Looking Ahead

With these 2 paintings making their journey to the Vancouver Mainland next week,

I've transitioned back to commissions for 4 icons, all Coast Salish in theme, which will take a few months.

After that, I will be returning to another canvas which I had drafted and base-coated a year and a half ago. I had a 12"x36'x1.5" canvas on hand and I wanted to do another one of this size. The closeup facet for this one is from the mid section of the Haida, Sidegate totem in Melbourne, Museums Victoria Collections. [ Item X 17074 Carving, Haida, Skidegate, Queen Charlotte Islands, North American North West Coast, British Columbia, Canada, 1901 ]

As the size doesn't allow for the extended eagle beak, I had to crop the image. "This totem has figures carved out of the wood: from the bottom, grisly bear, eagle, killer whale and frog."

Image from the Museums Victoria Collections

Draft of the section on canvas

The following, is information from the Museum's website:
*Important to note that this totem pole is now the focus of inquiries from the Haida Gwaii Museum at Kay LLnaggay in Canada.

'It comes from Skidegate village in the Queen Charlotte Islands in British Columbia, Canada. It was obtained in an exchange with the Field Museum in Chicago despite the report by their director, George Dorsey, that Baldwin Spencer had 'refused many offers of exchange [due to] the extreme rarity of Australian artefacts'. Objects from central Australia to the value of '100 pounds' were sent to Chicago in 1908 and the totem pole arrived in Melbourne in 1911. Charles Frederick Newcombe was the original collector of this and other totem poles at Skidegate village. He was commissioned by a number of museums in Canada, USA and UK to collect artefacts from along the British Columbia coast from the First Nations people of the Haida, Kwakiutl, Nootka and Salish, and Dorsey engaged him to collect for the then Field Columbian Museum from 1897. However it is most likely that the totem pole was collected between 1901 and 1905 along with the others from Skidgate village, which were distributed amongst museums across the world - namely to museums in Sydney (presumably to the Australian Museum), Cambridge, Kew Gardens, Liverpool and the British Museum in the United Kingdom, and Chicago, Brooklyn, Pennsylvania, the American Museum of Natural History and the University of California in the United States America. During the last one hundred years at this museum, the pole was cut into two sections in order to fit it into the store rooms, and only in 2000 were these two parts reunited when it was placed on display in the public galleries of the then newly opened Melbourne Museum. It remained there until last year and is now back in storage. The totem pole is now the focus of inquiries from the Haida Gwaii Museum at Kay LLnaggay in Canada.'