Chagal4's Blog

There are pieces that I do to help me meditate. I think of them as visual medication. I try to find some harmony…with some challenge…maybe a shape or a colour…I started years ago after visiting The Dr. Sun Yat Sen Classical Chinese Garden in Vancouver. It wasn’t just peaceful or quiet… it had some quality that raised it and carried it away from the city and time and the day. Every element of the garden had been considered and developed with meaning. It was the first garden I saw that included the sky. I could never reach that insight or enlightenment in my work but I could try to find in some pieces, a way to dream. This piece with its tree and abstract shapes is not intended to be perfect. It’s a suggestion…an invitation to relax and spend some time with it. Look at it…look away…come back…if it reminds you of a time or place or feeling…follow it. I hope it takes you somewhere nice.

Saturday, waiting for the rain…thinking of…

Ghosts.

I’ve never been one who loved dinosaurs. The idea of fifty foot lizards chasing my ass through the woods was just too much to be loading into the nightmare library. I was having enough trouble with “The Green Hornet” and “Inner Sanctum”  (O.K. don’t worry, those things won’t mean anything unless you’re over sixty.) I thought T.Rex was a cool name for an animal that had that many teeth though. (Good name for a rock band too.)

Like most people I find the evolution of life on this planet fascinating…and somehow the notion of dinosaurs being around for hundreds of thousands of years became the bench mark for evolutionary success. Of course they went away to become crude oil and I sometimes feel a twinge of weird when I step on the gas in my car…

I was not quite convinced that humans started out on this planet at all…Seems to me that the planet might have been chosen as a penal colony for bipeds from another solar system who did some really bad shit…and got banished from Eden. Then the species devolved and evolved in many directions until the current model perfected its killing skills and emerged at the top of the food chain…if you don’t count bacteria and viruses. So I’m not sure that “Lucy” and the neanderthals were progressive steps along the evolutionary highway…There could have been a higher order that fell on hard times and devolved to become neanderthals…Who says the evolutionary highway has to be a “one way street”? I mean, I look around these days and it seems like there’s plenty of evidence that our species has taken a step or two back. No? O.K. maybe not.

Anyway, I read a few years ago that the dinosaurs may not have gone completely extinct…and that many modern birds may have evolved from dinosaurs. Clever little bastards!! But really , have you ever looked closely at a turkey…or a buzzard? How about a pelican? Those things look prehistoric to me. I have a harder time imagining chickadees but maybe they came from tiny little dinosaurs.

The crows and chickadees were ranting this morning and woke me up…the fucking noise!!! and it got me thinking in this entirely unwanted direction. But it’s Friday morning and the latest nonsense from the political gang wars didn’t bear thinking about.

So if birds evolved from dinosaurs…what did fish evolve from?

You know, lately I’ve become concerned about fences. They haunt my dreams…make me think the world is getting smaller and maybe meaner.

I picture this one being very tall…sixty, seventy feet or so…but not long at all… perhaps only thirty feet…and it should be in the middle of nowhere…with no one nearby.

But you know what they say…If you build it, they will come…and choose which side of the fence they want to be on.

I just read that fifty percent of the worlds fish were gone! It’s like they looked fifty years ago and they were there (however many that was…) and then they looked recently and fifty percent were gone. Taking into account the worlds oceans, seas, lakes, rivers, ponds and gold fish bowls…that is a lot of missing fish. I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised when things go missing…North America once had millions of buffalo…the oceans had thousands of sperm whales…giant sword fish…passenger pigeons. Consider the humble passenger pigeon…My father told me stories of men standing in the street loading and reloading shotguns and firing straight up while thousands of pigeons darkened the sky and fell dead from all that shooting…Humans are so fucking stupid that if they hadn’t discovered the adrenaline rush of killing each other…there would probably be damn near nothing else alive on the planet…oh…maybe cows and chickens…but that’s just a maybe. I’ve seen old photos of the so-called great hunts that the tweedy rich went on…racks of dead birds, rows of dead rabbits, wild boar, lions, tigers, bears and deer…Oh yes…Bambi’s parents, aunts and uncles. I’ve read stories where men described places as being “hunted out”, meaning there was virtually nothing left to kill. We now often hear the same terminology…”fished out”.

