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The Flash cove

Posted in Bruce Byfield, comfort reading, George Macdonald Fraser, Harry Flashman, historical fiction, Personal, tagged , , , , , , , , on June 12, 2010| Leave a Comment »

When I’m stressed, I take refuge in the comfort of reading. I have a music player, but somehow it provides less shelter than the right sort of book: One that’s intelligent, but light, with occasional outbursts of humor. And I can think of no books that fit this description better than George Macdonald Fraser’s Flashman series. I’ve read each of the twelve books many times, and they never fail to provide a refuge.

The conceit of the stories is that Harry Flashman, the bully from Tom Brown’s Schooldays, grows up to be Sir Harry Flashman, VC, one of the great Victorian heroes – all without changing his basic nature. Despite his public acclaim, he remains a bully, a coward, and a lecher. But through a combination of outrageous luck and fast-thinking, only he knows what he is really like.

Flashman, his first adventure, sets the formula. At the end of the book, the young Flashman is in a fort about to be overrun by Afghani hillfolk. Thinking his life might be spared if he surrenders, he hauls down the flag, but, before he can do more, he collapses. Just then, the relief column arrives, and, finding him collapsed over the flag, concludes that his last thought was to defend that symbol of his country. When he awakes, he is a hero with the thanks of Parliament. This mixture of cowardly motivation and fortunate appearances continues throughout the series, broken only by his thought that he might show courage to save his wife – a thought so unsettling to him that he prays that he will never have to choose between saving her and himself.

Flashman is last seen as an old man in Mr. American, being driven in a car through the crowds towards Buckingham Palace on the eve of World War One. The crowd assumes that he has been summoned to consult with the king, but, for Flashy, the palace is simply the nearest place that he can relieve his ancient bladder.

This basic conceit is intertwined with the ingenuity with which Fraser inserts Flashman into historical events. The result is a kind of prototype for Forest Gump; for instance, during the Battle of Balaclava, Flashman manages to stand with The Thin Red Line, and to charge with both the Heavy and the Light Brigades, troubled by flatulence all the way. In similarly outrageous way (but without the flatulence), Flashman is inserted into every major event in British and American history between 1840 and 1901, and meets everyone of note from Queen Victoria and the Duke of Wellington to Abraham Lincoln, Geronimo, and John Brown. In between, he has affairs with every woman from Lola Montez to the future Dowager Empress of China, proud to be “one who instinctively fornicates in the jaws of death.”

And just to add to the veracity, Fraser is forever mentioning things like an obscure figure in a historical painting who resembles Flashman’s known likenesses. He also includes copious footnotes that compare Flashman’s accounts with the primary sources, explaining where it agrees and doesn’t agree, and where it sheds new light upon events. The truth is, Fraser is a history buff, and the series is largely an excuse to exhaustively research events.

Later books in the series become a little too predictable, but these basic principles are enough to carry even the weakest Flashman book cynically along. In contrast to the bombast of the Victorian Age, in Flashman’s world view, there are no heroes – only conventional, hypocritical cant or dangerous madmen like James Brook, the White Rajah of Sarawak, and George Armstrong Custer, whose charisma drives others to do what they would never otherwise consider.

Flashman’s view, of course, is as false as the one it is meant to deflate, but, like Falstaff, his cowardice becomes a sort of humanism. Is the defense of an invaded country really worth going to war for? He asks several times through the series. All that will happen is that more people will die, and for Flashman, nothing (with the possibly exception of his undeserved reputation) is as important as everyone staying alive at all costs. Frequently, Flashman does act and speak in ways that horrify a modern person, but what mainly comes through is a sort of anti-authoritarianism based on a defence of the creature comforts of life.

At its best, the setup has endless comic opportunities, including variations on the formula. For instance, at first, Flashman’s reputation is preserved only because – like those who discover Superman’s secret identity – those who learn what he is really like fortuitously end up dying before they can discredit him. Later, though, when he breaks down, blubbering and pleading for mercy, his opponents believe it is a ruse, because they cannot believe that such a famous soldier is really a coward. Even if he collapsed on the floor, Flashman says at one point, people would only believe his behavior was a joke in questionable taste.

As if all this wasn’t enough, Fraser himself is the master of the deadpan. For instance, he has Flashman describe his future mother-in-law (in a beautifully Wodehousian phrase) as having “all the faded beauty of a vulture.” Similarly, in Flashman’s Lady, his wife Elspeth features as a kind of Victorian Gracie Allen, with her own brand of illogic and a supreme obliviousness to what is happening around her. In her diary, she notes “there is no Emergency beyond the Power of a Resolute Englishwoman, especially if she is Scotch.”

