We spend much of our lives at work – but surprisingly little gets written about what makes work both one of the most exciting and most painful of all our activities.
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work is an exploration of the joys and perils of the modern workplace, beautifully evoking what other people get up to all day – and night – to make the frenzied contemporary world function. With a philosophical eye and his characteristic combination of wit and wisdom, Alain leads us on a journey around a deliberately eclectic range of occupations, from rocket science to biscuit manufacture, accountancy to art – in search of what make jobs either fulfilling or soul-destroying.
The book amounts to a celebration and investigation of an activity as central to a good life as love – but which we often find remarkably hard to reflect on properly. As Alain points out, most of us are still working at jobs chosen for us by our sixteen-year-old selves. Here is the perfect guide to the vicious anxieties and enticing hopes thrown up by our journey through the working world.
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work contains over a hundred original images specially commissioned from the great documentary photographer Richard Baker.
Chris Charlebois, Slow Current II, oil on canvas, 42 x 42 inches, 2009
Born in 1952 in Arvida, Quebec, Chris Charlebois has spent most of his life in British Columbia. He attended the Vancouver School of Art and his painting instructors were Don Jarvis and Bruce Boyd. Since then his work has been collected by numerous private and corporate collectors.
Charlebois is very active in the local art community, and has successfully participated in many live art auctions. Chris also teaches art at the Steveston Village Phoenix Art Workshops.
Inspired by the west coast environment his work is evolving into a kind of nature- based abstraction. Charlebois believes that his work must be an honest investigation and at times uses a sketch or photo only as a brief reference. But the original impression in the mind’s eye is always more truthful.
He seeks the beauty in nature that is constant and found everywhere, even in a clump of grass by the roadside or a nondescript bush near a ditch. Charlebois says there seems to be a point of departure where the painting ceases to be simply a copy of the subject but takes on a meaning and importance as itself. ” I cannot compete with nature, but I can attempt to add to it.”
” My goal as a painter has always been to simply express. Nature is the source of that expression. I look for the gesture in nature. It is this dominant line of movement and structure that all the elements in a painting will be built upon. By taking apart (abstracting) the components of the subject, then rebuilding making systematic logical choices a result of clear expression can be attained.”
“From nature I find direction. Colours and lines seen or felt, are expressed as infinite notes, harmonies, patterns and rhythms. From these references my paintings are formed.”
Chris Charlebois: New Works
SEPTEMBER 16 – 30, 2009, Kurbatoff Art Gallery, 2427 Granville Street,
Vancouver B. C
Chris Charlebois, Slow Current II, oil on canvas, 42 x 42 inches, 2009
Born in 1952 in Arvida, Quebec, Chris Charlebois has spent most of his life in British Columbia. He attended the Vancouver School of Art and his painting instructors were Don Jarvis and Bruce Boyd. Since then his work has been collected by numerous private and corporate collectors.
Charlebois is very active in the local art community, and has successfully participated in many live art auctions. Chris also teaches art at the Steveston Village Phoenix Art Workshops.
Inspired by the west coast environment his work is evolving into a kind of nature- based abstraction. Charlebois believes that his work must be an honest investigation and at times uses a sketch or photo only as a brief reference. But the original impression in the mind’s eye is always more truthful.
He seeks the beauty in nature that is constant and found everywhere, even in a clump of grass by the roadside or a nondescript bush near a ditch. Charlebois says there seems to be a point of departure where the painting ceases to be simply a copy of the subject but takes on a meaning and importance as itself. ” I cannot compete with nature, but I can attempt to add to it.”
” My goal as a painter has always been to simply express. Nature is the source of that expression. I look for the gesture in nature. It is this dominant line of movement and structure that all the elements in a painting will be built upon. By taking apart (abstracting) the components of the subject, then rebuilding making systematic logical choices a result of clear expression can be attained.”
“From nature I find direction. Colours and lines seen or felt, are expressed as infinite notes, harmonies, patterns and rhythms. From these references my paintings are formed.”
