‘The best of the best’
Western Voices in Canadian Art
by Patricia Bovey
Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2023
$49.95 / 9780887550478
Reviewed by Theo Dombrowski
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Artists can speak not just with words, but with a “visual voice” — as we see in the impressive Western Voices in Canadian Art. The artists in this book are fortunate to have as their spokesperson the book’s author, Patricia Bovey, who has been, amongst other things, former director of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria and the Winnipeg Art Gallery, as well as adjunct professor of Art History at the University of Winnipeg. To their voices she adds her own in the volume’s text —a voice that is hugely knowledgeable, analytically astute, and highly appreciative.
Readers coming fresh to the topic can’t help but be struck by the sheer number of Western Canadian artists in the book and the formidable array of illustrations. Formatted more like a text book than an “art book,” it is as heavy with text as it is rich with illustrations—and for good reason. This is a book with a mission. And that mission can only properly be felt by reading as well as viewing: to “hear” a voice—whether a visual voice or verbal one—we need to know who is speaking, how they are speaking and, perhaps most important for Bovey, what they have to say.
Many readers, especially those with favourite BC artists, will be curious to know who is represented here. First, they have to accept that this is not an encyclopaedia or dictionary. Although Bovey does use the word “compendium” at one point, as she makes amply clear in her preface, she couldn’t even begin to be fully inclusive. Considering as a principle of selection that an artist be “leading edge,” she also weighs in balance the terms “seminal,” “contribution,” and “influence.” Still, she clearly regrets having to exclude many substantial artists.
As a result, readers may find it most satisfying to treat the book as they would a curated exhibition—that is, a limited collection that depends on selection, grouping, and channeling to give the whole shape and purpose. This is particularly the case because Bovey makes no attempt to pin down what epitomizes the art of Western Canada, either inclusively nor exclusively.
While readers may be grateful that Western Canada, British Columbia included, has been home to legions of accomplished serious artists, in order to appreciate what Bovey has achieved here, they will also have to lay aside any concerns that some artists have no substantial presence—among British Columbian artists, for example, Liz Magor, Roland Brenner, Stan Douglas, Shawn Shepherd, Don Harvey, Steven Shearer, Charles Campbell, Anthony Thorne, Colleen Heslin, Mary Fox and more. Perhaps British Columbia’s most successful painter, wildlife artist, Robert Bateman, is given a respectful nod, but little more. On the other hand, British Columbians may well feel particular interest in such artists who do appear extensively—and repeatedly—as Emily Carr, Jack Shadbolt, Carol Sabiston, Maxwell Bates, Myfanwy Pavelic, Pat Martin Bates, and Fred Varley.
Rather than focusing just on well-known artists, though, Bovey makes a point of championing some underrated artists. Thus, for example of Richard Ciccimarra, she says, “…his work received neither the attention or acclaim it was due”. Likewise, she praises the “relatively unknown sculptor” Robert de Castro, whose “sensitive work has remained largely unrecognized.”
As an insight into key principles driving the book, it is illuminating to consider the historical and cultural timeline Bovey provides at the end of the book. Appropriately, she recognizes the value of international acclaim: she lists the many Western Canadian artists who were selected for the prestigious Venice Biennale. This is as might be expected. What is truly striking, though, is that, in identifying peaks in Canadian art history (most of them related to galleries or institutions) she singles out with a full range of significant dates only Emily Carr.
Importantly, however, she also includes two historic milestones. First, The University of Manitoba School of Art’s acquisition of Robert Houle’s ‘Residential Schools Series’, and, second, the commission from the Canadian Museum of Human Rights given to Indigenous blanket maker Rebeca Belmore. It is equally stirring—and illuminating—to see at the front of the book, that the author gives special thanks to the Hunt family of the Kwakwaka’wakw Nation for adopting her as a family member. These particular inclusions point to the fact that Bovey’s appreciation of Indigenous artists, across time and across genres, is one of the most powerful aspects of the whole book.