My only wish is that Fraser had written faster, or lived longer. As it is, while many parts of Flashman’s life are throughly documented, we never do learn how he managed to be a major in the Union forces one year of the American Civil War, and a colonel in the Confederate army the next year (although Abraham Lincoln seems to have had something to do with it). Nor do we know, as Fraser once hinted, whether Flashman really did play a role in the Riel Rebellion.

But never mind. Like many of my favorite TV series that have been canceled before their plots were wrapped up, the Flashman series leaves me grateful for what we have. In times of stress, Flashman can distract me with a detailed view of the nineteenth century and clever writing, and make me laugh at the same time. What more could I ask?

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Waiting in emergency

Posted in Bruce Byfield, emergency rooms, emergency wards, hospitals, medical system, Personal, tagged , , , , , , on June 11, 2010| 1 Comment »

Unexpectedly, I spent the past afternoon in the emergency ward of the local hospital. This was at least my twentieth time at emergency since 1995 (only once for me), but I’ve never managed to warm to such places. Spending time in emergency admitting is just a slow dread that leaves me feeling half-suffocated.

I suppose nobody welcomes a visit to a hospital, unless a birth is involved. If you are the one with an injury or illness, you remember it as a place where you were wrapped in your pain and discomfort like a second skin. If (as I usually am), you are there to lend moral support, then you slowly drain yourself while trying to provide comfort, all the time hoping that the patient gets some relief, and possibly hoping that, the trip is not fatal.

You might draw some support if you at the hospital in a group, but, even then, others can do only so much to help you. You are alone with your fears in a hospital in a way that you rarely are in any other place in modern industrial culture – all the more so because we are a death-denying culture, and a hospital doesn’t leave much room for denying.

But even if the emotions were not apt to be so intense at a hospital, the way they look and are run reduce your chances of relaxing or finding a moment’s respite.

Part of the trouble is that hospitals have the dinginess of any public places that are busy twenty-four hours a day. They are not dirty, but my impression is that no one has painted the walls or given the floors a hard scrub for years, if not decades. Like an all-night Denny’s, nobody cares for them. Hospitals feel like husks from which the soul leaked out long ago.

Another reason why hospitals depress me is that they are run impersonally. I do not mean that the nurses and doctors do not care about the patients; I know many who are dedicated and exhaust themselves regularly trying to provide the best care that they can.

But hospitals are busy, aggressively public places when you are concentrating on your personal crisis. You get the feeling that your crisis is unimportant, constantly about to be lost in hundreds of others. If it was not your crisis being dealt with, the resources it requires would immediately be taken up by someone else’s crisis. Nor is this feeling helped by the constant cutbacks, when you can easily feel that the real goal of the hospital is to spit you out of the system as quickly as possible, often before you are quite ready or your problem is solved..

Moreover, this feeling is only intensified when you hear the staff cracking jokes or bantering among themselves. I understand that they are only relieving their own tension, but, when you are sunk in your own crisis and trying not to curse the long waits, you can easily get annoyed by the apparent callousness.

But the really draining part of waiting for admittance into emergency is that the first casualty is always your privacy. With admitting clerks shouting questions at you, or nurses and doctors asking intimate questions while other supplicants sit a few centimeters away from you, your private concerns are suddenly on display. For that matter, you or yours may be literally on display, thanks to the backless gowns that are the norm. If you have not already shriveled up into your own private world thanks to your pain or concern, you may wish you could do so rather than having your concerns exposed in this way without anyone bothering to ask your permission first.

If you are there for moral support, you find yourself visiting the gift shop or going for an unhealthy snack you don’t really need, just so you are not on display for a while. But, if you are the would-be patient, you have little choice to stay, feeling like you are answering questions on the phone about your love life while riding a bus filled with eavesdroppers.

All this goes on for hours (six today, and we considered ourselves lucky). At the end, the patient is safely ensconced in a bed, and falls asleep from exhaustion, while – after a brief visit – their supporters stagger home and collapse on the living room couch before snatching a quick snack.

How the staff endures this environment day after day, I don’t know. I suppose the answer is that many don’t, because emergency ward staff have a high turnover. But how those who remain learn to ignore the place and what happens there is hard to fathom. But for those of us who visit, an emergency ward can often seem the last place that’s healthy to be sick in.

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Writing is writing is writing

Posted in genres, journalism, Personal, Uncategorized, writing, tagged , , , , , on June 10, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Writers love to claim that their genre is difficult and arcane. I have heard poets claim that verse is the purest and most challenging form. Ditto for writers of short stories, plays and novels. I have heard diarists claim the superiority of the private journal over the blog, traditional journalists the superiority of the newspaper story over the online article, and mainstream writers the superiority of their work over science fiction or mysteries.

