We now get to see what Jim Savage sees in his community development mind.
As one of this region's longest-serving personnel in the field of public-private economic collaboration, Savage has trained his mind to extrapolate from the past, analyze the present, and spot opportunities for the future.
He sees things a certain way. His job is to have a vision for the Cariboo and then attract the people and the funding to that vision. Hotels, casinos, bio-mass, housing, he has delved into every corner of community life to bring places like Quesnel and Wells the social infrastructure they need.
All the while there lurked in the back of his mind the aspiring artist he was in his youth, pacing the cage, waiting to sidestep the spreadsheets and ledgers and dance on the canvas.
On Thursday night, Prince George gets to see what this subliminal artist was dreaming about all along. Savage is the profiled artist this month in the feature gallery at Studio 2880.
His solo exhibition is called Illuminations and what it spotlights the most is the slightly tilted, slightly off-kilter sense of reality that gently warps his view of life.
The genre Savage paints in is known by artists as "magical realism" or sometimes "marvelous realism" in which common scenes are depicted but with a slightly impossible quality to them. Maybe the scene is a tree, but the leaves might be blue or the trunk may taper downward, or the branches be human arms, anything to jolt the viewer into realizing that all is not what it seems.
"Intellectually it is quite challenging," he said, since the paintbrush has to wedge open the filters of the mind - the ones that we all tend to apply when we translate the fantastical contents of our minds into expressions of realism. We customarily edit realism into our speech and our actions. This form of painting wants to show what's really going on in our brain.
"I feel I know next to nothing about art history and I'm starting to learn about that, about magical realism and those strands of what art is and where it's come from," Savage said. "I'm not attracted to abstract. I don't see the point though, either, of doing something as a painter that a photographer can do with the press of a button. I think the point of many different art forms is to manipulate reality, to be subversive with realistic scenes. That's what magical realism allows for."
The dreamlike wafts of Bruce Cockburn's music triggered this artistic bent. When Savage was a young man living in Toronto, the dweller in the apartment below frequently played a certain instrumental guitar song. Savage had never heard it before.
He eventually worked up the courage to go downstairs and knock on the door. The tenant was happy to talk to him about the Cockburn album Night Vision, the classic instrumental track Islands In A Black Sky, and the accompanying album art - a painting entitled Horse And Train by Alex Colville.
Savage was almost instantly hooked, on the music and the art. The two shared a stylistic connection, and it was a short bridge to his own consciousness.
Less short was his route to the easel. He was on a career path, and even though he left Toronto for a return to hometown Quesnel at - not coincidentally - the time he wanted to buy his first house, he did not have the flexibility in his life to devote himself to art.
So it fell to sleep in his mind, but it was hibernating, not dead. At the apex of his wheeling and dealing - ownership stakes in a casino startup in Wells as well as the Wells Hotel, plus all the economic development work on his desk in Quesnel - the artist deep within thrashed in bed and yawned out of slumber.
"We had a real tiger by the tail with those projects and I was essentially working full time on those ventures in Wells and I had a full-time job in Quesnel in the community development field. It was a time of intense stress in my life," he said.
He happened to spot an ad for art classes.
The teacher was Samara Carrier, and when Savage acted on the impulse to walk through her door and ask her introductory questions about restarting his art pursuits, he soon discovered he was shaking the hand of fate.
"She has taught probably thousands of people in her 50-year teaching career, and it turns out she was raised in Wells. Her dad was the mine manager in the '40s or '50s. She is also a cousin of a good friend of mine in Wells. I didn't know any of this when I met her in 2004."
What he found was an urge to paint too strong to resist. He was burning out from all the business in his life, so it was a healthy transition to slow that down and fill those voids with the catharsis and expressive flushing that art gives the soul.
"I frankly got a little bit scared," he said.
"I immediately took to it, but I knew I could not commit to it until I dealt with all these other matters in my life."
By 2012, that had been accomplished to the point that he could have his first art show. Then, this past fall, he joined the group sales room at Studio Fair in Prince George. It went so well for him that he has now applied for a full solo booth on the main floor of the region's largest annual show and sale.
The organizers of Studio Fair, the Prince George Community Arts Council, spotted his talent and his ambition. They struck a deal to host this exhibition of new Jim Savage works. On Thursday night at 7 p.m. he will personally unveil the show with an artist's talk and reception.
His Illuminations will then hang at Studio 2880 (2880 15th Ave.) until July 3.
