Tag: canadian-landscapes

Ken Kirkby, A Painter’s Quest for Canada

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excerpt

“Sure. I’ll be happy to try that, but you know that while I’m doing that
I won’t be painting.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Fraser said.
“I’m not worried. I just don’t want you to get in a huff about not having
enough paintings.”
“I said don’t worry. I’ll make it worth your while.”
“That’s not what I mean. I’m happy to do it for you in return for what
you’re doing for me. And I don’t want any money for it.”
“You don’t want any money! Well, I never – a man who doesn’t want
money. So what do you want?”
“I just don’t want you to get upset when my painting production falls
off because I’m doing other things for you.”
“Of course, I’ll be upset at your lack of paintings. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“But that’s not reasonable!”
“It’s quite reasonable in light of how you present yourself – as the one
apart – the one to whom the rules don’t apply – the one who walked in
here without an appointment. There isn’t a painter in the country that
would dare do that. And, your shenanigans in the Peace River Country
– and your wanderings in the Arctic – as if you owned the bloody place.
You put yourself forward, with a quiet aloofness, as the man who can do
everything and anything, so I’m sure it won’t be any kind of a trick for
you to be in two places at the same time, doing two different things at the
same time.”
“Well,” Ken said. “That’s not how I see myself.”
“Fine. But I’m only telling you how you portray yourself.”
“If I was who you say I am, I’d be able to get my Arctic paintings and
stories out to the public, and I can’t.”
“Your Arctic paintings are the only tentative part of you. You haven’t
come to terms with that subject. You’re unsure and it shows. Everything
else you paint is clear, simple, strong and sure-footed. But don’t be concerned.
In good time, all of this will look after itself. With your confidence
and your bloody single-mindedness, you’ll work your way through it. But
right now, you’re not there and I will neither show them nor recommend
them. In that area you have a long way to go.”
That evening, he related the conversation to Helen.
She laughed. “Don’t tell me you’re surprised. You have an ego as big as
the world. You’re full of yourself. The long and short of it is that you’re
arrogant. Alex is right. You wander into a place, you give it the once-over
and all of a sudden, you’re going to fix everything, you’re in control, and
you’ll take care of it. That’s what it looks like from the outside.”
“It does?”
“Yes, it does. And what do you have in mind anyway? Where are you
heading with all this?”

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Ken Kirkby, A Painter’s Quest for Canada

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Then he reached to the side, and turned on the
tap of the small bar sink, and filled a pitcher with water. Lastly, he opened
another cupboard, lifted down two tumblers, poured a goodly measure
of whiskey into both, and splashed water into the glasses.
“This is how you and I are going to do business,” he said. “We’re going
to drink.”
‘In the middle of the day?” Ken asked.
“What’s that got to do with anything? We’re going to drink.”
“Why do we have to drink?” Ken eyed the whiskey with revulsion. “My
guess is it’s to do with, ‘get a man drunk and you’ll find out who he is.’”
“Who told you that?”
“My father.”
“I’d like to meet your father.” He took a large swallow. “So, tell me
about yourself.”
Ken told his story, while he watched Fraser drink until the bottle was
empty. He drank a bottle every day, he said, and he was as proud of that
as the fact that he was a one match a day man. He struck a match in the
morning to light his first cigarette, and every subsequent cigarette, for the
rest of the day, was lit from the stub of the last. “It takes discipline to do
that.”
“I want you to come to the gallery two or three days a week. I want to
hear your story. I want you to tell me your feelings, your thoughts, your
understanding of the universe – everything. I want to listen to you. I want
to hear you.”
For several weeks, Ken visited and talked, while Fraser downed a bottle
of rye and smoked an eternal chain of cigarettes. “You have a passion that
is white-hot and I love it,” he said. “We have all these artists around, and
they’re all limp. I want to see a man with a paintbrush in one hand and a
sword in the other. That’s you.”
One day, Ken asked Fraser why he never saw the paintings he sold to
him. “Where do you put them?”
“I’ve sold them.”
“All of them?”
Yes, all of them.”
“Oh my gosh. Well, that’s terrific.”
“You look surprised.”
“I am.”
“That’s not a very nice thing to say to me. Of course, they’re sold. So,
bring me some more. Go and paint.”
“There’s a limit to my speed.”
“I’m sure there is and I want to find it. I suspect the faster you paint the
better you get. You’re thinking too much. Don’t think. Painting isn’t about
thinking. This is not an intellectual exercise.