Indeed, “appreciation” is probably the best word to describe the author’s most prominent tone. She herself uses the word “celebration” but most often the reader is likely to be struck by a penetrating, detailed, and empathetic sense of connection with an artist or artwork, the qualities that suggest real appreciation. Many writers on the arts feel it important to illuminate the difficult side of otherwise admirable artists whose careers go through a slump, for example, or who, at times, produce problematic or even inferior work. Bovey, however, keeps our eyes trained on the best of the best.
The fact, indeed, that Bovey writes with a refreshingly personal sense of appreciation, points towards one of the salient features of this curated exhibition—namely, the fact that just as artists may have “visual voices,” Bovey herself has a distinctive voice. Part of that, of course, is implicit in the selections she makes, but part, too, is explicit in her personal comments. The “voice” in this book is very much not that of a depersonalized authority such as we might expect in an encyclopaedia or dictionary.
On the contrary. Indeed, the book is particularly engaging simply because the writer has been so directly and personally involved with many of the artists. Through direct contact, she has managed to elicit not just “visual voices” but also verbal voices, all the more notable because many artists are infamously non-verbal—or worse. The book is alive with quotations not just from gallery owners and critics as we might expect, but from artists themselves—about their techniques, their purposes, and their deeper visions. Says Aliana Au, for example, “I usually have some sense, but part way through let it go so the painting leads me. I start without necessarily knowing where it is going so it is a ‘journey.’”
Thus, the vitality and freshness of the author’s voice is also enlivened by her including specific mentions of, for example, her visits with ceramicist Robin Hopper, an “email to me” from Phyllis Serota, or her time with multimedia artist Bill Reid: “[T]he hours I spent with him in his Granville Island studio in the 1980s were memorable.”
Even more distinctive, though, are the few points when Bovey, without hesitation, praises an artist. Thus, she says of Esther Warkov’s three-dimensional House of Tea, that it is a “masterpiece.” Two of her comparatively rare personal testaments are especially affecting: first, is her apparently deep sense of connection with Varley’s self-portrait Mirror of Thought. It is “in my view, especially important in the annals of Canadian art.” Second, is what she says of Indigenous artist Robert Houle’s large painting Sandy Bay: it “became for me one of the most significant works in Canadian art.”
Almost the opposite of Bovey’s role as a subjective, personal guide is the role she fulfils as the source of seminal objective knowledge. While in some cases this comes in the form of national or regional achievements and recognitions, in others it is international in scope.
However, she selects as her chief method of giving a “voice” to her artists, paying penetrating attention to individual artists. At some points the knowledge is technical. Who could have known, for example, what lies behind the striking effects achieved by Don Proch? Bovey lets us in on the secret. “To achieve the pencil-like subtle gradations of grey in the black and white version of Horizon Detail, 1974, for instance, he used roller-bearing graphite, which he got from a local automotive machine shop, and mixed it with bronzing varnish.”
Technical secrets can be fascinating, but more important to the heft of the book is what she occasionally reveals about the personal life of the artists flowing into their achievements. Far from sensationalistic, though, such intimate details she shows to be organically interconnected with the art. Myfanwy Pavelic’s haunting self-portraits, for example, as the author reveals, are all the more stirring when we learn that the painter suffered from “serious health issues” and “protracted periods of isolation.” The artistic results, though, are what matter. “Her work exudes dignity, beauty, honesty, and depth of emotion: joy, sadness or despair.”
This final sentence epitomizes exactly the kind of analysis and interpretation that is a more vital element in Bovey’s voice than the connected facts. Indeed, it is when she is leading her readers from work to work, casting light on details, stirring her readers to see, really see, that she seems most like a curator of a vast exhibition. Take, for example, what she says of Ivan Eyre’s Yell: “The kneeling male figure…conveys a sense of urgency. His characteristic vest, large boots, mitts, and headdress suggest unassailable power….” The work “looks to the future, not the past. Its northern orientation symbolically enhances that forward look.” “Yell sounds a call of concern, not victory.”