Chris Charlebois: New Works
SEPTEMBER 16 – 30, 2009, Kurbatoff Art Gallery, 2427 Granville Street,
Vancouver B. C
Emily Carr, Langford, 1939 oil on paper mounted on plywood 57.2 cm x 86.7 cm The Art Gallery of Alberta Collection, gift of the Ernest E. Poole Foundation 68.6.16
By Michael Cox
The Vancouver Art Gallery has more than 200 works by the west coast artist Emily Carr (1871-1945) in their permanent collection, and it is a rare day when they don’t have at least one room displaying her paintings or drawings. She is, arguably, the best known of early twentieth century British Columbia artists. Running concurrently with this summer’s show of Rembrandt, Vermeer and other Dutch Masters, is the third-floor exhibit, Two Visions: Emily Carr and Jack Shadbolt (to September 13), which contrasts the two local artist’s interpretations of the natural world and First Nations totemic art.
Emily Carr is best known for her iconic paintings of dark forests inhabited by the totem poles and long houses of the first peoples of the Pacific northwest: the Salishan, Nootka, Kwakiutl, Nisga’a, Nuxalk, Heiltsuk, Haida, Tsimshian, and Tlinglit nations whose artistry was once dismissed, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as vestiges of a “savage” culture. It was not only the famous totem poles these people created, but carvings, bentwood boxes, masks and jewellery: now highly collectible, expensive, and revered world-wide as “Canadian” aboriginal art.
Carr’s interest grew organically from her passionate connection to British Columbia. Even after studying art in San Francisco and Paris, after living in London, she defined herself as a west coast artist, and returned again and again, where she found creative sustenance not in the approval of others, but in the isolated villages along the B.C. coast. It was from physically arduous visits to native settlements that Carr created her most mature, affecting work. Her paintings have become as much a part of the Canadian artistic identity as those of the Group of Seven.
But Carr was only recognized by the artistic community later in her life; as a woman, as a west coast artist, and as an unmarried eccentric, Carr was at a disadvantage in the male-dominated academy. Nevertheless, she persisted in both her painting and writing about her life and life’s work in such well-known books as Klee-Wyck and The Book of Small, neither of which has ever gone out of print.
In Penguin Canada’s new series Extraordinary Canadians, Lewis DeSoto, himself an artist and writer (A Blade of Grass), has crafted a new and accessible biography of Emily Carr.
Like DeSoto, I was, at one time, less interested in Carr’s seemingly impenetrable paintings of the temperate rain forest I thought I knew so well.
For DeSoto, it was a visit to a native village that shook him from his complacency about her shadowy art; for me, rather, it was the very institution which had, earlier, bored me with its seemingly endless Carr retrospectives. In 2002 the VAG put her alongside Georgia O’Keeffe and Frida Kahlo; and in 2006 they curated a show which toured Canada, Emily Carr: New Perspectives on a Canadian Icon (the book is available from the VAG store).
Like DeSoto, I experienced a familiar artist with new insight, and began to appreciate her exceptional talent. She was every bit deserving of the accolades later given the Group of Seven. Had she been painting in Paris, her works would today be hung alongside Cézanne and van Gogh, DeSoto claims.
It was only in 1927, when she was fifty-six, that Emily Carr’s reputation was justly recognized, when the National Gallery of Canada (in Ottawa) had an exhibit of west coast art, both native and modern. Here, Carr not only had some of her work shown (more than any other artist), and was asked to design the cover of the exhibition brochure, but she was introduced to contemporaries A.Y. Jackson and Lawren Harris among others.
It was only then, so late in her artistic life, DeSoto writes, when Emily saw the works of the Group of Seven and could talk with artists who were similarly trying to reinterpret the Canadian landscape that “she was struck by how much their intentions echoed hers. She, too, had been striving to define her experience in relation to a unique, sparsely populated landscape, and to find an original style in which to paint it.”
Few liked the modernist approach of these artists, but they were determined to forge their own styles, and Carr, although outside the group socially and geographically, found solace in the knowledge she was not alone.
DeSoto’s biography is highly engaging if at times simplistic; it reads as if written for a high-school level reader (which, perhaps, is the intent of series editor John Ralston Saul): “Victoria was growing into a small city. Automobiles were appearing among the horse-drawn carriages.”
That said, the plain language makes for a fast read. If all of the biographies in this Penguin series are as digestible as DeSoto’s Emily Carr, we have no excuse for not learning about many of the extraordinary Canadians whose lives have, until now, remained obscure to the average reader, turned off by fusty history classes or too-thorough, six-hundred page biographies.