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Ken Kirkby, A Painter’s Quest for Canada

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While he studied, he periodically found himself distracted by the
thought of the one art gallery in Vancouver he had not approached with
his paintings – the Alex Fraser Gallery. Stories of Alex Fraser, and his
treatment of artists in his London and Vancouver galleries, had circulated
through the art community for years. Ken was angry with himself. He
was rarely afraid of anyone and had met no one in Canada yet who had
intimidated him. Alex Fraser’s reputation did.
He had heard that the man was irascible – so what? He had heard he
was powerful. Was it in his power to judge his work? What if he found it
wanting?
The only thing worse than his fear was the prospect of his disappointment
in himself if he refused to face it, so one day he screwed up his
courage, loaded his truck with paintings, and drove to 41st Avenue near
Boulevard in Kerrisdale.
He walked into the gallery, where an attractive middle-aged woman
asked if she could help him.
“Yes, I’m here to see Mr. Fraser if he’s about.”
“Mr. Fraser doesn’t see people without an appointment.”
“Oh, that’s a shame. I’m here and I have some paintings. Please, can
you ask if he’ll see me?”
She smiled and walked into a back room. A few minutes later, a small
man with slicked-back hair and icy, blue-green eyes walked out. He was
dressed in a perfectly fitted gray pinstriped suit, with knife pleats in the
trousers and shoes that shone like mirrors.
Exhaling a great puff of smoke, he lowered himself into a big armchair,
and placed two packages of Players unfiltered cigarettes and an ashtray
on the little gate-legged table beside it. Taking a fresh cigarette from one
of the packages, he lit it from the one in his yellowed fingers, and crushed
the stub in the ashtray.
Turning to the woman who had followed him out of the back room he
called, “Doreen! Doreen, I want you to tell the young man about manners.
Ask him does he understand the meaning of manners?”
“Mr. Fraser would like to know if you understand the meaning of manners,”
she said, turning to Ken.
“Indeed I do,” Ken said. “And I apologize for coming in without an appointment
but I was nervous and I managed to screw up all my courage
to come in – and here I am.”
“Doreen! Doreen, tell him he is quite right to be nervous in approaching
me. Ask him what it is that he wants.”
“I have some paintings and would like to show them to Mr. Fraser.”
“Tell the young man that I can’t bloody see his paintings, anywhere.
Where are his paintings?”

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Ken Kirkby, A Painter’s Quest for Canada

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With the Group of Seven paintings as
a template, he taught himself to paint again, working only on southern
landscapes. He took several to the owner of The Golden Key Gallery who
placed one in the window and sold it within two days. More sold during
the next few months, but then the gallery owner sold his business and
Ken was once again without an outlet.
Still, he persisted and one day, while sketching the bent shapes of driftwood,
in the dunes near the airport, it occurred to him that he could make
a profit from the abundance of wood on the beach. He purchased a pickup
truck and two chain saws, cut up the wood, wrapped velvet ribbons
around the most attractive pieces, and attached a card with his telephone
number. He left the wood on the front steps of the city’s grand homes
and within days, the orders came in. While he delivered and stacked the
firewood, he told the homeowners his stories of the Arctic, and when
they asked about his paintings, he would display the canvases he carried
in the cab of his truck. The Arctic paintings didn’t sell but the southern
landscapes were a hit.
He taught himself to become a storyteller, rehearsing every anecdote
he had, practising his tone, volume, order of words and, most importantly,
his choice of words. Where was the power of the story?
His clients listened, but showed little interest, so he made a list of every
service club in the city. Would they like a guest speaker at their next
meeting? Yes, they would like to hear about the Arctic, and so, Ken did
the rounds. Each audience contained a handful of people who showed
mild interest – the rest were bored, and often antagonistic. Sometimes
he was heckled, and a red tide of anger would creep up from his chest to
flush his neck and cheeks. Once someone shouted that he, and the rest of
the people there, resented an immigrant telling Canadians how to live in
their country and run their lives.
“That is hardly what I am doing,” Ken retorted. “I intend no disrespect.
I am simply here bringing information from a faraway place.”
His words dropped like ragged bits of paper to lie discarded on the
floor. Perhaps his stories were so outside the experience of most Canadians
that they seemed like tall tales – unlikely and unbelievable. There had
to be a better way to tell people about the Arctic but what was it?
His father told him that he was involving himself in matters that were
none of his business. He was not a citizen of Canada and until he was,
he should keep his opinions to himself. He responded that he was only
doing what he had learned at his father’s knee, in Portugal. He reminded
his father that Ken Sr. had not been a citizen of Portugal and yet he had
become deeply involved in the affairs of that country and had worked
hard to help the people. The Inuit were human beings in great distress, he
said, and he was trying to help.

