John A. Macdonald gets credit for a lot of things: founding Canada, gracing the $10 bill, being the country's first and third prime minister. But he doesn't get the same level of credit for being a master artist.
OK, it's another John A. Macdonald on display at the Two Rivers Gallery, but this one is alive and still delivering visual statements the way the 19th century politician delivered oral ones.
"This is my third show in Prince George," said the Saltspring Island painter. "I had one in 1978 on the children's art wall. I had a show in 1992 at the gallery when it was at the Studio 2880 facility. And now George (Harris, gallery curator) has asked me to do this. But I'm so proud. I thought P.G. was a great place, when I was growing up there, and I think it's gotten a lot of bad press for different things over the years and its not fair or representative of the place. I think it's a hothouse of different things, especially in art. It was a great place to be from, if you were an artist."
Macdonald said he was in track and field with Daniel Lapp, who went on to become one of Canada's eminent musicians. His neighbour was wildlife art superstar Ken Ferris and although the two didn't know each other on an artistic level, Macdonald was always excited that such an acclaimed painter was so close at hand. He also got a lot of motivation from art classes as a child, because he wasn't in the art classes of a child. He said his parents often enrolled him in courses that would get cancelled due to lack of interest so he'd get bumped up to the adult sessions as a compromise. He also got to know other emerging artists like Anne Bogle and Doris Dittaro who were alongside him also learning, and went on to their own acclaim as painters.
"Being an artist has been very difficult at every stage, but I kept passing the marks," he said. "When I went to Emily Carr (University of Art + Design straight out of high school) they took 200 people of the 1,400 or so they interviewed that year. A bunch dropped out. Only about 100 graduated. And after 25 years I think I'm the only one from my cohort doing it for a living. Hardly anyone survives in it, you don't always get treated very well, and you have to learn to be versatile. I knew I wanted to be an artist, at a conscious level - when I was 10 or 11. I'd come home and draw for three or four hours every day and then do a bit of homework. If I didn't get any accolades it might have been different, but I got some accolades along the way, and that was definitely motivating for me."
Now he has had showings of his work in New York, West Hollywood, galleries all over the world, he was a courtroom illustrator for the CBC, he did trempe l'oeil art for tanks at the Vancouver Aquarium, he and wife did murals and illustrations, and he has a 10-by-10 oil painting hanging perpetually at the Bentall Centre in Vancouver, another work on permanent display at the Grand Pacific Hotel in Victoria and the Hyatt Regency in Calgary, and one painting in the collection of the Department of External Affairs in Ottawa.
"Macdonald's large expressive paintings tackle a broad range of themes, from sunbathers to road trips to museum exhibitions," said Harris, describing the exhibition that now hangs at the gallery. "There is often an air of the surreal in his paintings emphasized by his use of figurative elements that seem about to materialize. They suggest characters from memory or dreams that warble and shimmer just the other side of our grasp."
Macdonald said, by way of self-assessment, "Some are ugly in a way, some are nightmarish in a way. I call them my monstrous paintings. I'm trying to evoke cubism without doing a cubist painting."
His show at the gallery gave him a chance to clean out the inventory piling up at his home studio. He called into action some paintings he'd done and were in others' collections, so he believes this exhibition to be part reveal of new work and part retrospective.
"I have a number of different systems I engage with when I'm making work," he said. "Sometimes I'm more linear, sometimes more spontaneously. I go back and forth depending on how much coffee I've had to drink. But particularly towards the end of something, things get focused on the work to the detriment of all else. I lose my hammer, I can't find my staples, everything gets helter skelter."
He strives to make work that might seem at first to be scattered in thought, or without thematic purpose. He wants final interpretation to be up to the viewer, but he assures the audience his images do indeed have their underlying messages. He even riffed one on his name and its similarity to the historical figure in Canadian politics (the only material difference being his middle name is Alistair whereas the political figure's middle name is Alexander). The Parliament Hill fire of 1916 destroyed a famous painting of the Fathers of Confederation painted by Robert Harris. It was famously reproduced in 1967 by artist Rex Woods. Macdonald thought he would create his own response to that work, in three-dimensional form.
"It became a jokey thing to me to redo that work," he said. "I made it with junk lumber I found at the recycling place on Saltsprig Island here. Part of it came from a recycled cabinet - get it? cabinet? - and I had no plans as I worked. It just worked out and paralleled how Canada is a place of diversity, coming together of parts from all over the world, and turned into a growing thing, just like this artwork. The piece itself is not completed, it could always be ongoing. I jigsawed it out with a sawzall and George Harris said he had never received a piece at the gallery in such a state of disrepair, but I got it all back together again. The disrepair is part of the point, as it relates to the way the country is put together with passion and imperfection even though politicians try to plan things."
The exhibition is called Unnatural Histories and is on at Two Rivers until Jan. 10.
