Dempsey Bob's retrospective depicts evolution of a master B.C. carver – Vancouver Sun

First Nations artist has his first retrospective, five decades into his career
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When: April. 2 — Aug. 14
Where: Audain Art Museum, Whistler
Tickets and info: From $20, Audainartmuseum.com
It took awhile for Dempsey Bob to get his first major retrospective show. But the 74-year-old makes up for lost time with Wolves, The Art of Dempsey Bob, an exhibition at the Audain Art Museum in Whistler that runs through Aug. 14.
The exhibit features 109 pieces from public and private collections, tracing his progress from a young carver from the Tahltan–Tlinget First Nations learning his traditional craft to the master carver of today.
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Bob’s forte is impossibly elegant masks, headdresses and sculptures that take traditional northwest coast art forms and subjects — such as wolves, frogs, ravens, bears, salmon and killer whales — into the realm of modern fine art.
“This one guy asked me if I still use stone tools. And I told him ‘You know, I came here on a jet, I didn’t come in a canoe,’” he said over the phone from his home in Terrace.
“We live today. Every art has to evolve, eventually. The way I approach my work (is), where would our people have gone with the art if they didn’t stop us, through the residential schools and all that stuff?
“There’s nowhere else to go. You can’t go back, you know what I mean?”
So you get a piece like Wolf Chief’s Hat (1993), a striking carving of a stylized wolf head with sleepy eyes, big red lips, ultra-white teeth and giant fangs executed in red cedar, acrylic paint, operculum shell, horsehair, leather, and ermine.
Or Raven Panel (1989), a colourful painted cedar carving that was done after the Exxon Valdez oil spill off the coast of Alaska.
“The black on the bottom is the water, the oil on the water, and that’s why the salmon is black,” he explains.
“Then I did the raven, dropping the salmon eggs in the water. We believe that the raven came and dropped the eggs in our head-water rivers and creeks, and that’s how we got the salmon. I thought the raven’s going to have to come again.”
The modern twist on the work is that it comes with a mirror.
“We say there is a spirit side, and the mirror represented that to me,” he relates. “It shows the other side, shows the other half of reality, that’s what it represents to me.
“This one German guy said to me ‘Hey, that’s not traditional, that mirror is not traditional.’ And I told him ‘If the world lasts another 100 years, that’s going to be a traditional mirror. You’re not going to be here, and I’m not going to be here, we’ll have already bought it.’”
He laughs, something that happens often in a half-hour interview. His sense of humour no doubt helped him through some trying years when he was establishing himself as an artist.
Dempsey was born into an artistic family in Telegraph Creek, on the Stikine River in the northwest corner of B.C. His mother was from the Wolf clan, which means in the matriarchal lineage of his First Nation he’s a Wolf as well, hence the title of the exhibition.
“I was born in the right family, because my grandmother’s father was a carver from Alaska,” he said.
“I didn’t know him, he died a long time ago, but I knew him from my great-aunt’s stories. My mother was a seamstress, she made regalia, beadwork, all that.”
But his natural artistic talent didn’t seem to impress an art teacher in high school, who gave him a C-minus.
“I didn’t draw the way she wanted me to draw,” he says with a chuckle.
“I said ‘That’s how I see it, I’m First Nations, I’m Tahltan and I’m Tlinget. That’s how I see it, and that’s how I draw it. That’s what I do — I can’t deny who I am, I’m my grandmothers and my grandfathers.’ So she failed me, but it pissed me off so bad I got good.”
He laughs.
“It was funny, there was a (high school) reunion, I went back there and wanted to talk to her,” he said.
“I got the Officer of the Order of Canada and I thought ‘That’s pretty good for a C-minus.’ I wanted to go talk to her about it and show her my thing and she wasn’t there.
“Then I realized, I think it was her job just to piss me off so bad I got good, determined.”
He worked all sorts of jobs before he became a full-time artist in 1974.
“I worked in the cannery and I worked in the fish plant, I worked in the pulp mill and the sawmill, did everything,” he said.
“Worked on the pipeline. I did all kinds of stuff, just to survive. You’ve got to survive. When I started (doing art) I did a lot of teaching, because that’s the only way I could get some income in the winter, when there was no one to sell to.”
He had the good fortune to study carving with Freda Diesing in Prince Rupert in the mid-70s.
“She was very critical to the revival of our art,” he said.
“She was the only one teaching it at that time, so she was like our school. She came along at a critical time in my life. I think about it now — what if I didn’t meet her?”
It took awhile to get some momentum in his career going. When he started out, the only place that would sell his art was the Totem Pole gift shop in Prince Rupert.
“When I started there was no market, we had to build the market,” he said. “It’s always a struggle to be an artist.”
His big commercial break was in 1989, when American collector George Gund bought his entire 32-work show at the Grace Gallery in Vancouver. West Van collector Eric Savics bought another complete show in 1993.
In a way his commercial success may be one of the reasons he’s never had a retrospective, even though his work is in many big institutions, such as the National Gallery in Ottawa.
“What happened is most of my pieces are in private collections, in collectors’ houses, so nobody got to see them,” he said. “This is the first time people are really going to see what I’ve done.”
Many artists never get a chance for a retrospective like Wolves, which will cross Canada to the McMichael Gallery in Ontario, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Kelowna Art Gallery over the next couple of years.
He found it “sort of intimidating” to reunite with all his work, decades after he’d seen most of it.
“This one little mask was looking at me, ‘Where the hell you been, dad?’” he laughs. “‘It’s been 40 years! I haven’t seen you for 40 years!’
“There was 70 pieces in the room when I (first) went in, and I could feel them. Because I know every line, I carved it. I drew it first, carved it, sanded it, then I finished it and painted it, so nobody knows them like me.
“But now they look different, they sort of changed, they got their own character, their own feeling. It’s powerful when you get them all together.”
His work continues to evolve; his recent work is complex, with multiple figures. He’s slowed down a bit, though: now he usually works on 10 pieces at a time, rather than the 20 he used to work on when he felt inspired.
“I’ll get one idea and I’ll piggy-back an idea from that, then I’ll get another one and do that and I’ll get another idea, go to bed, wake up and holy s–t, I see something else,” he said “And I’ll do something else.
“Cause when you’re hot, it’s effortless, I feel like I put on my tools and get it done fast and nail that idea right away. Otherwise it’s work, if you’re not in that zone. I get them to a point where I’m not going to change too much, then I know I nailed the idea, then I’ll slowly finish them.”
His art has been a lifelong learning curve.
“As a student (I thought) in two years I’ll be Dempsey Bob, and holy s–t, it took me 50!” he laughs. “And I’m still trying to be Dempsey Bob. I’m trying to get better. People don’t realize how long it takes, you know?”
jmackie@postmedia.com
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