Maybe I am revealing myself as a hack, but I have trouble understanding why these claims are even made. Having published (if sometimes lightly) in a variety of genres, I fail to see much difference between them. So far as I have been able to observe, the task of writing is always much the same.

I suppose that writers make these claims to soothe their pride. Although writing is no easier than any other art, anyone who has even a few grades of education knows a few of its rudiments, so non-professionals think they know all about it. Moreover, unlike music or painting, it requires only items that can be found around most households, so amateur writers abound. Go to a science fiction convention, for instance, and you can probably start a conversation with anyone you meet simply by asking, “How’s your writing going?” Under these circumstances, perhaps many professional writers feel such a strong need to assert their expertise that they over-state the case.

Still, their claims sound false to me, because they are contrary to my experience of writing.

Generally, writing begins by an assessment of format. If you are writing a poem, you generally write in lines and stanzas; if you are writing a movie script, you need to follow rigid layout conventions before anyone will consider reading it. Similarly, online writing tends to use shorter paragraphs than writing that will be read on a printed page. Such assessments becomes automatic when you become experienced in a genre, but if you switch genres, you immediately become aware of the change in expectations.

The next consideration is your audience. For instance, vocabulary tends to freer and larger in poetry, because you can expect careful readings who are willing to take the time to puzzle out obscurities. The jargon (and what you need to explain) varies with the academic or technical audience. In online writing, exaggeration and hyperbole is more common, because online readers tend to be less engaged than print readers, and you want to keep your attention. In some cases, your subject matter might also change; if I remember correctly, Sylvia Plath said that she enjoyed writing fiction occasionally because in poetry she couldn’t write about things like toothbrushes.

And so it goes, for any type of writing I have done professionally. Any piece of writing requires that you adjust to the expectations of its stylistic or content genre. And, once you have, the acts of writing, revising, and editing differ only in the details.

Under these circumstances, claiming the superiority of one form over another seems unconvincing and downright desperate. Perhaps professional writing as a whole requires a different mindset or degree of talent and discipline than amateur writing, but at the level of process, where you spend most of your time, the act of writing remains constant. I can’t help thinking that those who insist otherwise do the art an injustice, and mislead everyone – perhaps themselves most of all.

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The ending of quarrels

Posted in Bruce Byfield, family, feuds, Personal, quarrels, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on June 9, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Sometimes, my life seems to divide into distinct periods. The current period, apparently, is one in which quarrels end. Perhaps that impression is simply the result of my wish to see patterns or progress in the random events of my life. Or maybe I feel there’s a larger pattern because my only part in events was to agree to them. But, in any event, in the last two months, I have seen two longstanding disagreements end, and feel better for doing so.

The first is a family matter. Never mind the details; they’re complicated and not mine to tell. Enough to say that, for the past thirty years, my part of the family hasn’t been talking to another part.

However, in April, a young relative from the other part of the family, who hadn’t been born yet when the defining moment of the quarrel occurred, contacted me, asking if I were my parents’ grandchild. I corrected her misapprehension, and an occasional email correspondence has sprung up. So far, we haven’t managed to meet (although not through lack of trying), but we probably will sooner or later. The young relative may also meet with one other member of my part of the family.

This new state of affairs, from what I’ve been told, doesn’t sit well with some people on both sides of the divide. But the quarrel was never more than indirectly mine, and I am not so petty as to extend it to someone who could not possibly bear any responsibility. To tell the truth, I’m cautiously pleased at the idea of maybe having another relative, since I don’t have very many.

The second case involves a friend from high school, whom I met again a few years ago. We corresponded for a while after we met, but the interaction, as innocent as it was, slowly soured. She cut if off with a curtness that I considered rude and unwarranted, and I immediately withdrew, too proud and hurt to ask for explanations. Once or twice, I did try to renew the connection, only to be met with silence, so after a couple of years, I stopped trying.

I was toying with the idea of making another effort (which frankly I probably would never have done) when she contacted me recently with an apology. Despite misgivings, I responded, and apologized for my part in the quarrel with a minimum of rehashing of what happened.

We are now Facebook friends – which can mean many things, but in this case seems to express a general feeling of goodwill so long as not much effort is involved. Nor do I think my former acquaintance is interested in the usual Facebook banter. We haven’t really talked, but I suspect that we’re both being cautious, and I appreciate the possibility that an actual friendship might emerge some day.

Neither of these episodes makes much change in my daily life. Nor can I claim to know the other people involved very well. Possibly, I will never know them better than I do now.

All the same, both episodes are gratifying in a way that is both unexpected and hard to express. Any feud, no matter how justified, seems spiteful and ungracious after a while. By contrast, its ending feels a general tidying of loose ends – as well as the triumph of the better side of everybody’s personality. That remains true even if nothing more comes of the reconciliations.

