'The Colours of Art Live on'

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Arthur Shilling (1941 - 1986)-
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© Artur Shilling
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>>> "Spiritual Abstraction" is a theory which Arthur Shilling believed old people know and practice and is something young children can sense.<<<
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Arthur Shilling remembered
by Robert Britnell
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Arthur Shilling said he had once seen light and colour making love. His relationship with his work was that intimate. Some have said that there is no one who could ever make colour do what Arthur Shilling could make it do. Ten years after his passing it was said "to see his work is to be exposed to a vision that lives on today."
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Its been 23 years since Shilling died of heart failure and that thinking has not changed.
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Shilling was born April 19, 1941, on the Chippewas of Rama First Nation near Orillia, the seventh child into an Ojibway family of 13 children. His father was a carpenter. Shilling started drawing as a small child and also in his formative years he carved totem poles. He was encouraged by his mother, Eva, who despite having little money would save up to buy books with the works of Van Gogh, Rembrandt and Cezanne. It was from these masters that he would teach himself to paint. As a child he suffered four attacks of rheumatic fever which inflamed his heart valves and left them damaged. At the age of eight he was placed in the Mohawk Institute in Brantford for a year with a brother.
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It was at this institute that he became more conscious of his artistic ability. In the months of recovery from the severe fever that permanently damaged his heart, he began to paint and by the time he was in his late teens his accomplished style was beginning to attract attention.
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In his book Ojibway Dream he described how he looked at the world while growing up, "As a boy I would explore the fields excited and terrified. I could smell the grass, hear the birds. Maybe it was the colours, the green grass that turned my curiosity. Seeing colour made me forget being afraid. I wandered further and further away following the colours."
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Shilling did not attend high school because the teachers would not let him paint. He moved to Toronto in his late teens, and although he received a scholarship from the Indian Affairs Department to study at the Ontario College of Art, he went to few classes, preferring to find his own way. The teachers at OCA wisely looked at his work and encouraged him to keep painting naturally and not to let anyone else influence him.
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At some point he was inspired by Norval Morrisseau, but Shilling chose a different path from Morrisseau and that way meant moving away from traditional First Nation art forms, the illustration of legends and the use of animal symbolism, while at the same time exploring the native experience in the life of the people around him, particularly in the faces of people from his community.
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"There is more than legends and folklore to our Indian culture and I try to capture the spirit of the whole thing around us and interpret it by giving it depth, dimension and meaning through very definite colour forms."
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It was in his own people that he found his greatest inspiration. He painted them as though he could see their souls. "You know I'm painting an Indian from the feeling that comes out in the drawing," he said in 1967. "Feathers don't make him an Indian. It's the strength and emotion that come through the picture."
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He received a boost from Esther and Jay Fine, owners of an Orillia gift shop. They approached Shilling at his home in Rama to ask him to display some of his paintings in their shop.
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At the age of 22 he received a scholarship of $6,600 toward the cost of third-year studies at the Ontario College of Art and Design as an exchange student in Florence, Italy. He also studied under Bert Henderson, head of the southampton School of Fine Art in Ontario. From there he went to study with Gerald Scott of the Artists' Workshop.
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Although the silence of his First Nation heritage came naturally to him, he had made two memorable comments around this time. One was related to his use of colour: "There are not enough shadows in the world to overcome the colour in my mind." The other was in answer to what he would do with a million dollars: "Stay right where I am (in Orillia) and paint."
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A few of his paintings were on view in Toronto in 1963 at the Artisans Gallery, whose owner, Mildred Ryerson, was one of the first to recognize and forward his talent. Shilling had spent a year in Toronto with the assistance of private bursaries. This exhibition was his first concentration on portraits in oils, but long before that his facility with pencil was plain.
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Since 1967 many things had happened in his life: solo and group exhibitions, awards, an invitation by Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau, along with six other Canadian artists, to have dinner with Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, a presentation to the Governor General Edward Schreyer at Rideau Hall, a heart bypass operation and three films by the National Film Board that included The Beauty of My People: the Life and Work of Arthur Shilling, The Great Canadian Indian Canvas and The New Canadians. Shilling had come to national attention.
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He had married Amelia, more affectionately known as Millie, whom he had known since childhood in Rama.
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The mid 1970s were not pleasant times for this artist. Shilling began drinking and the alcohol grabbed a hold of him and kept him from his painting. He became seriously ill and was hospitalized in Toronto and Orillia. Following the successful replacement of a damaged heart valve in 1975 that saved his life at the age of 34, he returned home.
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The Shillings had two sons, Bewabon and Travis, who became subjects for his portraits. Shilling returned to his canvases with a new spiritualism he found in the land of the Rama Indian Reserve. Now, Shilling "painted because it's the only way to show the beauty of my people... I try to reveal their spiritual soul, the quietness that makes us different, that no other nation or people have."
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By 1980 numerous galleries across Canada had shown his work and exhibitions of his paintings had also taken place in New York City and as far away as Brazil. His paintings were in the Department of Indian Affairs, the permanent collections of The McMichael Canadian Collection, The National Museum of Civilization, The Royal Ontario Museum and The Canadian Embassy collection in Washington, D. C.
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In 1984 while he was working on the paintings and text for the book The Ojibway Dream, he was obliged to undergo further heart surgery. During the spring of 1985, ignoring medical warnings, he travelled to the Peace River district of northern Alberta and spent several weeks there teaching on native reserves. Although failing energy made painting very difficult, he work until his death on March 4, 1986. Shilling died while in his 45th year and had been living close to death with a damaged heart for a long time. So when he wrote of sleep and dreams and death, of his use of colour to fight off fear and darkness, he was writing as he painted, in a desperate race against time. Shilling was buried in a quiet and protected stand of white poplars just down the road from his home.
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His book, The Ojibway Dream, was published in the year of his death and included a collection of 21 paintings and a poetic text offered as a memorial to this magnificent artist.
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Both his sons, Bewabon (an Ojibway word meaning "sunrise") and Travis have followed in their father's footsteps and are successful artists in their own right.
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Source: Text 'Artur Shilling remembered' by SUN MEDIA - A Quebecor Media Company; Image & additional text by TAWOW - Canadian Indian Cultural Magazine /Volume 7 - Number 1/.-
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>>>Reference posting: Great Anishinaabe/Woodland Artists (Part VII) -
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* The image in this posting is a detail of the large painting of the two oldest and two younger residents of the Christian Island Reserve, Ontario, Canada. This beautiful painting was presented to the Christian Island Band Council on the opening of their new Cultural Centre. © Artur Shilling