Curator & Collector

Understanding the aboriginal art of the northwest coast is a worthy endeavor; fortunately, the first steps are not difficult. This post functions as a table of contents, or index, to the posts in my series on the formal elements of the aboriginal art of the First Nations of the northwest coast. The series took as [...]

Solstice 2001 image from Roy Henry Vickers’ “Copperman: The Art of Roy Henry Vickers” Solstice 2001 belongs to a period in Roy Henry Vickers’ art long after the highly traditional forms of Raven and Whale, and yet there is still much to be appreciated in terms of traditional forms and subjects, quite apart from Vickers’ [...]

The Westcoasters, taken from Roy Henry Vickers’ book “Solstice: The Art of Roy Henry Vickers” Roy Henry Vickers’ 1982 work The Westcoasters is an early transitional work. In the book Solstice, it is, in fact, the first work not to make more or less exclusive use of the traditional shapes of northwest coast aboriginal art. [...]

Raven and Whale, taken from the 2010 Roy Henry Vickers calendar In the previous six posts, we looked at the various formal elements of the aboriginal art of the northwest coast. These included shapes: ovoids, U-forms, split U-forms, and S-forms. We also saw how the form lines (in black) create negative white shapes, often crescents, [...]

Trev Deeley Motorcycles: Host of Roy Henry Vickers in Vancouver, Dec. 12th-13th Yesterday I and my son went to Trev Deeley Motorcycles on Boundary Road to see First Nations artist Roy Henry Vickers’ Vancouver holiday show, which is continuing until late afternoon today. It was my first time to see Vickers since I was a [...]

I created the current header image* for this blog from my own photograph of Roy Henry Vickers’ Eagle Aerie Gallery in Tofino, BC. This gallery was built by Arthur Vickers, himself an accomplished artist and Roy Vickers’ younger brother. I am not adept at “photoshopping” images, but I added black-and-white effects using Microsoft Windows Live [...]

Image of Roy Henry Vickers’ artwork The Westcoasters taken from the reproductions page of the artist. While in UBC’s Museum of Anthropology the other day, I realized that First Nations artist Roy Henry Vickers represents canoes in different shapes. This thought came to me when I took this photograph of a Nuu-chah-nulth canoe* there: The [...]

A few days ago, my family returned from a very brief visit to Tofino on Vancouver Island in BC. It was the first time I had been there since I was a boy, and I was delighted to return, chiefly on account of the most famous gallery there. The Roy Henry Vickers gallery is, for [...]