I don’t mean to suggest that I plan to forgive everybody I have a grievance against. In some cases (and if any of them are reading this, they know who they are), there would have to be a major demonstration of contrition before I would even consider patching up the quarrel – and I don’t think that any of the people I’m thinking of would be capable of such a gesture.

But these are the exceptions. With a certain pride, I have discovered that, for all my occasional temper,  I would rather participate in the ending of a quarrel than share any responsibility for perpetuating one. My only regret is that I did not play a more active role. Still, it’s a good thing to learn about myself.

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Review: “Eagle Transforming: The Prints of Robert Davidson”

Posted in aboriginal art, art, art appreciation, art exhibits, British Columbia, Bruce Byfield, Eagle Transforming: The Prints of Robert Davidson, First Nations art, Haida, Haida art, indian art, native art, Northwest Coast Art, Personal, Surrey Art Gallery, Uncategorized, Vancouver, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 5, 2010| 2 Comments »

The last time I saw a Robert Davidson retrospective was his Eagle of the Dawn show in 1993. Back then, all I knew about Northwest Coast Art was that I liked it. But, having learned a little since then, I appreciated the Surrey Art Gallery’s “Eagle Transforming: The Prints of Robert Davidson” as a chance to put my thoughts about Davidson’s work in some sort of order.

My superficial impression has always been that Davidson’s prints have changed dramatically in the last forty-two years. However, my second time around the gallery, I started to see the continuities.

For instance, from the start of his career, Davidson’s formlines have varied dramatically in thickness. He is especially fond of long tapers at the end of a line, such as the end of a feather, or at the end of elongated fingers or claws. Because of this habit, his formlines keep the eye moving far more than most artists’, which would account for the sense of movement in many of his designs.

Frequently, too, Davidson promotes red from the secondary to the primary formline color (although he uses a brighter red now than when he started), sometimes omitting black altogether, or else using it as the background for a print. When he does use a traditional black formline, he often used red as the primary formline on limbs or figures inside a larger one.

In addition, from very early in his career, Davidson has looked for unusual shapes to contain his designs. Although working in an art tradition that tends towards the symmetrical, Davidson often makes his designs asymmetrical. He is perfectly capable of a traditionally symmetrical design, as in “Eagle: Oliver Adan’s Potlatch Gift,” but his symmetrical designs have a stiffness (or perhaps a formality) that his other work does not. You might almost think that his symmetrical designs were exercises – and not wholly successful exercises, at that. Other artists succeed with symmetrical designs, but Davidson, I would suggest, is not strongly interested in them.

Accompanying the asymmetry is a search for form. A few years into his print designs, Davidson is already projecting his design on to a whale fin. Circular designs are also frequent in his work, both confining shapes and appearing as negative spaces in such works as the 1987 “Seven Ravens.” I was surprised not to see many split forms in the exhibit, but perhaps the reason is that split forms tend to be symmetrical by definition.

This interest in irregular and different shapes has served Davidson well over the years. “Butterflies,” printed in 1977, escapes the potential banality of its subject by placing the design into two circles. Similarly, a hummingbird design from a couple of years later avoids the usual cuteness of the subject by making it a stocky creature with wings attached to powerful shoulders.

Davidson’s least successful works? Those with extensive areas of cross-hatching, which work well in engraved metals or on carved wood, but tend to look unfinished in a print – especially since Davidson does little to vary them.

Nor is Davidson at his best with more than a few colors. Davidson’s palette is relatively small. In addition to red and black, it includes a royal blue and a turquoise. But, when he ventures beyond these four colors, the result can seem garish rather than bold, which may be why his color choice remains relatively cautious.

For me, one result of seeing so much of Davidson’s work side by side is that I now realize that his movement towards abstraction in the last decade is less of a break than I had previously thought. I knew, of course, that he had continued to do more traditional works while doing his annual prints, but I had tended to view the abstractions as facile works – as small ideas printed large to lend them an interest that they wouldn’t otherwise have.

I still think of these abstractions, which often take the form of closeups of a small part of a larger design, as working against themselves, because they expect the eye to linger when the basic tenets of the tradition have the effect of keeping the eye moving. However, even though I consider them unsuccessful, I can see now that they are a natural extension of interests that he has had all along.

My only complaint about the exhibit as a whole is that, by including only prints, it robs the individual pieces of part of their context. Davidson is a carver and jewelry-make as well as a print designer, and, to my eye, many of the prints in the show show the influence of these other media (for example, the cross-hatching).

However even with this omission, “Eagle Transforming” is well-worth a few hours and several trips around it. If you are like me, you will only notice some aspects on the second or third viewing.

