.  They are much smaller and to tend to run to shades of grey, beige and blue.  They are quite decorous although some are dark.  The poetry they evoke is private, personal and domestic, making me think of Emily Dickinson rather than John Milton.  Amber does say in her artist's statement that she has drawn on her own life experiences in her art.  She works in beeswax, with a blow torch, and says that sometimes she the medium takes over, but to me it all looks very precise.  I noticed several pictures with small light coloured circles like portholes for the artist to look through.  These pictures seemed to be painted with the inner eye, giving the viewer entry into the artist's mind.

     The second show, "Scenes from Late Capitalism" by Nathan Heuer, is quite different from anything in "Devolve."  It is drawn with a great many straight lines, in a reasoned, abstract, understated, somewhat satirical way.  There is a definition of a straight line as "the shortest distance between two points" and Nathan covers the shortest distance between constructing a motel or a factory and letting it fall down.  Nathan says that his object was to show utilitarian buildings set up and abandoned in the spirit of consumerism.  However in his drawings, they still appear intact.

     The works by Wayne and Amber might be described as abstracts, for lack of a better word, but Nathan's work, while strictly representational, is far more abstract from the emotional point of view.  The two shows are a study in contrasts.

ARIADNI HARPER: 15 YEARS - PHOTOS IN PAINT

  Ariadni Harper's large, representational images at NAC are solid and reassuring.  They carry a sense of strength, firmness and peace.  She seems to have special interest in nourishment, as witness her pictures of lobsters, both cooked and uncooked, roots and fish ready for cooking.  But she is also interested in living animals, whether goldfish darting about in a lily pond or a pug dog, and also children.

     She is interested in depicting her images, which started out as photographs before being transferred to paint, from odd angles.  One example of this is "Birthday Dinner" in which the entire canvas is filled with cooked lobsters jutting into each other with no sign of any background.  Another is "Reflections" in which the artist has concentrated on reflections in the water from the bow of a boat, while showing very little of the rest of the boat at all.

     A really disconcerting example of this approach is "My Squirrel" which shows the artist's hands holding a very detailed depiction of a creature which doesn't look very much like a squirrel at all but perhaps more like a magnification of a baby bird.  "My Squirrel" may be her pet name for it.  I was completely taken aback by the way she used representational detail in two completely different ways in the same picture so that the two things jolted you out of your expectation of a single coherent picture of recognizable reality.  She seems to have set out to overwhelm us with a realism whose ultimate effect is quite unrealistic and yet convincing.  She is not imitating Magritte at all and yet she makes me think of him.  She makes us doubt the evidence of our own eyes rather than her technical ability.  This must be the picture she is proudest of as she uses it to advertise her show.

     In the midst of all her reassuring solidity she is very inventive and goes straight to the heart of what she is depicting.  For instance, her painting of root vegetables carries the very essence of roots so that it is not simply the expression of their appearance.  They might almost be the Platonic Ideas of root vegetables.  Whatever she paints, it is the essence of that thing.  She is also quite a colorist, as we see in the edible sherbet colours of "Cotton Candy Clouds".  She makes me want to absorb her paintings into myself as part of the structure of my own body.

     These paintings are the result of fifteen years of work and represent a surprisingly coherent  experience, given that they are stretched over such a lengthy time frame.  Solid as her pictures are, the artist seems solidly settled within herself.  Perhaps this explains why she has included architectural details along with her natural objects.  Her natural objects have their own architecture, so these different things blend together quite seamlessly.  Her eye organizes reality so that we can accept it without question. 


                                                  AN APOLOGETIC POSTSCRIPT

     I see I have tried to be too clever and subtle and have actually insulted this artist by what I intended as a compliment.  It has been pointed out to me that what the artist was holding in her hands in the painting "My Squirrel" is not a baby bird at all - indeed it doesn't even look like a baby bird - but a handful of black walnuts.  She is calling herself a squirrel for collecting them.  That just shows how badly a critic can go wrong in bringing depth psychology to bear on what is simply representational and the artist is making no highfaluting claims to be anything but representational.  So please accept this apologetic postscript as a reminder that I am not infallible even if I am an academic.  In fact that turns out to be a drawback.


    

WILLIAM GRIFFITHS

                                                   
   

     At first glance I took an instant dislike to the abstracts of William Griffiths currently on show at NAC.  They simply did not speak to me, and since I like to take a sympathetic interest in the works of art I review, I really wondered if I would be able to write about him.  This attitude changed when I read his artist's statement.  The statements of young artists, struggling to make their art sound as important to other people as they feel it is to them, are often vacuous and pretentious, but William Griffiths, who is an artist of experience and even some international reputation, comes straight to the point.  He says "I am intrigued by the beauty in the natural world ( landscapes, trees, rocks ), as well as the beauty in man's manufactured masses ( metal, deteriorating structures, forgotten dwellings ).  I photograph overlooked objects, and use them as inspiration for abstract work.  I strive to recreate the moment and express what I see."

