George Littlechild: The Spirit Giggles Within
Heritage House, Victoria, 2012, $59.95 (Littlechild's art can be seen at Alcheringa Gallery, 655 Fort St., 250-383-8224)
Rodger Touchie: Edward S. Curtis - Above the Medicine Line
Heritage House, Victoria, 2010, $19.95
The Spirit Giggles Within, George Littlechild's new book, is not as frivolous as its title may indicate. The cover image is a detail of Littlechild's painting Woman, Thunderbird, Clear-Cut and presents Mother Nature, tears streaming down her cheeks, standing alone amid a congregation of stumps. "In my work," Littechild writes, "I am committed to righting the wrongs that First Nations peoples have endured by creating art that focuses on cultural, social and political injustices."
While the subject matter is serious, the artwork looks like it was fun to make, and bursts with joy. "It is my job to show the pride, strength and beauty of First Nations people and culture," he says. This book offers the background to the striking paintings that Littlechild has created, and makes a wonderful addition to my understanding of his work, which I have enjoyed and puzzled over during the past 25 years.
Littlechild is candid about his background and wants us to understand his complex and truly Canadian heritage. "As a youth," he writes, "I did not realize that I was biracial, half Plains Cree and half white. ... All I knew was that I was Indian. I was raised in foster care, a victim of the Sixties Scoop."
Each of these biographical elements, drawing on his displaced forefathers and his Edmonton childhood, as well as his Kwagulth friends in his current home in Courtenay, provide subject matter for his vivid paintings. Many centre on historic and family photographs. Now, in the artist's own words, we have an articulate description of these varied subjects and his very personal relationship to them.
Whatever the meaning of these iconic images, they attract and maintain my attention as dynamic and colourful paintings. Littlechild is a graduate of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and he certainly knows how to activate a canvas. His typical painting focuses on a face, someone real or mythical, whom he admires. Each is depicted frontally and schematically.
Often the forehead is bisected, the cheeks are adorned with bright dots, and the chin is given prominence with painted stripes. The effect is up-to-date war paint. His colours - often pink, red, yellow and blue - seem arbitrary, but in total add up to a distinctive palette. Central to each of the images are the eyes - deep pools of power and pain.
Beyond the figures, Littlechild playfully garnishes his canvas with his repertoire of symbols - horse, star, hands, hearts and so on. There is no recession in space, and the picture plane is painted, decorated, splashed and written upon with obvious pleasure and an emotional engagement.
Here lies the giggle within. Sequins, buttons, sticky stars and postcards are pasted into the mix as they come to hand. In this book, a number of digital images - computer-made collages - extend his take on half-breed culture in a new direction. He's an artist with something to say, and uses every means to say it.
As I was enjoying Littlechild's book, I found another volume from Heritage House that sets up an interesting parallel. Rodger Touchie's 2010 book Edward S.
Curtis: Above the Medicine Line is an extensively illustrated biography of the famous American photographer who, in the early 20th century, made a huge photographic study of "portraits of aboriginal life in the Canadian west."
Like Littlechild, Curtis was enthralled by the power and pain he saw in the eyes of the peoples of the plains and coast. He often portrayed them within a rather stylized background. Curtis looks in from a very sympathetic non-Native perspective, while Lit-tlechild looks out from a partially adopted and fully engaged aboriginal point of view.
Both are picture books, with extensive texts. While Lit-tlechild's book is basically an exegesis of a random gathering of paintings spanning his career, Touchie's book is a chronological biography of Curtis's life, offering dozens of illuminating anecdotes about the people Curtis met. Both offer an insight into the depredations the "dominant culture" visited on those they found here, and contribute to a better understanding and a way forward. They complement each other well.