And to those visitors who left comments saying that they don’t care much for Northwest Coast Art, all I can say is that they are barbarians who don’t know fine art when they are confronted by it. For myself, the only reason that I don’t look forward to the day when some of Davidson’s designs join Bill Reid’s on Canadian currency is that, when that day comes, he will probably be dead, and then we will have nothing new from him to admire.

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Site Review: The Raven’s Call

Posted in aboriginal art, art, art appreciation, Bill Reid, British Columbia, Bruce Byfield, First Nations art, indian art, native art, Northwest Coast Art, Personal, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 2, 2010| 3 Comments »

I’ve been looking forward to the virtual gallery of Bill Reid’s works ever since I heard a first whisper of it over a year ago. However, perhaps I anticipated too much, because, now that The Raven’s Call is online, I find myself disappointed. I’ve bookmarked the site, and plan to return to it regularly, but, all the time I’m using it, I keep thinking that it could have been something much more.

The first problem with the site is the navigation. The home page offers four menu items – of which only two, Who was Bill Reid? and Bill Reid’s Art, actually deserve to be at the top of the menu. Of the other two, The Unfinished Story is amusing but slight, while In the Classroom appeals to a narrow group of visitors, and suggests possibly unjustified assumptions about the users of the site. Are visitors really elementary and high school classes, or are they mainly adult art lovers and students of First Nations culture?

The second problem is that while the site has an astonishing amount of material, both visual and aural, most of it is simply categorized and labeled as though it is a museum specimen. For instance, in Who Was Bill Reid? You can view a pictorial history of his life, and a series of aural clips by both Reid and others. Similarly, in Bill Reid’s Art, you can see slide shows labeled Sculptures and Containers; Paintings, Prints and Drawings, and Jewelery. However, because nothing is done to place any of this material in context, the effect is like browsing through the drawers of a museum archive.

The result is an experience is interesting but dry and minimally engaging – so much so that it fails to do justice to either Reid or his work. It is only in the biography Bill Reid’s Journey that any of this material is put into context. Rather than just the bare facts about where a photo was taken or when a piece of jewelry was created and what it is made of, I suspect that most users would prefer to have a few hundred words giving anecdotes and explanations of how each item fits into Reid’s life or development of an artist.

Still another problem is that site designers show more interest in fitting graphics into the viewing page that displaying them at a size where they can be studied in detail. This tendency is especially obvious in larger pieces like “Mythic Messengers,” where the insistence on presenting the work as a whole results in a view that is only marginally better than the thumbnail. Some details of these larger pieces would go a long way towards helping viewers appreciate Reid’s work.

I would like to say that The Raven’s Call is the online monument that Reid’s genius deserves. If nothing else, I would prefer to offer praise commensurate with the three years that the site took to assemble. However, in all honesty, I cannot. The Raven’s Call might almost be a remnant from the mid-1990s, rather than a modern site.

Even its terms of use, which tries to limit borrowing from the site to fair use, seems archaic in web terms. After all, Reid’s work is well known, so there can be no question of anyone claiming it as their own. For another, the pictures are low resolution, so any use of them is going to be extremely limited anyway. Had the site designers contented themselves with a Creative Commons Attribution license, asking only that borrowers acknowledge the source of the material they were using, there might be some chance of the license being respected. Instead, the site simply looks old-fashioned in opting for terms of use that cannot possibly be enforced.

I’d like to think that the present version of the site is only the beginning – that, slowly, it will evolve the context that is currently lacking. But, for now, the main impression I take away (aside from the awe that Reid’s work always leaves me with) is of good intentions and results that were far less than should have been.

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The choice to preen

Posted in Bruce Byfield, nandays, Parrots, Personal, pets, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on June 1, 2010| Leave a Comment »

After four years, our parrot Beau has changed his behavior. In the last month, he’s started seeking us out to preen us.

If you know nothing about parrots, you probably don’t realize what a milestone that is. It’s not the same as a cat enjoying having its stomach scratched, or a dog licking your face. Cats and dogs can learn to enjoy interacting with humans in these ways, but these are not the behaviors of mature animals. They are the behaviors of very young animals that cats and dogs have kept because they are rewarded for them, and because they are pleasurable.

By contrast, parrots of all ages preen – not just their mates or their young, but other parrots in the flock as well. Partly, exchanging preens is a necessity, because, like many birds, parrots have places they just can’t reach themselves, such as behind the head and under the beak. Moreover, feather cases growing in can be uncomfortable.

But, just as importantly, preening is an important part of the complex, ever-shifting relationships in a flock. Who preens who (and in what order) can be a matter of status as well as trust. A parrot needs to preen and be preened almost as much as he or she needs water and varied food. For a parrot, preening is not just an indulgence; denied this social interaction, a parrot is unhappy and often despondent.