[Penguin Canada’s Extraordinary Canadians series includes biographies of: Lester B. Pearson; Stephen Leacock; Nellie McClung; René Lévesque; Norman Behtune, Pierre Elliott Trudeau; Marshall McLuhan, L.M.Montgomery and others, twenty subjects in all.]
Detail from Vanitas Still Life (Skulls on a Table); Aelbert Jansz van der Schoor c. 1660
At the Vancouver Art Gallery throughout the summer is a thought-provoking mix of works: 17th century Dutch still life paintings of skulls and flowers, Reece Terris’ stacked rooms organized by decade starting with the 1950’s installed in the gallery’s rotunda, and Andreas Gursky’s images of excessive human activity, topped off by the large-scale image of an abstracted Nascar-style race track in Bahrain’s desert, three riffs on an old artistic subject–the vanitas.
Winston Churchill, Sunset over the Atlas Mountains, 1935
Winston Churchill, excerpt from Painting as a Pastime, 1950:
Painting is complete as a distraction. I know of nothing which, without exhausting the body, more entirely absorbs the mind. Whatever the worries of the hour or the threats of the future, once the picture has begun to flow along, there is no room for them in the mental screen. They pass out into shadow and darkness. All one’s mental light, such as it is, becomes concentrated on the task. Time stands respectfully aside.
David Milne invented and mastered the colour drypoint technique at the beginning of the 20th Century. John Hartman revived and sought to explore the technique some forty years later. Though their lives only overlapped for three years, the combination of each artist’s work demonstrates adept skill and insight into a lesser known primaking medium through the subjects they have chosen to explore, document and capture.
Invention and Revival: The Colour Drypoints of David Milne and John Hartman was curated by Rosemarie Tovell with an essay by Anne-marie Ninacs. The exhibition has been organized and circulated by Carleton University Art Gallery.
Artist tour and talk with John Hartman – Sunday, June 7, 4:30 pm
Curator tour and talk with Rosemarie Tovell – Sunday, July 19, 4:30 pm
This fabulous exhibition is part of Vancouver’s first Drawn Festival.
When was the last time you heard someone (probably young, probably female) say, “Oh my God!” about something, anything, they heard or were relating to someone else? It would be an understatement sans pareil to say it is not an uncommon expression these days. But because of its ubiquity, it has perhaps lost its capacity to truly express astonishment.
“The basic way I compose is to take a cluster of sound, like a handful of paint. First of all I give it some kind of rhythmic impetus, and then I let it go forward. There’s a sense of a vehicle travelling forward across terrain.” John Adams, composer, in an interview with Robert Davison
This fabulous piece is by the American composer, John Adams, who in his earlier work used to make sparer, less melodic music, until he discovered how rewarding it was to create sounds that made people feel something. The rest is history, including great pieces such as Short Ride in a Fast Machine, Violin Concerto, and Shaker Loops, of which this rather raw video is an excerpt. His early influence was John Cage, but as his work matured it became more rhythmic and emotional (one could say Romantic) with close links to the work of Terry Riley and Steve Reich.
This video recording, by the way, is of young musicians, none of whom are over 18 years of age.
You can listen to John Adams talk about his work and his influences here.
If Jonathan Adler had listened to his pottery professor at art school, he would have quit being an artist and got a job as a lawyer. Luckily for us, he didn’t take her advice. Instead, he parlayed his wacky and shameless ideas into a hugely successful design career.
Everyone else may have already seen this, but since I don’t have cable, I just discovered Adler and his book My Prescription for Anti-Depressive Living in the library on the weekend. Along with images of his delicious and uplifting designs, he peppers humorous anecdotes and strong opinions throughout the book. Below is an excerpt with Adler’s take on the contemporary artworld today, and his philosophy on design.
“When I look at the artworld today, I get pretty depressed. I think that somewhere along the way, people were tricked into believing that art has to be incomprehensible and skill-free and ugly. I totally reject that idea. I want my work to be communicative and beautiful and, I hope, impactful on an emotional level before an intellectual level.”
Jonathan and his talented window-dresser husband live happily together with their dog, Liberace.
We spend much of our lives at work – but surprisingly little gets written about what makes work both one of the most exciting and most painful of all our activities.