So we know that along with the millions and millions of people we’ve knocked off, the toll in animals has been greater still. But I never imagined that I’d read that fifty percent of the fish were gone. I have driven and hiked in clear cut zones where whole forests were chopped down. Looked like the moon. I’ve also stood on the edge of one of North America’s largest open pit mines. It’s in British Columbia. They started more than a century ago with two mountains…They dug until both mountains were completely gone…then they kept digging until there was a hole as deep as those mountains had been high. Quite an achievement! And when the mine gave out…people loaded up their trucks and cars…left the keys in the front door of the house…and hit the road. Well…they weren’t going to be paid to fill in the hole…and you couldn’t pay a mortgage on a house with no job…Fifty percent of the fish!!!

And we have politicians promising tax breaks for the middle class, protecting us from terrorism, and making certain that refugees aren’t really terrorists coming in to steal our jobs…and shoot up the doughnut stores. I say bring them in…immediately and set them up on some fish farms…Hurry!!!

Mystery…Haven’t you walked down a street or sat in a bar or a restaurant or a doctor’s waiting room and wondered about someone you see? You don’t want to stare …but there must have been something that made you wonder. Sometimes for me it plays on my mind and two days later I’ll still be pondering the mystery. Like here’s a guy with a crisp white shirt and clean pressed suit…looking sharp…and he’s wearing a battered pair of work boots…That’s not so big a deal…but how come? Then there’s the lady with the sad eyes…about forty, sitting ramrod straight at the cafe in front of a tea. All around are hipsters and kids engrossed in tablets and I-phones. They’re all quiet but she’s calm…tense…but not rigid. She’s self contained. Something has happened. She’s turning it over in her mind…digesting it. Is it serious? A death in the family or a friend? No…not that sort of grief.  A diagnosis with consequences? Possibly. Trouble with a partner? Yessss perhaps…but what kind of trouble? I gave her a name…Marjory. Decided I like her and stopped looking. There’s a point where it becomes intrusive…invasive. It’s a habit of mine. People fascinate me and I watch them, look at how they sit or stand, hold their hands or tilt their heads, what’s happening in their faces. Later a gesture or a posture may become part of a drawing or painting. I try not to be rude…

I put Marjory in a red chair, nude but not posed, in front of a window with a cool breeze. She smokes and thinks but there’s no pressure or pretence and the room is cool with no distractions. The mystery is still there…but we’ve moved on from tea in a cafe…she’s almost worked it out. A little later she’ll get dressed and go out. She drives a silver Jetta downtown to an office. Her partner is out of town…She’ll call later. Then we’ll see.

I’ve always liked the idea of cowboys…though I know the life must have been hard. It was my generation…comic books and those old Roy Rogers and Hoppalong Cassidy movies. Billy the Kid and Wyatt Earp and the toxic Doc Holiday. At seven we shot it out in the bushes behind the school with the sheriff  whose name was Bobby and lived down the street. He was always the sheriff because whenever we plugged him he swore we’d just winged him and carried on. We tied him to a tree once and didn’t tell his mother for an hour…Big trouble for that.

I was sitting in the bar in Cache Creek many years later nursing a hangover and hiding from the sun…Outside there was…I’m not kidding…a hitching post and three horses saddled and tied up. At a table across the room, three cowboys..all hats and boots and nine mile squints…Drinking beer and having lunch. I ate my burger and smiled inside…hangover floated away. They still chase cows on horses out there…and they still look like they did a hundred years ago…insist on it  I suppose.

It’s raining buckets outside…the streets are running water and the hiss and splash of traffic is a dozy  background noise. I have Sinead Lohan on my head phones waltzing Bob Dylan’s great song…”To Ramona” in my ears. It always moves me and her version brings me closer to tears. This is the kind of day that reminds me of my first trip to Paris. I never thought I’d get there. When I was younger my horizons were all within North America.  I had crossed and recrossed North America and I’d been from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic and from the Atlantic to the Pacific… I thought that Paris couldn’t be more complex than New York City. Oh…well, I fell in love didn’t I? Jet-lagged and grouchy and tired, I was ready to hate the hair on my head.  But somehow, in the taxi on the way from the airport, with motorbikes and scooters blasting between cars and  horns beeping and soon the city rushing through my eyes…I knew it wasn’t any place I’d ever been before.