All this is true at any time, but it is even truer when a parrot chooses to preen a human. Parrots raised among humans may reach the necessary level of trust quicker than a wild parrot, but even a hand-fed one does not have the long history of domestication than a cat or a dog has. Even today, most domestic parrots are no more than a few generations removed from the wild. They are not creatures selected over centuries for subservience to humans.

Parrots that preen a human may be desperate for interaction, but they are still choosing to trust. Equal to equal, they are expressing friendship.

For these reasons, a preen by a parrot is not anything that you can take for granted. But it is especially touching in a neglected parrot like Beau, particularly since he has taken so long to reach this stage. We adopted Beau four years ago from the Greyhaven Exotic Bird Sanctuary, and he arrived in our house with baggage. He may have lost a mate, and he had apparently spent several years exiled to a laundry room, with only the sound of the washing machine and dryer for company. He may have been in mourning when he arrived in our house (parrots do mourn), and he was definitely seriously under-socialized.

When not crazed by his own hormones in the spring, in the past, Beau would accept a brief neck scratch, and sometimes a tickle under his wing, but, until now, he has not been much interested in returning the favor.

Now, he is preening with a persistence and enthusiasm that he never had before. If a hand is nearby, he will start preening between fingers or knuckles. If an arm is nearby, he will start on the arm hairs. But what he seems to like best is to scurry up a shoulder and preen hair and cheeks for minutes at a time.

As a veteran of decades of bird preens, I can tell he is tentative. But mostly he is eager, almost as though making up for lost time. His preening can be a little nerve-wracking, because ears tend to get him so excited that he bites, but gradually he is learning the rules, just as I am learning to relax under his ministrations.

Despite my nervousness, I feel honored by the change. I always do, but, in this case, I also take the preening as a sign that his rehabilitation is nearly complete. Like many parrots, Beau may never completely recover from being abused, but at least now we know for sure that he has made progress to a more normal life, and is comfortable in his new surroundings.

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Galleries or self-promotion?

Posted in art, art buying, art galleries, British Columbia, Bruce Byfield, First Nations art, indian art, Northwest Coast Art, Personal, Spirit Wrestler Gallery, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 29, 2010| 2 Comments »

I spent the afternoon at the opening for the Northern Exposure show at the Spirit Wrestler Gallery. This is an annual show for the Freda Diesing School of Northwest Art, featuring the graduating class and the pick of the work by first year students. Besides giving students some extra cash, the show also teaches students how to deal with a gallery and an exhibition. So, naturally, when I was talking to the students, a common topic was whether they should try to place more pieces in galleries or find other ways to make a living from their art.

The question, I found, is hard to answer in the abstract. Not only does the answer depend on the galleries involved, but I suspect that the details of the answer are starting to change.

On the one hand, a gallery that is enthusiastic about an artists’ work can be the best advertising that the artist can have. The gallery staff can draw visitors’ attention to the artist to increase their sales. The gallery can act as an unofficial agent, passing commissions on to the artist. I’ve heard of gallery owners advising artists about what is selling, and the prices that buyers are willing to pay. They can promote an artist in a group show – or, better yet, a solo show. Artists can’t expect a gallery to promise to buy regularly (“That would mean we were taking on responsibility for an artist earning a living,” one gallery employee remarked to me), but an unofficial agreement that an artist will give a gallery first right of refusal for new works can benefit everyone.

On the other hand, horror stories about galleries are common. I have on good – but strictly anonymous – authority that certain gallery owners regularly break verbal agreements, all the while insisting that written contracts aren’t necessary. Some, too, delay payment for months; in one case I know about, the artist had to wait ten months for over ten thousand dollars. Artists who ask about such delays have had gallery owners scream abuse at them.

However, regardless of how a gallery treats artists, all of them have one thing in common: They stand between artists and their audience. This relation has the advantage of freeing artists from having to promote themselves. But it also means that 40-60% of the total price of a piece goes to the gallery. Considering that literary agents charge 15-20% for the same services, artists may feel that the price is too high, no matter how good the services are.

Fortunately, for artists who feel that way, the Internet provides some alternatives. Websites, Facebook fan pages, and microblogs like Twitter all provide ways for artists to interact directly with their audiences, bypassing the galleries entirely, if they choose. With free software content management systems like Joomla! or Drupal, artists can even conduct online auctions, using Paypal or credit card services for payment. As for pricing, artists can charge more than the wholesale price they receive and still offer prices that are lower than a gallery would charge.

And, increasingly, artists are taking full advantage of these alternatives. One senior First Nations artist says that 80% of his sales come from the Internet. Another estimates that about one-third of his sales are online, and is trying to boost that fraction every way he can.

