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Eagles all around us
A local photographer captures a pair of eagles resting high above Cates Park /Whey-ah-Wichen
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Chatter in the Cove
‘Wild’ Seycove auction raises more than $40,000 for schools in the Seymour area April 2018
9900 Circulation East of the Seymour River
Seymour-raised Shadowman took bite out of Big Apple with eerie art by RICA TALAY
Oren Jacoby set out to make a film that he thought he would never finish. The New York based director produced and directed the 2017 documentary Shadowman, which features the works of the late conceptual artist Richard Hambleton, who grew up in Deep Cove in his family’s home on Mount Seymour Parkway. During the 1980s in New York, Hambleton was one of the up and coming artists, alongside his conceptual peers Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, making a mark in New York’s art scene. Hambleton was 65 when he died on Oct. 29. According to the documentary, he painted until his death. Before he became famous for his mysterious, black shadowy silhouettes that he plastered all over New York City in the late ’80s, Hambleton’s artistic curiosity started at Windsor Secondary. He’s also known in Vancouver’s art scene for his fake crime scene outlines. Deep Cove resident Christine Elsey said she knew the artist when he went to Windsor in the late ’70s. “He was interesting,” she said. “But he was really gentle, not very talkative really, but quite expressive at the same time.” Elsey went to Windsor when she was 16 and was taking the same Grade 11 art class as Hambleton,who was 17. She describes Hambleton at that time as “abstract” and said he had quite a sense of humour. “He wouldn’t really engage too much,” she said, explaining Hambleton veered toward experimentation, “as opposed to any kind of any structured artistic activity,” she recalled. “One time in art class he went around the whole class, just experimenting with twisting pieces of string in his fingers in different shapes and going up to people and just showing them what it looked like.” The film focuses on Hambleton’s early
career in New York and chronicles the fame and success he was gaining when he dropped out of the art world. The rest of the films centres on Hambleton’s reinstitution into the scene by art dealers Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld and Andy Valmorbida. Shadowman took Jacoby almost eight years to produce. “It took forever,” the director said. “I started in 2009 and didn’t really finish it until right before the Tribeca film festival (on March of 2017).” He explained how the reason was partly the lack of funding and the lack of co-operation by Hambleton. He describes working with the artist as “challenging” at times. “At certain points he would just become unavailable and we couldn’t do anymore and I sort of gave up the film thinking we’d never get to talk to him,” he said. “When he was available he could be wonderful and articulate and insightful about his life and his work, but other times we just couldn’t get to him.” Luckily Jacoby found archival footage and photographs of Hambleton from local artists who knew him in the ’80s. The film opens up with a black and white shot of Hambleton painting one of his famous shadow silhouettes, Jacoby said getting that footage was a “lucky accident”. “I met somebody at a fancy cocktail party and making sort of chit chat conversations and she told me she had once made a film when she was an art student and I asked her what it was about, and it turned out it was about Richard Hambleton,” he shared. Asked what Hambleton was like, the words charming, intelligent, funny and ironic flow out of Jacoby’s mouth. He was introduced to Hambleton in 2009 by his friend Hank O’Neal, who chronically photographed street art in Lower Manhattan for 30 years. A few of Hambleton’s paintings were featured in see Shadowman’s page 2
Conceptual artist Richard Hambleton grew up in the Seymour area and later moved to New York City, where he became famous for his black shadowy silhouettes that he plastered all over the Big Apple in the late 1980s. PHOTOS SUPPLIED STORYVILLE FILMS
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