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Ken Kirkby, A Painter’s Quest for Canada

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Excerpt

Ken closed his eyes, his lids like coarse sandpaper scraping against
his eyeballs. Opening them was worse. The woman tied a piece of soft
hide over his eyes and all he could do was bear the agony and wait. For
days, he travelled as a blind man, in pain and nauseated from the gentle
rocking of the sleigh. When the pain eased, he took off the hide, and the
old woman gave him a pair of goggles with a small slit, explaining that he
would have to carve them to fit his face. He carved with great care so they
barely touched his skin. Close contact would freeze them to his pores.
They had been travelling a long time, when a golden glow appeared
on the horizon. As they drew nearer, the golden fire resolved into a large
group of igloos. The dogs heralded their approach, and people streamed
out of the igloos to welcome them. The first questions were about food.
The caribou had not crossed their path this season. Did the new people
have caribou? Yes, they had much caribou and it would be shared.
A feast was prepared for the newcomers, who entered the largest igloo
in the centre of the village. In the anteroom, they took off their parkas
and beat them vigorously before entering the main room, where layers of
caribou hides were spread on ice benches that circled the room. Kidney
shaped seal oil lamps provided warmth and light. When they had eaten
and told stories, people dispersed to their own igloos. Ken and his people
crawled under many layers of hides and slept. The old woman had told
the people that Ken was a quiet Kabluna. “He is a friend,” she had said.
“He is now Inuk.”
The next morning while the men built igloos, Ken pulled out his roll of
sketch paper and drew them, as they searched for the right sort of snow
by poking deep into it with a knife or a long sharpened piece of bone.
When they found the right spot, they drew a circle and began cutting out
uniform chunks of hard-packed snow, beginning at what would become
the entrance. They lifted the blocks into place, bevelling the edges, and
chinking the spaces between with loose snow.
Ken was invited to accompany the men on the next hunt. For the Inuit,
hunting is the essence of life. The animals must be revered and not offended.
Kablunat don’t understand this, the old woman told him, but Ken
was now Inuk – no longer a Kablunat. She convinced the hunters that
Ken was an exception. They set off onto the frozen sea that was covered
with a thin layer of transparent ice that moved in front of the sled teams
like a rubbery wave. Underneath them, thousands of air bubbles bounced
and rolled.
When they spotted a seal in the water beneath them they searched for
the beast’s breathing hole and waited. When the seal was forced up to
gasp for air one of the men heaved a long spear and the water stained
crimson.

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Ken Kirkby, A Painter’s Quest for Canada

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never been a connection between those people and the Inuit and yet here was
an original seminal idea being spoken by a woman in a completely different
time and space and place. All these things were like jolts hitting me. Here I
was living with an ancient people that were speaking to me directly. This was
not something being told to me by a teacher or a relative. I was getting the
original story and it affected me very profoundly.
When the old woman finished her story, silence enveloped the igloo like
a down blanket. Quietly, Ken stood and walked outside. The sky was filled
with as many stars as Ken’s mind was filled with thoughts. In one instant,
his life had changed. Knowingly or not, the old women had answered his
question about his role in this place, and in the lives of the Inuit.
She joined him, and he linked his arm through hers. Together they
stood gazing at the sky. Icy crystals of thought invaded his heart, while an
avalanche of ideas roared through his mind.
This was that crystal moment when everything that had happened before
made sense. I now had a clear purpose. I had gone to the Arctic because of
the stories that had been told to me in that cave in Portugal, but now, I felt
an urgency to gather as much information as possible – and to disseminate
it. It was clear to me how brilliantly I had been prepared. From this moment
on, I was no longer pursuing childhood dreams. I had a white-hot fire burning
inside me.
One day, the sun reappeared over the horizon and Ken felt as though
he was awakening from a dream. For a seemingly endless amount of time,
he had lived in darkness, listening to stories and legends, and the line between
waking and dreaming had blurred. And now the sun – a cause for
celebration – a reason for feasting!
Feasting also served to remind them of their great good fortune. They
had food, warmth, and clothing. Even more important, others had been
helped and they were grateful to have been able to help them. The young
man who had amputated his toes had survived, and that was even further
cause for thanksgiving.
As the days grew longer, the polar bears came out of hibernation. One
had been spotted nearby and men quickly prepared for the hunt. Once
again, grandmother prevailed upon the hunters to include Ken. When
the dogs picked up the scent they were released from their traces, and the
men followed their high-pitched howling.
When the dogs found their quarry they surrounded it, darting in close,
and then running back, staying out of reach of its lethal claws. Finally,
overheated and exhausted, the bear collapsed. The hunters fired at the
downed body until it lay still in a pool of blood, and then they began the
enormous task of skinning and butchering it. The oldest hunter stood
back. “In my day, that’s not how we hunted bears,” he said. “When we
hunted, it was one man with a spear and one bear with his claws.

