Curator & Collector

Rear-side view of Bill Reid’s “The Raven and the First Men”*

When I took a group of young people to UBC’s Museum of Anthropology some days ago, one of them asked me about the significance of the face at the bottom of the giant yellow cedar version of Reid’s The Raven and the First Men. I myself have wondered this, and until recently was unable to answer properly.

In “The Classical Artist on the Northwest Coast,” an essay in Solitary Raven: The Essential Writings of Bill Reid (an eminently readable book, and the subject of another post), Reid says:

“the face on the tail of the Raven is an elaboration of the joint mark in which the ovoid has pretty well disappeared altogether. The concentric ovoids that you generally find in such a thing have been taken over by the face, which originally would have decorated only the central ovoid. It has expanded to take over the whole thing. So although it is a face, it doesn’t represent anything in itself. It is just an elaborated joint mark” (p. 140).

The joint mark is the negative space white circle that appears, for example, in my post on negative space in the aboriginal art of the northwest coast. The concentric circles, and also negative space crescents, can be seen in Reid’s traditional form-line Haida Dogfish:

Image of Bill Reid’s “Haida Dogfish” taken from
The Canadian Museum of Civilization

The ovoids to which Reid refers, including the central body ovoid which contains the face are “compressed into circles” as Hillary Stewart remarks in her comments about this artwork in her book Looking at the Indian Art of the Northwest Coast.

Reid would go a step further from his dogfish portrayal in his Haida Beaver Tsing:

Image of Bill Reid’s “Haida Beaver Tsing” taken from
Spirits of the West Coast Art Gallery

Perhaps the most extreme example of this elaboration of joint marks into faces occurs in Reid’s stunning, very busy (and almost disorienting) Haida Bear**

Image of Reid’s “Haida Bear” taken from
the Lattimer Gallery

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*For those who have not had an introduction to the First Nations art of the northwest coast, please see the table of contents to my little blog post series on this subject.

**There seems to be some confusion over the precise name of this artwork. I will endeavour to find out the exact name within the next week or so.