But artists pay a price when taking control of their sales in this way. They have to learn marketing skills, which can make them nervous and uncomfortable if they are inexperienced or introverted. They have to learn the principles of commercial design, which are very different from the art they create. They not only have to create their initial web pages or Facebook pages, but keep them constantly replenished with new content, because nothing looks less professional than a long outdated web presence. If buyers are unsatisfied, they have to deal with the problem themselves. Most important of all, they either have to spend time on business and promotion – perhaps as much as a third of their working hours, especially at first – or find a sympathetic friend or family member or maybe a consultant to do the work for them. With these demands, some artists might feel that the price for taking full control of their career is too high.

Yet another problem is that an artist can make a living promoting themselves, but, in doing so, they become invisible to the traditional art market. If that happens, then the artists may not be mentioned in art books, or approached by governments and other institutions for large commissions.

My own suspicion is that, despite the disadvantages, an increasing number of artists will start to market themselves. Most Northwest Coast artists I know are doing some online promotion, although none (so far as I know) are doing all they could. In the future, galleries will continue to exist, but they may have less control over artists than they have traditionally had, because the alternatives will be too well-known.

Whatever happens, artists today have a choice that they didn’t have fifteen years ago. However, what choices they should make depends very much on their own skills, personality, and preferences.

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John Wilson: Spirit of Our Ancestors

Posted in aboriginal art, art, art appreciation, British Columbia, Bruce Byfield, First Nations art, Haisla, indian art, masks, native art, Northwest Coast Art, Personal, portrait mask, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 20, 2010| Leave a Comment »

The Northwest Coast art in our home includes many contemporary pieces. However, I am also fascinated by traditional pieces, particularly recreations of historical masks according to modern sensibilities. That is why, when John Wilson’s “Voices of Our Ancestors” (aka “Portrait Mask”) became available, I jumped at the chance to buy it.

John Wilson, "Spirit of Our Ancestors"

“Voices of Our Ancestors” is based on two historical Haisla masks in J. C. H. King’s “Portrait Masks from the Northwest Coast of America,” a book first published in 1979. It is a mask well worth studying for its own sake, all the more so because examples of Haisla design are relatively rare. When you do see them, you have no trouble placing the Haisla geographically, because their art often seems like a combination of Kwakwaka’wakw and Tsimshian traditions. Nor is Wilson’s mask an exception.

Artists Unknown, Historic Haisla Masks

However, what especially interests me is Wilson’s reinterpretation of the historic masks. To start with, Wilson chooses a less rounded, more northern shape for the mask. This change is accompanied by some changes in proportions, such as a wider space between the lips and nose, and a higher placement of the ears. He has also decided not to include the teeth that are in the originals, and replaced the originals’ rounded eyes with more smaller, more slanted ones. In addition, the cheekbones of Wilson’s mask are far less prominent than in the originals. The result is a less human, more supernatural look – a fitting change, considering that the mask is a work of a modern man looking back on the past.

Another noticeable difference is in the selection of colors. This difference is not just a matter of what was available; one of the older masks actually has a brighter red than the one that Wilson uses. By contrast, even allowing for aging, the historical piece has a more subdued blue than Wilson uses. Wilson also accents the red by drawing thicker formlines, and using it in places where the historical piece uses blue.

Wilson has followed the general designs of the original, including the stylized mustache and goatee, but almost always he has put his own interpretation on them. For instance, he has taken the rows of parallel lines just visible on the colored original, and added them as a design element below the nose, replacing the rather uninspired blobs of cross-hatching, and perhaps suggesting mustache stubble.

However, the largest difference between Wilson’s mask and its inspiration is in the form lines. Although formline influence is obvious in the originals, Wilson’s formlines are more disciplined, with more variation in thickness and more balance. For instance, where the formlines on the forehead in the original meets above the left eye, Wilson’s meet between the eyes. Similarly, where the original has formlines meet on on the cheeks, Wilson’s meet at the nostril.

Probably the most obvious difference in the design is on the cheeks, where the formline helps to replace the cross-hatching, and the blue u-shapes are greatly reduced in size. Even more importantly, the red formline that follows the line of the cheek curves upwards rather than downwards as in the original, doing more than any single element to make the modern mask less human and more arresting than the originals.

“Spirit of Our Ancestors” is obviously influenced by the sources that Wilson acknowledges, but clearly it is more than imitation, or an unthinking copying of a classical piece. Wilson’s mask is more balanced piece of work than either of the originals, with a stronger northern influence as well. Although somewhat of a new direction for Wilson, it more than succeeds on its own terms. Wilson has not simply copied, but repeatedly improved as well.

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Spelling and writing

Posted in Bruce Byfield, journalism, Personal, spelling, Uncategorized, writing, tagged , , , , , on May 15, 2010| 5 Comments »

For someone who earns a living as a writer, I have a shocking confession to make: I am a good speller, not an excellent one, and I don’t greatly care.