     Of course every artist I respect strives to recreate the moment and express what he sees, but William Griffiths and I have very different ideas of beauty.  My ideal of beauty is expressed by Baudelaire in his famous poem, "The Invitation to the Journey." 

"There, everything is order and beauty,
Luxury, calm and deep sensuality."

Baudelaire was thinking of Dutch interiors, for he was inviting his lover to join him in Holland, but I find the same inspiration in other works of art, for instance in the landscapes of George Sanders, with which I have filled my living room.   I cannot imagine covering my walls with the abstracts of William Griffiths, which are austere and uncompromising to the point of brutality. 

      I don't often get excited about abstracts.   I admire the abstracts of Lynette Fast, which have a playful, fantastic kind of beauty, but usually I can take abstracts or leave them alone.  As Steve Remus remarked to me, abstract art has been going on for a hundred years and it's hard to do anything new or shocking in that field, but William Griffiths manages it.  Furthermore, what really struck me when I took a closer, more objective look at his art, is that every picture is different.  That takes some doing.  Usually, once an artist - and that applies to really good artists too - has found a style that suits him, he tends to produce endless variations on the same design.  I know I do it myself.
But in the case of William Griffiths one picture seems to contradict the one next to it, even in the physical way it is put together.  Maybe that is why I found his show so abrasive at first.

     For instance, "St. Peter's" - I am not sure if this is the one in Rome or a parish church of the same name since we see it basically in a vague, misty outline - is completely different from some other pictures around it, which have distinct shapes with little knobs glued onto them.  In some pictures the definite shapes are in distinct, separate layers.  Next to "St. Peters" is a bunch of orangey pink zigzags on a blue background which justifies Steve Remus's praise of William Griffiths as a colorist, but is in opposition to the misty, semi-representational dark and light greys of "St. Peters."  Quite different again is a picture that leads off the show, "Vacant Lot."  When I first looked at it, it just looked dull and drab.  Then when Steve Remus shone a light on it, I saw an interesting jumble of blacks and reds.  Then this in turn turned out to be painted on a pliable panel of some heavy material which, when lifted up, revealed the lighter vacant lot below.  Different again is a pyramid which William Griffiths simply calls "Pyramid."  The more I looked at this how, the more interesting I found its contradictions and varieties. 

"THE KURFUFFLE OF 1902" BY FITZROY WESTFEATHER, ILLUSTRATIONS BY DOYLE O'DOYLEY

     The show that is presently on at NAC is quite disconcerting.  It consists of a number of illustrations taken from a short, unpublished book which purports to be in progress.  The book is lying around for our perusal and was originally presented to the Queen, one of whose ladies-in-waiting politely declined it on her behalf.

     Steve Remus felt I needed some help in writing a blog about this, so he told me that, in spite of the title, the book is a sendup of The War of 1812 and the author, who is using pseudonyms, is schizophrenic.  He invited me to ask the author questions about anything I hadn't understood.  The chief question I asked him is whether he feels skeptical and sarcastic about the diagnosis of schizophrenia.  I do have the impression from reading his book the author is skeptical and sarcastic about the reality around him or what modern Canadians take to be that reality.  I once asked a psychologist to define schizophrenia for me, since it obviously does not consist, as so many people suppose, of having dual personalities, and he said that the split involved was a split from reality.  I told a close friend that, sand he said "Whose reality? What reality?" which is quite a question. 

     I think that we can take it that the mentally ill patient is told that his view of reality is basically mistaken and should be corrected.  Since all we have to go by in discerning reality is our own perceptions, this news is not welcome.  Some mental patients have what is commonly called "insight," that is, they agree that their perceptions are mistaken and try to go along with having them corrected.  But since they are human beings and have egos and rely, as almost all human beings do, on telling themselves stories about themselves, even they put up a certain amount of resistance.  I have personal experience of this myself, so I know what I am talking about. 

     An extreme example of this resistance can be found in the satirical novel, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" by Ken Kesey.  I had not read it myself until I saw that the author of the work I am reviewing mentioned it, but it is so well known, if only from the movie based on it, that I hardly have to describe it. 

     Being cuckoo is such a common and derisive term for being crazy that the author I am reviewing has filled his story with cuckoo clocks that are crafted locally and have roused the inhabitants of New Amsterdam (New York) to such a pitch of fury by their total unreliability that they are descending in a body on Shipman's Corner (St. Catharines) to destroy all the cuckoo clocks.  This I take to be the chief allusion to The War of 1812, particularly as a young lady called Laura goes trekking off to get soothing help from what perhaps should have been the British Invasion, but is actually a musical group sponsored by the American Ambassador.