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Ken Kirkby, A Painter’s Quest for Canada

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One day the dogs heralded the arrival of a new family. They staggered
into camp with barely enough dogs to pull the sleighs. The animals’ ribs
stood out through their fur, and they lay down exhausted, their eyes
glazed. The people had to be helped from their sleds. Inside the big igloo,
they explained that they had come from far away and had left most of
their people behind. They had not found caribou this season and had run
out of food. They had no seal oil for heat. They were dying.
One young man’s toes were badly frostbitten. The elders determined
that they would have to be removed to prevent gangrene, a common condition
in the North where blood circulation to the extremities slowed.
There was no hospital – not even a doctor. The old woman said she
would select the person to perform the operation, but the young man
said he would do it himself.
The old woman stopped Ken as he turned to leave. “No,” she said.
“Kabluna wants to go everywhere and experience everything. This is part
of everything.”
The young man honed a knife and with immense concentration and
deliberation, selected the correct place to amputate the toes. One by one,
he sawed through flesh, sinew, and bone. He did not complain, cry, or
moan, taking the same impassive, measured care that he would if he had
been skinning an animal.
It shocked me. How can someone do that in that way and not fall into
paroxysms of agony? And I knew I had something to learn. I had to investigate
what pain was and how it was dealt with. I knew these people were not
superhuman but their understanding of humanness was very different from
mine and it probably came from eons of living in that environment.
These things set me on a very different track in my own head. They led me
to deal with our concepts of possible/impossible, difficult/not difficult and
so on. Nature is neither good nor bad. Nature is neither kind nor unkind.
Nature simply is. Possible and impossible are things of the imagination –
just as the pain is in our imagination. And seeing as we don’t know enough
to make these judgments, we shouldn’t even consider worrying about them.
If there is something in you to be done that is powerful then you set about
doing it and you take out all the imaginings of the dark monsters you might
meet on the road ahead. They may, in fact, never materialize. These concepts
were the golden door through which I walked toward a completely different
understanding, an understanding that has made it much more difficult for
me to live in our culture.
A council was held to decide the fate of those who had been left behind
to starve to death. Four dog sleighs were loaded with food, blankets, and
other necessities, and when it seemed that Ken was to be left behind…

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Ken Kirkby, A Painter’s Quest for Canada

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The days and nights blended one into another, and long
periods of quiet contemplation were interspersed with intense bouts of
hunting. Ken learned to breathe differently. Taking in great gulps of the
frigid air would have burned his lungs, so he inhaled slowly and measurably
through his nostrils, calculating each breath.
One day another group of people arrived at their camp with several
dog teams. Among them was a boy in his early teens. He too had recently
come from a residential school and was sullen and spoke to no one.
The group brought word that the caribou had not come their way and
they were here to join Ken’s group and hopefully share in what they had.
Ken’s group agreed to travel together and to share their abundance. They
planned to move further east, to where they hoped to find enough seals
and walrus to provide meat for the long winter.
One day before setting out, the troubled youth was particularly disrespectful
to one of the elders and was quietly chastised. He walked away
from the camp and had gone only a short distance before several people
went in search of him. No one could survive long in this cold. The wind
began to howl picking up ice crystals and blowing them across the land
and the searchers hurried back to the tents. Within minutes the world
was white; taking even one step outside the tent was certain death.
They waited in silence and Ken found himself feeling both disconcerted
and exhilarated by their patience and lack of anxiety. He was unsettled
because he had lost all sense of reference and elated because each moment
was perfect. He was alive in the now and nothing else mattered. The
long hours of silence gave Ken only one point of focus – himself. He was
meeting himself for the first time and the self he was meeting was neither
good nor evil – he just was – and Ken embraced that self with his mind
and heart, quietly blessing every event that had led him on this journey
to this place.
The white storm lasted for several days and when it ended, the people
left their tents to resume the search. There was no sign of the dogs,
just small mounds of snow scattered around the tents. When the people
nudged the mounds, the dogs emerged from their igloos, shaking the
snow off and wagging their tails furiously. They untethered several of
them to assist in the search, and their acute sense of smell led them to
another mound of snow under which they found the frozen boy.
There was no crying or wailing. They wrapped him in caribou hide
and with great effort moved rocks, that the wind had swept bare, to form
an oval. Gently, they placed the boy in the oval, placing some of his possessions
with him. Then they walked away. They had eaten animals all
their lives; in death, they completed the circle and returned their bodies
to the beasts.

