HOMAGE
RICK RIVET WITH RECURRING IMAGERY, THIS B.C. PAINTER’S VISION MOVES INTO THE WORLD OF MYTH AND METAPHYSICS BY PORTIA PRIEGERT
64 Galleries West Spring 2008
Looking at Rick Rivet’s paintings is like embarking on a journey through a dream world — images emerge and recede, symbols float into awareness and wash in on waves of sumptuous colour. His work is highly expressive, with mark-making techniques that range from bold slashes to slowly graduated fields of thick colour. Through it all are Rivet’s ruminations on nature, memory, metaphysics and indigenous mythologies. “A lot of the mark-making is almost like carving into the painting to get at an unconscious idea,” says Rivet, a Métis artist originally from the Northwest Territories. “I think it’s a fairly complex process to develop an image. It develops — it doesn’t just happen. There’s chaos and control, destruction and reconstruction. There are layers of paint, with drips over them, and washes over other areas. It’s very process-oriented.” In an exhibition recently circulated by Saskatoon’s Mendel Art Gallery, Rivet’s work hovers between abstraction and representation, engaging the languages of both. He blends the traditions of modernist art with those of shamanistic cultures. His synthesis, with its rich visual qualities and underlying thoughtfulness, is deeply evocative at an emotional and intuitive level. Rivet’s imagery includes basic geometric forms such as squares and triangles and loosely rendered animals, human forms and northern motifs — kayaks, sleds and whaling boats. His concerns often focus on particular imagery repeated in multiple paintings — masks, mazes, string games, medicine wheels and burial mounds — common elements in a variety of shamanistic cultures. His northern roots also inform his process. “I think a lot of my work stems from growing up in the Arctic and growing up on the land, being there right in the landscape all the time, when you’re out playing or just living in a fishing camp or on a trap line.” Rivet traces his ancestry to Europe through his father and to the Dene and Saulteaux people through his mother. He was born in 1949 in Aklavik, above the Arctic Circle in the Mackenzie River Delta. Aboriginal traditions were more intact at that time and Aklavik, a regional trading centre, was home to various aboriginal peoples as well as Europeans. “My family lived on the land and in town depending on the season,” he says. “At age seven, I began attending school in Aklavik with other students from the region, a cross-cultural experience to say the least.” His family eventually moved to Inuvik, which became the economic centre of the Mackenzie Delta in the 1950s, and he continued his schooling there. He saw his first Western art at school — religious pictures in the classroom — and also recalls how aboriginal students were punished for using their own languages. He dismisses his early schooling as “a total brainwash attempt that I was smart enough to avoid.” Still, with the assistance of government grants, Rivet headed south in 1969 for his post-secondary education. He has earned four degrees in art and education — first, a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Alberta in Edmonton in 1972, and then a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1980 from the University of Victoria, where he studied painting, printmaking and art history. He went on to earn a Master of Fine Arts in 1985 and a Bachelor of Education in 1986, both from the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. His formal education was complemented by travels across Canada and jobs that included surveying, roofing, mining and prospecting. He also researched traditions of the Aleut, Navajo, Cree and Hopi as well as Siberian www.gallerieswest.ca