Oh, when something of mine is published with a mis-spelling or typo, I wince. If the publication is online, I correct it as soon as I can. And, once or twice, when upsets in my personal life have left me distracted, and I’ve gone through periods where my copy editing was poorer than usual, I was left with plenty of self-doubts. After all, I’m supposed to be a professional, and part of that status means submitting copy ready to publish. The fact that editors are supposed to have my back when it comes to proofreading does not diminish my obligation to be my own first line of defense.

However, my concern is limited. I make the corrections as they come to my notice, and move on. I have no sympathy with the apparent glee with which some readers find mistakes and point them out, and only point out other peoples’ errors when they are unintentionally humorous. In my heart of hearts, spelling is not a great concern for me.

Part of the reason for this attitude is the way I read. I not only read phonetically, but hear every syllable in my head, even when I’m reading silently. Because of that inner voice, when I come across a spelling mistake, the only time that I have trouble understanding is occasionally when letters are transposed.

For another, I am well aware of how illogical English spelling is. I think it was George Bernard Shaw who claimed – not entirely accurately– that, under the rules of English spelling, “fish” could be spelled “ghoti” (“gh” as in “tough,” “o” as in “woman,” “ti” as in “attention”). While I doubt that the efforts to simplify spelling will ever succeed, I do tend to regard proper spelling as an artificial convention, slightly more useful than heraldry, but just as arbitrary. Moreover, like a knowledge of heraldry, a knowledge of spelling sometimes seems to serve mainly as an indicator of class.

If schools tend to focus on aspects of literacy such as spelling – as witnessed by the renewed popularity of spelling bees (currently, there is apparently even a fad for strip spelling bees among adults) – the focus has more to do with the easy of assessment than any usefulness. Determining who is writing well is partly subjective, but in the last two or three centuries, we have standardized spelling until we can easily say whether a spelling is correct. True, our ability to write has not improved, but, all the same, for those who need to assess students, the descent from the art of writing to the simple right and wrong of spelling must be a relief, and never mind that it serves only limited purpose.

I can even rally my bachelor’s degree in communication to rationalize my attitude. Basic communication theory holds that the signal – what you communicate – can still be transmitted with a high degree of noise – irrelevant or ambiguous information or errors. Often, you do not even need vowels or full words, as anyone who has used abbreviations while texting understands. In other words, not only does correct spelling do nothing to improve the quality of writing, it does next to nothing to improve the transmission of writing, either.

Similarly, I can use my degree to rationalize that, the more complex the concepts you are trying to convey become, the likelier that problems are going to arise. In the same way that a complex piece of technology such as a jet requires regular maintenance because its complexity means more can go wrong, so the more complex the ideas you are trying convey, the more that spelling mistakes and other errors are likely to creep in.

As I try to correct mistakes, only to find other ones (and, occasionally, to introduce new ones in my corrections), the image in my mind is of the cartoons in which a character is trying to nail down floorboards. No sooner do they nail down one board, than another one springs up behind them. At times, the idea of eliminating every error seems next to impossible.

But the main reason I have only limited concern about spelling is nothing more than personal preference. What absorbs me as I write is not producing flawless copy, but developing ideas and structuring and expressing them so that they are as clear as possible. Once I have done these things as well as I can in the time available – because, often, I am working to a deadline – my interest recedes sharply. Proofreading is an after-thought, much as bibliographies were when I was in high school and university: necessary, but dull. While writing is a creative act, and editing and revising is an analytical one, proofreading is simply rote work, and often repetitious. Even with a spell checker and macros to catch my most common errors, such as using two spaces where I only need one, copy editing my own work is still repetitious and uninteresting. I never have the satisfaction from copy editing than I do from finishing a draft that comes closer to expressing my thoughts.

If I have been writing all day and need to email a piece before I go to bed, I may also have little energy left for the task. Often, I become more careless than I would be when I am fresh. To a degree, then, part of my disinclination is undoubtedly the natural tendency that everybody has to disregard a task for which they suspect they have no particular talent

Having been afflicted with some of the obsession for spelling and grammar that infests North American education (although less than some, since I was in an experimental program for four years of my five in high school), I feel that I should be ashamed of my disregard. Yet, talking to other writers, I realize that my attitude is probably shared by most of them.

A reasonable ability to spell may be a basic skill for writers, but it is a minor one. In fact, I would almost go so far as to say that it is more a marketing skill than one fundamental to the craft of writing. You need to know how to spell so that editors will read your work easily, not because spelling polysyllabic words improves the quality of what you write. You could become a champion speller and still not have anything to say or the skills to express it. I would even go so far as to say that, if a would-be writer wants to improve their skills, then spelling should be one of their last concerns.

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