Curator & Collector

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’ own comments on the spiritual and cultural allusion of the snow and the dancer in the sky.

The centerpiece of the artwork is, of course, the artist’s Eagle Aerie Gallery in Tofino, BC. The gallery, built by Vickers’ brother Arthur Vickers, has a Roy Henry Vickers-favourite element: the eagle. The eagle has a beak that curves down sharply, the chief characteristic of the eagle in northwest coast aboriginal art. In addition, the eye, tongue, and mouth are shown traditionally. There are three black-outlined ovoid shapes in the eagle, and corresponding negative-space ovoid shapes also. The human face below the eagle’s head is depicted completely traditionally. The doors show upside-down U-forms. Moreover, the interplay between mountain and sky on the left takes the form of a flying bird’s wings, head, and beak.

It is in the shrubs and trees, though, where one realizes just how important traditional forms and ways remain to the artist. What looks at first like snow-covered vegetation turns out to be teeming with birds and fish. This might seem to some a little whimsical; when one knows of the role of negative space in traditional northwest coast aboriginal art, though, the birds and fish in the shrubs and trees acquire new significance. Curiously, in a stroke of artistic creativity, Vickers has inverted the usual significance of the colours in this tree (the one on the right): the outer line is white, and the inner, negative space, is black!

The presence of the birds and fish in the trees and shrubs around the man-made building speak to the unity of the world we live in, a world not of man-over-nature, but of humans-as-part-of-nature. The upraised hands of the doorway-figure point, literally and figuratively, above to a spiritual element. Perhaps the chief reason why this image speaks to me is due to this unity of nature, humanity, the divine, and hope–all clad in the peaceful, beautiful shades of winter grey, black, and white. The photograph of Eagle Aerie Gallery that serves as the header for this blog is my own attempt at a modest tribute to Vickers, his brother, and their wonderful northwest coast art.
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This blog post is the concluding one in my series on the forms of northwest coast aboriginal art; the next post will be an index or table of contents, and then I will be introducing two coins with aboriginal designs in the forthcoming posts. There is, of course, much more material to come.