Zen and the Art

I can't say that I think about art very much. Sometimes something catches my eye and I'm quite careful about what I put up in my own home, but in general, don't give much thought to it.

Recently however, I have been reading a book about part of the life of an artist from British Columbia, Emily Carr. I was lent this book, 'The Forest Lover' and I was excited that the titles of the chapters were the names of all the plants and animals I have been learning about at the Nature Park. Emily is portrayed as a free spirit, a woman who would not be bound by social mores. Then she went to Paris and I became annoyed with her. She wanted to learn what the great French painters of the time could teach her, but she is hampered because, surprise, surprise, no-one speaks English. She went to France with the intention of spending a year there, and yet she makes absolutely no attempt whatsoever to learn any French and in fact whines and whinges at everyone and anyone that she can't understand what they are saying to her.
She really does come across in this part of the book as being very ignorant.

The book - and in fairness Emily as she is depicted by Susan Vreeland the author - has made me think quite deeply about two things. One is the relationship between the artist and their milieu and the second is how the land forms its people.

I had mentioned before that it was Berlin of all places, that opened my eyes to the meaning of art. For the first time, and this was in the Checkpoint Charlie museum, I was able to look at art and experience the emotion of the artist. Much of this work wasn't done during the war, but in the years following, when the German people were coming to terms with the horror of what had happened to them from within.

I wondered whether I was simply imbuing what I was seeing with my own feelings. I knew what the German people had suffered so therefore I saw it in the art. And yet I don't think I had any idea of the depth of suffering until I saw this work. I felt this again when we went to Sachsenhausen and saw some of the sculptures there, even more raw and terrifying. You can look at pictures of hopeless, emaciated people, but to see a scuplture created by someone who has been one of those people, to understand how they perceived their own body, was to get inside a corner of the artist's head.

Emily, the Emily in the book, has an intense connection with the BC Forest, and it is one that I can understand. My father always told me the names of plants, it was something I was brought up with, and for which I am grateful, but now I am having to expand that knowledge, because of course there are plants and animals here that simply don't exist in Europe.

In France, Emily learns new techniques, she learns painting, but she feels no bond with what she sees. When she returns to BC however, she is back with the things she understands. She is driven to paint the forest and the native art because it is already in her soul.

In Britain, we are such a mongrel nation that most of us can think of ourselves as Celts, Vikings, Romans, depending on how the mood takes us. But it is really the Celts that I think of as being part of the land. Their feasts, their culture was all about our relationship with the soil, flora and fauna that is the British Isles.

In Canada, I am aware of more of a division between the settlers and the First Nations - of course, settlement has been historically recent. Sometimes I see anger towards the native peoples, sometimes anger from them, and at other times, a romanticising.

But in this book, and when I am in the Nature Park, I am aware of something different, of that same feeling I have about the Celts in western Europe and Britain. That First Nations culture is inextricably bound up with the forest and the land. To anyone else that probably sounds trite or romantic, but to me, the personal understanding of it is neither, it is a type of Zen, an ownership of that knowledge.

I have a print of just one Emily Carr painting. It is of a cedar tree, drawn with exaggerated perpective so that you feel the amazing height of these trees. Although I don't have the British Columbian forest in my soul as Emily Carr did, or even most likely as people who have lived here for much longer than me, I am starting to get it. There is a spirit of the forest here that is quite different from the spirit of the land of the Celts. It's both disturbing and calming at the same time.

A much more modern Canadian artist, very modern in fact, since he isn't a painter but an animator, is Kevin's brother Trevor. He has a site with some of his artwork on it and if you would like to check it out, here is the link.