     Absolutely no one on either side is taken seriously by the author.  Laura Secord isn't, Harriet Tubman isn't, the "Injuns" who helped the Empire Loyalists aren't, the Americans, who include Twain and Obama, aren't.  The author is just having a good laugh all round as what we consider the reality of politics and history.  At the same time he refuses to take even the work in which he is doing this seriously.  It is certainly far less serious and convincing than "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."

     Where the illustrations are concerned, I asked the author, who is also the illustrator, if he had made a special effort to keep the illustrations simple and childlike.  I think he did, to get a deadpan effect, but he hadn't told me so. 

     I think that we can suppose that he is on the road to recovery because he is in control of the products of his imagination and reaching out to share them with other people instead of being controlled by them.  But perhaps he still has a way to go before reaching out in a way that is totally convincing.

POSTCRIPT NUMBER ONE

     I have decided to include a few musings of my own by way of a postscript to my reviews of shows at NAC.  My tenant Andrew, who has been posting my Blog for me recently, suggested I do this.  He is quite a movie fan and has been getting DVDs from the library for the two of us to watch.  It is so long since I have been to the movies that they are quite new to me.  The latest one we watched was "Fame" ( the original 1980 movie starring Irene Cara amongst others ) and Andrew asked me to review it.

    I took a lively interest in it because one of my Southern nieces attended Julliard School of Music and when last heard from was playing in the Houston Symphony Orchestra.  She had plenty of encouragement from her father, the musically gifted pediatrician Bill Bucknall, who made her her first viola.  In a similar way, my librarian nephew, Tim Bucknall, is getting  his daughter Carolyn trained for an artistic career.  He has all the more reason to do this as she is dyslexic and has no skill in handling words.  But his primary motive is to follow the trail blazed by his father, Malcolm, who opposed an adamant resistance to our father's attempts to divert him from art and shunt him off into what that man thought was a more lucrative career.  Although his father called him a fool, Malcolm had done very well for himself and even has fans in Australia.  So I was interested to see what all these lively young people in New York were doing with their talents.

    The first thing that struck me about this movie was the title "Fame."  I immediately thought of what the poet John Milton had to say on this subject. 
"Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise
( That last infirmity of noble mind )
To scorn delights and live laborious days."
All these young actors, dancers and musicians may not have scorned delights because they certainly enjoyed what they were doing to the extent of its containing the whole meaning of life for them, but they did lead most laborious days and scorned any attempt to divert them from it.  Milton speaks of the desire for fame, from a Christian point of view, as "an infirmity," a weakness, but as an English critic has remarked, although the poet Gray talked of a "mute inglorious Milton" lying in a country churchyard Milton himself would never had tolerated a life that was mute and inglorious.  Otherwise, why would he have described his poetic talent as "that one talent which is death to hide?"  Like all creative geniuses he opted for fame, although his Christian conscience told him to prefer humility.

     But part of the truth to reality of this movie is that only some, no matter what their talent, actually end up getting fame.  They risk everything to end up waiting tables, perhaps,  The movie is fiction, but as Jean Cocteau put it, this fiction is a lie that tells the truth.  This is what makes this movie supremely worth watching, unlike the remake.

PASSAGE AND RECALL BY KRYS KACZAN

                                      PASSAGE AND RECALL BY KRYS KACZAN


Restored to memory,
As the dawn breaks upon my sight,
I recover meaning
From the shadows of the night.
Memory, open the door
To so much and so more,
Hold the door open,
Now that I have awoken;
Not that I slept much at all.
I have lain awake
More than half the night,
Wondering how we gather meaning
From all the vestiges of seeming,
So we read our life like a book.
Again and again we look
For the meaning of a smile,
A tear, a laugh, a cry.
And memory, careful memory, supplies the answer why.
Open Sesame,
You have to say,
But it is no use forgetting
The word to unlock the hoard.
As the pen is mightier than the sword
Because it is able to record,
So the paint brush can do this as well.
The memory is one of sight,
Born fresh and new upon the light.
Krys, a Niagara artist, has been able to recall
Across the passage of the years,
That time when she was a child
And when she first smiled
To see the apple blossom break
Into snowy clusters to burst forth and shake
Along the gnarled and twisted boughs
Of the many orchards on her family farm.
Away and away the trees rolled
In green clumps and ridges,
Quite green again, once the blossoms fell,
After having burst forth in such an orgy of white.
She remembers it so well
That she has been able
To tell it like a fable
Of Creation on its first days,
When God turned His gaze
On the world He had just made
And saw that it was good.
That is its meaning
Contained in shape and seeming,
In every shade and hue,
Old, preserved in the mind,
And eternally fresh and kind.