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Ken Kirkby, A Painter’s Quest for Canada

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On shore, Ken’s friend took out a sharp knife and slit open the belly of
one of the big fish exposing a white strip of pure fat. He peeled it off, put
the end in his mouth and cut it off with his ulu. He passed Ken a piece of
the precious fat that melted deliciously on one’s tongue.
Ken became mesmerized by the minutiae of Inuit life. Everything they
did was alien to his previous experience. He watched one of the men
make a drum from the hide of a young caribou. Only the skin of a young
animal would do, the man explained. It was shaved clean, soaked with
water and spread out in the hot sun where it bleached white. It was then
stretched over several pieces of wood that had also been soaked, bent to
make a circle and bound together with strips of leather. The skin was
sewn on to the hoop and left out in the sun again, this time to shrink.
Watching the process, Ken understood how important each piece of
wood was to these people. Where he came from people would have used
just one piece of wood to form the hoop. Here, the circle was made of
many small pieces of wood. Trees didn’t grow on the tundra. There might
be the occasional knee-high shrub and very rarely, willows that grew waist
high in protected gullies. Every scrap of wood was hoarded and used with
care and precision.
The Inuit had to obtain additional wood from the south where the
sub-Arctic Indians lived. The old woman told Ken that there had been
an uneasy truce between the Indians and the Inuit, which was often not
honoured. Raids and massacres had taken place for years.
When the woman told stories through her son, she often said words
that she asked Ken to repeat. When he learned a new Inuktitut word, she
smiled and when he began to put words together to form a sentence, she
beamed. It was the most difficult language he had ever learned, but then
the people were like no others he had ever encountered. They didn’t make
eye contact when they spoke and they had no word for me, mine or I.
Raising your voice, particularly to children, was taboo. Children were
expected to learn by the example others set. They ate when they were hungry,
slept when they were tired, and played when they wanted to. Adult
displeasure was shown in the smallest facial expressions – the wrinkling
of a nose or a slightly raised eyebrow.
One day a young man named John joined the camp. He was about
sixteen years old and he spoke excellent English. He told Ken that he was
on holiday from the residential school in the south but he had decided
not to return. They had cut off his hair and had beaten him for speaking
his language. The old woman was his grandmother, and John told Ken
that she and others were trying to get their children back. But this was not
easy. While they needed to be stationary so that they could be contacted,
they also needed to keep moving …

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Ken Kirkby, A Painter’s Quest for Canada

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distance away observing him. When they saw that he had noticed them,
they came to sit beside him. The man said, “My mother says you are a
very quiet Kabluna.”
“Maybe all Kablunat are quiet,” he said.
The man translated for his mother and said, “She says that all other
Kablunat that she has known are noisy. They talk a lot.”
“Maybe I don’t have much to say,” he replied. “Maybe I don’t know
very much.”
When Ken questioned the old woman about the Inuksuit she told him
a story that began a long, long time ago when there were very few human
beings. They travelled over the vast land in small family groups, following
the herds of caribou that were the source of their food, their tents,
their clothing, and their utensils. They could not afford to deplete their
energy by chasing the food. Instead, they made stone human beings and
called them Inukshuk, which means, like a person or acting in the place
of a person.
The people placed the Inuksuit in V-shaped formations. The caribou
with their poor eyesight, thought the Inuksuit were hunters and so it required
only a very few people to herd them into a trap. The closer they
came to the end of the V, the closer together the Inuksuit were placed.
At the point of the V, hunters hid behind boulders while women
and children lay on the ground beside the Inuksuit. As the caribou approached,
the women and children jumped up, waved their arms, and
danced about, to give the appearance of many, many hunters. The caribou
would then stampede to the end of the V, which was usually at the
junction of a lake and a river. When the caribou plunged into the lake,
the hunters hidden behind the boulders would jump into their kayaks
and paddle after them, spearing them in the water. Then they would haul
them back to shore where the entire family, even the children, would
clean and gut the animals.
Inuksuit also took on many other shapes, the old woman said. The one
on the river’s edge where they were sitting was a fishing Inukshuk. She
knew this because it was topped with a smooth stone taken from the riverbed.
It indicted that the fishing was good here. Other shapes had other
meanings and the configurations of Inuksuit had meaning also.
To my mind, what I was hearing sounded like language but they didn’t
write the language on a piece of paper – they wrote it directly on the land.
And I was beginning to get the picture of absolute practicality. Here you
could live with minimum technology if you knew how. To think that you
could direct an entire way of life by putting a few stones together just so,
so that other people coming would be able to read the significance of these
things. The degree of sophistication of this began to seep into me and I realized
there was much to learn here. And this way of life was like the people

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