Author Jonathan Raban, in his book “Passage to Juneau,” has a way of interpreting Northwest art that is absolutely spot-on. Raban describes* that the more he looked at Northwest art, “…the more I saw that Northwest Indian art was maritime in much more than its subject matter. Its whole formal conception and composition were rooted in the Indians’ experience with water (a fact that seems to have generally eluded its curators). The rage for symmetry, for images paired with their doubles, was gained, surely, from a daily acquaintance with mirror-reflections: the canoe and its inverted twin, on a sheltered inlet in the stillness of dusk and dawn. The typical “ovoid” shape – the basic unit of composition, used by all the tribes along the Inside Passage – was exactly that of the tiny capillary wave raised by a cat’s-paw of wind, as it catches the light and makes a frame for the sun. The most arresting formal feature of coastal Indian art, its habit of dismembering creatures and scattering their parts into different quarters of a large design, perfectly mimicked the way in which a slight ripple will smash a reflection into an abstract of fragmentary images. No maritime art I knew went half as far as this in transforming events in the water itself into constituent elements of design.”
What do you see?
Here’s a Port McNeill art galleryshowing other examples. Enjoy.
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* Pages 24-25.
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