Curator & Collector

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. Only two earlier works, Full Moon, and Loon, had made use of other colours (yellow and aquamarine, respectively). The Westcoasters, then, marks a start in a new direction, combining, as it does, a rather realistic portrayal of the human figures, the very realistic portrayal of the Nuu-chah-nulth canoe, the stylized portrayal of the rain, with the rhythms of western art and the use of a non-traditional third colour in more than one shade.

Nevertheless, the first shape that meets the eye is an ovoid (though, in a twist, it is upside-down). Ovoid-like shapes, or stretched U-shapes, cover the sky with clouds. The characteristic negative spaces, the T- or Y-shapes, are also present where expected–between the form lines of the clouds. There are split U-forms, too: in the eight red and white designs of the boat, and in the body of the right-most figure. Negative space also exists, though in a more modern usage, in the body of the figures on the left and in the center.

After the (European-centric) first view of the top left, the viewer moves from the upside-down ovoid, down and right along the stylized rain, into the water and towards the two figures in the lower left part of the boat. The eye then travels, with the boat, up the wave, to the prow of the boat, which in turn points to the thinnest part of the clouds. Since each cloud to the left drops down lower than the one before it, the eye moves leftward and continues in a circular, counter-clockwise motion. When one steps back from this, one sees that the sky and the boat are pointing right–also the direction that the lead figure in the boat is looking. The storm thins to the right, and so the figures are traveling in the right direction, though whether the storm will pass their destination by after they get there is an open question.)

The only colour in the picture comes from the human figures. Their noses and arms are red with the cold; also, they have painted their canoe with a red design.

The text makes the artwork a tribute to the First Nations of the West Coast, and it surely this, but in a larger sense the work seems to me a metaphor for human existence, meaning, and creativity: human red on the grey canvas of nature. Not that nature is discounted as lesser; far from it. (The next image in Solstice is a brilliant sunset.) With hard work and brains (the latter embodied by the navigator at the front), together with creativity, the artwork seems to say, we are able to go through life together in a beautiful, challenging world.