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Asay taking another swing at World Cup
LOCAL ARTIST INSPIRED BY ANDY WARHOL FRANK PEEBLES 97/16 staff
The paintings come from the same traditional roots as before, but internationally celebrated artist Robert Sebastian is working in new forms. One of the evolutions in this veteran art star’s work is producing paintings on printcanvas. His original images are still for sale, and fetch thousands of dollars each, but he is also allowing select images to go into print series. He chose the canvas medium “because it saves on framing, people can just hang them as they are, and you get just the image in its raw form,” he said as he released them to the world. The first places they are on public offer are WD West Studios and Two Rivers Gallery’s Art Shop, both located in his second home of Prince George. His original home, and the place where his art career his its primary base, is Hazelton in the midst of his Gitxsan Nation ancestry. There is a sect of artists, he said, and he was one of them, that pins their career hopes on selling originals one by one. The price of a single original can be prohibitive, so the buyers become financially elite as an artist’s career develops. Sebastian wanted the average person to be able to afford his art, and have his work appreciated by the mainstream public. He has now embraced the print, where several copies can be sold at a more inclusive price. “What motivated me was Andy Warhol,” said Sebastian. “I found out he almost never sold an original. That made me think.” He has also been inspired lately by the younger generation of Aboriginal artist. He is now infusing modern images into his traditional depictions, like his recent painting of a leaping fish that has, small in the background as if looking down from high above, an airplane. Sebastian was part of the surge of west coast Indigenous art that broke out of the 1970s and ‘80s as the leading edge of First Nations cultural revival that is still building momentum today. As one of the recognized masters of this genre, Sebastian’s work is in collections all over the world, including British royalty and international governments. The Mon-
97/16 photo by James Doyle
Artist Robert Sebastian shows off some paintings in front of Two Rivers Gallery on May 23. The paintings are part of a new series of prints he is launching. treal Expos, for example, commissioned him and brother Ron Sebastian to carve a totem pole for Olympic Stadium. They presented it in 1980 at a home game ceremony with Maurice Richard, Donald and Keifer Sutherland and other Montreal dignitaries in attendance. That kind of exposure was hard-earned and came with immense responsibility, said Sebastian. The shapes, colours and subject matter of traditional Aboriginal art are not haphazard. Cultural guidelines from nation to nation and even clan to clan inform the rules around what can be represented in such art. Artists’ mastery of these genres partially includes perfecting the shapes, but necessarily includes perfecting the rules around their use. Sebastian shakes his head over the purists who claim no one from outside a First Nation should be allowed to work in the
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artistic aesthetic of that First Nation. He wholeheartedly agrees with non-Aborignal artists taking up these artistic traditions, or a Cree or Inuit artist who might want to learn to paint in the style of the Gitxan. However, he said, a commitment must be made on the part of that outside artist before they take their work to the commercial level. “You have to check the history so you know what you are doing,” he explained. “Our culture has been underground for a long time, forced there, shamed there, and it’s only been coming out again since about 1970. It’s still hurting, the pain is still great, we still feel the repercussions today. It was made illegal for a long time to even talk about sacred things, but it was through art, important activists who were extremely good craftspeople, that it started to come back and become free. That has to
be respected.” Sebastian names Walter Harris as a Gitxan art master he personally looked to as a leader, and he also saluted the Hunt family of Vancouver Island as being art activists who helped Canada begin to think early thoughts about reconciliation with the oppressed First Nations. One of the important things the Hunt family did, Sebastian said, was welcome and mentor John Livingston into their traditions. Livingston, who passed away this spring, was non-Aboriginal but became a leading figure in that region’s Indigenous arts scene. He earned his adoption by committing to the study of the art’s cultural foundations, said Sebastian. “As long as they study the meaning, learn the full history of the symbols and designs, then I am ok with anyone who feels moved to make our art,” he said. “But you have to do your work, and that means person to person, learning directly from one artist to another, over a period of time. I strongly believe in new traditions - basing all new designs off of old traditional ones - but you have to know what you’re doing. It’s also important for older generations to be open to the designs of the new generations. You have to allow youth to find their own way, express themselves authentically in their times. When you are trying to build a culture that stands for honesty, that stands for integrity, then that has to come out in the art. If you build good children, you will find some fine art come out of that. That’s so important. The art will tell you what kind of culture you have, what kind of community you have.” At age 65, Sebastian believes he has about 15 more years of vital art still ahead. Some artists, he said, don’t even start their careers until this point in life. He doesn’t want to waste the head start he has been given, especially since his life was, by his own admission, deeply troubled and painfully disrupted in his early adult years. He credits his two children as being the forces in his life that forced him to correct his path, and even that was slow and uneven in its execution. He stands now a gratefully changed man ready to take on new concepts in Canada’s oldest forms of art.
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