Most intriguing about this particular analysis, though, is that it is not accompanied by an illustration. While the book has hundreds of illustrations, nearly all analyzed in this level of interpretative detail, many works, like Yell, do not. Obviously faced with practical constraints, the author has chosen to create in the mind’s eye, through words, what she could not illustrate. This is not the whole story, however. Nearly all such works—like Yell—or, at least the artists behind the non-illustrated works, can be found online. In fact, this inducement for the reader to look beyond the book is, arguably, one of its chief values.
Although this kind of close interpretation may be the centre of Bovey’s analytical writing, it is only part. On a much broader scale she gives her readers much to think about. Consider, for example, what vigorous ideas she spins around even a mundane subject: “Roads are connections and divisions and present both opportunities and dangers. Defining communities, they exude beauty and strength, as well as cities’ ugly and less visible sides.” Even of a standard genre, like portraits, where we might think nothing needs to be said, Bovey makes us think again: “Portraiture is the art of studying people and conveying in visual form what it is to be human… “Portraits are both subjective and objective, revealing the artist’s feelings, connection and perceptions with and of the sitter.”
Such reflections readers might (or might not) expect in this kind of book. What they are less likely to expect are some of Bovey’s most powerful reflections. These are powerful exactly because they connect intimately with the way that the writer has organized her book. First, she takes readers through the history, not just of key movements, from colonization to the present, but also through accompanying genres, both traditional and, like performance art or videos, radically non-traditional. Second come the “themes.” Predictably, landscape (this is, after all, Canada) looms large. Following are “urbanization,” then what Bovey calls “abstraction into the spiritual” and, next, portraits—linked to what she calls “inscapes.” Think: Pavelic’s self-portraits.
Last, and, we sense, most vital is the section she calls “Visual Voices and Societal Concerns.” In this section, the same kind of provocative reflections that Bovey employs throughout the book, become elevated into something more resonant. Consider what the author says of the single year, 2020: this, she argues, “saw the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and the worldwide Black Lives Matter movements being added to the issues of Indigenous and minority discrimination, reconciliation, mental health, domestic violence, trauma, environmental controversies, and climate change.” Next turn to a powerful statement like this: “The residential schools spanning generations, are a truly black mark in Canada’s history.” The point, surely, is clear.
Passionate as Bovey may be about many of the artists’ concerns earlier in the book, her passionate voice—studied, steady—achieves its high point in this last part of the book. It is hard not to feel that it is in this final chapter that the author feels an overriding sense of appreciation for artists who tackle social and environmental injustice: “…as a society, we must listen to the prescient concerns conveyed by artists.”
Starting her final chapter with environmental issues, she builds to human rights, to post-colonialism, and, with increasing intensity, to residential schools, and, finally, to war and conflict. The chapter begins with Emily Carr’s Odds and Ends, with its haunting depiction of clear-cut logging. It ends with Ukrainian Canadian Michael Boss’s Ukrainian Kozaks send a letter to Putin: the war in Ukraine permeates her final words. Between the two, Bovey implants raw and stirring evocations in visual form of what she says in her epilogue: “The art of Western Canada’s creators needs to be seen and heard, and their messages acted upon.” It is not often that we conclude a book about artistic achievement with a call to action. But, then, this is not an ordinary art book.
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Theo Dombrowski grew up in Port Alberni and studied at UVic and later in Nova Scotia and London, England. With a doctorate in English literature, he returned to teach at Royal Roads, UVic, and finally Lester Pearson College in Metchosin. He also studied painting and drawing at Banff School of Fine Arts and UVic. He lives at Nanoose Bay. You can visit his website here. [Editor’s note: Theo Dombrowski has reviewed books by David Gurr, Carla-Jean Stokes, Gail Sidone Šobat, Alan Twigg, Ian Williams, and Jason A.N. Taylor for The British Columbia Review.]
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster