Leaving town for the summer used to be a lot simpler.
Haida artist April White is planning her annual move to Masset at the northern end of Graham Island in the Haida Gwaii archipelago and there are many things that need to be taken care of before she leaves for the summer.
The phone in her gallery rings again for the fourth time interrupting her story. “People know I’m leaving,” she said. “There’s no easy way to slip out the back.”
White divides her time between Powell River, Masset and Friday Harbour on San Juan Island in Washington State.
“I like to tell people I spend half my time here, half my time up in Masset and half the time everywhere else.”
For the last 10 years White and her partner Farhad Ghatan have been spending part of their year living in Masset. Together they run the Eagle Feast House Bed and Breakfast which also includes studio and gallery space.
“It’s like the end of the Earth when you’re up there,” she explained. “The people that come are very directed to be there, so you have quite a captive audience.”
White, who was born in Haida Gwaii, and has the traditional Haida name Sgaana Jaad or Killer Whale Woman, moved with her family as a young child to Powell River.
In 1993 she bought a 1928 heritage house on Marine Avenue and set up her studio and gallery called Wind Spirit. She spends most of her winter working there and it also houses her printmaking and her custom frame shop.
White’s art has become increasingly well known internationally over the last few years. She regularly travels to the American Southwest to first nations art shows, and last year she was invited to Paris, France to display her paintings in one of the most prestigious art shows in the world, the 2012 Art en Capital’s Salon du Dessin et de la Peinture à l’Eau (works with water-based pigment on paper). It was a show of 15 North American first nations artists; only three of the artists were Canadian. She has done countless numbers of exhibits in Canada and even cooperated to publish a coffee-table book of her art. She was also included in Raincoast Conservation Foundation’s 2012 book Canada’s Raincoast at Risk: Art for an Oil-free Coast.
Despite spending the better part of the last 30 years as a working artist, White did not study art in school. She is almost entirely self-taught. She graduated from the University of British Columbia with a bachelor of science degree in geology.
“In school I took as much science as I could,” she explained. “Art was easy for me.”
Ever since her childhood she’s enjoyed creating art, but it wasn’t until the mid-1980s that she decided to trade her rock pick for her paintbrush as a career. “Watercolour technique wasn’t exactly a topic of conversation with the drillers,” she said.
She had been working as a geologist in BC’s most rugged and beautiful parts, scenery that she started painting in her free-time. It did not take her long to hone her skills and soon the people who were framing her paintings wanted to sell them too.
Transitioning between geology and art was helped by her family’s artistic and cultural heritage, with its strong connection to the natural and supernatural world. White’s great-great-grandfather was Charles Edenshaw, who is considered to be one of the best Haida artists and carvers. Her cousin Jim Hart is a master carver and she has numerous other cousins who are talented artists as well.
“People are sure that art is in our genes,” she explains. “It’s more in our temperament than our imagination.”
While she may have started with painting using watercolours it did not take her long to branch out and explore other methods of sharing her vision of “the world of her ancestors,” with its “breathtaking beauty and bounty woven with the supernatural.”
From watercolours she moved on to formline paintings with acrylic-based inks. Formline is the traditional, stylized Northwest art form. It is used to show natural elements in the real world, by flattening and rearranging the anatomical elements of animals and humans. The artist then takes these elements and combines them in creative ways, such as the face of a bear used in the shape of the eyes of an eagle or salmon.
As she honed her screen printing skills she also opened a custom frame shop in the basement of her studio. Now she creates her images, decides how many she will release in an edition, and then prints, frames and sells them all out of her gallery.
White has her eye on new projects to keep her busy and challenged. She’s currently working on a collage project where she is planning on taking overruns and prints with small problems and cutting them up into small pieces and rearranging them into new works.
She’s also working on an 18-colour layer print on wood that has forced her to be creative and alter the way her screen printing works.
“I’m on plan Z now,” she said. It is the first time she has tried something so complex. “If it was on paper it would be no problem, but I’m printing on a two-inch thick board.”
The board already has a copper-painted frame so after the print is complete it will not have to be put under glass, she said.
Carving is the next major challenge for White. One of the best known forms of Haida art is in argillite carvings. Argillite is a type of hard, fine black rock that can be carved with woodcarving tools. The specific type that Haida carvers use can only be found in a quarry near the town of Skidegate on Haida Gwaii.
This summer, White is planning to make a brief return to Powell River to host a PRISMA (Pacific Region International Summer Music Academy) fundraising event at her gallery.
“It’s my way of helping,” she said, “to give something back to the arts in the community.”
