At this time in my life, I was exposed to a lot of new ideas. In fact, my mind felt a bit too full most of the time. Everything seemed too stimulating. It was the rapture of being surrounded by lots of new people, new ideas, and the intoxication of possibility.
Who was I?
I would see some of my classmates show off their art school personas, decked out in leather jackets, bolo ties, and gelled and bleached hair. I never trusted fashion much, and had no real sense of style anyway. I just wanted to be clean, self-sufficient, and maybe a little anonymous. In my 1971 German Army Surplus combat pants and Converse sneakers, I was no preening peacock of fashion. I could only watch the other fashion peacocks in wonder, asking myself how much their outfits cost and how they knew what was good to wear.
But I saw that image-making and performance was an important part of social survival: looking good probably made you feel good, and standing out socially probably made you feel special, or strong, or happy. For me, Emily Carr was more like a new refuge, a place I could hide in while I figured out who I wanted to be. It was my duck blind, from which I could safely observe the other wildlife.
Who I was at the time was a slightly confused, unrefined young man, with a burning desire to figure out life and my place in it. At art school, I felt as if clouds of philosophies, life goals, values, and new questions were swirling around me in the very air, breezing out from every duct in the old factory that the Emily Carr College of Art had been rebuilt from. The school I was learning in had been redesigned from something old into something new and very different in purpose. That was symbolic for me. I wanted to both answer my old questions (why me, and who am I?) and ask some new ones (where can I do? Do I deserve to succeed?)
The spectrum of subjects in the Foundation first-year curriculum was both general and vast: Colour, Three-Dimensional Art, Creative Process, Drawing and Two-D image-making, and Art History. In any given week, I’d learn a bit about the ancient Egyptian sculpture, Bauhaus integration with industry in Weimar Germany, recent video art in New York, or First Nations carving and jewelry made by Masters here in BC.
I struggled to understand social and political movements which used art for their expression and promotion. Each Manfesto by each artist group felt kind of hollow to me until I dug deeper into it and understood a bit more of the lives of its creators and the society in which they lived. I think my world was so dominated by modern commercial media that I couldn’t understand the significance of rebellious posters and pamphets in European cities after World War 1. Gradually, I understood that it was all graphic design, but in the service of social satire and political commentary in World War 1, and in my modern world, a similar language was being used to try and get me to buy shampoo.
Art became the framing device for everything I was starting to learn about: Art was Representational. Art was Non-representational. Art was Objective. Art was Subjective. Art was Political. Art was Social. Art was Concrete. Art was Abstract.
The topics that affected me most naturally seemed to be closer to abstract, technical ideas, like the relationship of light to colour, or how art and science affected each other and society in general. I guess I didn’t realize that I was actually a fairly technically-minded materialist. I just kept trying to find answers or at least a base of reference for each new mental challenge or unanswered question.
Who Could I Be?
The fact is, for me, everything was exciting and worthy of exploration: I loved the hands-on immediacy of drawing, I loved the energy of colour and its almost infinite combinatory effects. I loved the promise of new technology, the glow of LED lights and the whir of tiny motors. I loved sitting in the dark, taking notes while being told a story about some past craftsperson or artist. All of it engaged my imagination and spurred new thinking and new directions.
My problem might have been in choosing one thing or another as a direction after Foundation was over. I couldn’t decide on choosing just one direction.