I’ve been back many times since…and the love only grows. I explore the side streets (everybody does) and most of all I see the people. Maybe it’s just the change of place but it feels like I can see them more clearly…and they stick in my mind. Bill Cunningham, the great American fashion and street photographer, says that Paris educates your eyes. People have a sense of style. And you know that even if they live in a tiny fifth floor garret they give careful if casual thought to who they are on the street. It may be a hat or a shirt or a scarf…a dress or shoes…It’s also a walking city so the way that people carry themselves…it just draws me in…makes me feel more…alive. Isn’t that what love does?

Like any city, Paris, has its poor and they occupy corners and sidewalks and trim the excess off the tourists. Around the corner from our favourite apartment…not far from the Louvre…this old dragon held down a piece of real estate. I’ve seen her for three years…and she remains in heat or cold or sleet or rain. The flics leave her alone. It was biting cold the day I decided to sketch her…but what struck me was the scarf that she’d pulled out of one of her bundles…It was so bright and striking…I went back to the apartment and tried to remember…

In the back end of the seventies I  was in a state of lament…Years of acid and weed and various pharmaceuticals hadn’t so much scrambled me as left me fatigued. The amplitude of the global bullshit was still trying to come down from the war in Vietnam and the street fighting in the rest of the world. Everything seemed…bleached. AIDS was killing people, wrecking families and forcing a new reality on society. Discos were blowing out eardrums, cocaine was beginning to make Medellin a household name. It was as if kids were trying to push though some invisible barrier…wild costumes and wilder hair and the punk rockers and some kind of fed up anarchy. Left, right, up, down in, out…there was no direction, or it didn’t matter. By seventy nine I was broke, depressed and living in a slum in Vancouver. I found odd jobs and paid the rent, stepped over junkies nodded out on the elevator floor and sat in my crib and read fifty cent books from the used book store. I drank sweet Marsala that knocked me out around bed time..Life was on hold. I’m sure I did some drawings and a few paintings, I remember some of them, but I don’t have any. I collected stories. Survived. With the help of my friends. Out on the edge of society there’s life of despair, adventure, laughter and occasional madness…and every night you must tell yourself…”I gotta get out of here” and mean it. My best friend came from Toronto after his life collapsed and we realized that the sixties had left us with unpaid emotional bills. It was a struggle for nearly three years…You couldn’t buy a job…and really I’d burnt a few bridges along the way. Being out of the game for a couple of years…it’s like coming out of jail…well…you just don’t. You sort of bounce along the wall until you find a door or a window…

These drawings were done in 1981. I was past the depression…I wanted clean, clear and simple images…I could see what I wanted to do with texture and colour…These are from my workbook…not for for sale but to relearn.

I was taught that a man’s pain is private. It wasn’t one of those direct lessons but rather one absorbed it somehow until it was right. After the war…and for my generation there was only one “THE WAR” . It was WW2 and it chewed on family members, uncles, fathers friends fathers and uncles and we grew up with it. When it ended…hundreds of thousands were cast adrift in search of the wonderful life they’d promised themselves during the war. But they were carrying a lot of baggage. Emotional, physical, social. And there was pain…pain that didn’t get talked about. Things seen and done that couldn’t be shared. Nightmares that couldn’t be explained…and the bottle. In my youth…there was always the bottle. Under the seat in the pick up…on the shelf in the kitchen…on the side board, in the tool box…

Bartenders swore that there were actual holes in the mirrors behind the bar where ex soldiers stared right through them. Wives just swore. Kids? well, they always say that kids know more than they let on. Kids talk to other kids and what they don’t collectively understand …they invent. All that stuff about a man’s pain being private? It’s bullshit, of course, but it was a code that many lived by and still do today. It isn’t just wars and soldiers…it’s the pain of unfulfilled hopes and failed chances. It’s physical pain…it’s the pain of growing old…or being alone. We pull up our socks, square up our shoulders, stick out our chests, chin up…eyes straight ahead…and carry on.

These two guys are having a conversation, they’re sharing confidences in a code that’s old, old, old. They talk about it…what ever “it” is without really saying “it”. They finally surround it with words and thoughts and digressions and denials and nods and sighs and head shakes…and “how about another drinks” until they come to the moment of silence…They’ve covered “it ” and then the older guy …on the left, sums it all up.

“Well, that’s it then.” He says….Meeting adjourned.