It’s been, and still is pretty hard to avoid our world in turmoil. The trade wars are having a huge effect on us as the closest neighbour of the U.S.A. The threat to our sovereignty is particularly painful to us. Enough of ranting, I want this to be about how rarely politics effects my practice as an artist.
Fourty+ years have past since I put brush to canvas, and I still hope I get it right one day. My explorations are often criticized as having no linear continuity. I hope not. Through much of my career the work I have toiled away at have been done in series. That is several paintings with a singular subject matter dominating. There may be different yet similar approaches from one piece to the next, but that is my choice. Looking at my subject is like looking at my own mind, that may change it’s view of the world from one day to the next, perhaps even slightly. Change is after all, the only ultimate truth.
I digress. There have only been only 2 one off pieces with a political theme in my creative travels, and 1 series that still remains incomplete.
In 1993 there was an event in our Yukon Territory that riled me. There was a pipeline built across the Old Crow River that impeded the migration of the old crow herd of caribou. They have travelled that route since time immemorial. Then human greed got in the way.
The second piece is a painting dedicated to Katerina Witt, a figure skater from, (at the time), East Germany that had won a gold medal at the Sarajevo Olympics. Flash forward to the Lillehammer Norway Olympics. By then her skating career was drawing to an end. Knowing that the awards were going to a new generation of skaters she performed a routine in disgust of the war in what was Yugoslavia. She goose stepped with a snarl on her face.
The 3rd and last is an ongoing series that I have been posting here called Dark Industry. There is a purposeful industry built around the trade wars that are crippling sovereign nations. It both saddens and angers me.
Old Crow River, watercolour and ink on paper, 22”x30”, 1993.