Five Stone Markers

The older I get, the more I love looking at art in the context of daily life. Theories and thinkers can elucidate art. But so can the weather, the local news, the mess in the kitchen.

Yesterday, at a table cluttered with ammunition and camping gear, a friend showed me satellite images of Slave River in the Northwest Territories. He pointed out a particular hairpin curve. He figured he’d find bison there, on the land inside the curve, clearing snow with their big shaggy heads to eat the grass buried underneath. In the satellite view, the river looked like a length of muddy string, or a moose-hide mukluk lace trampled into the earth. The images made my friend think about hunting. But they made me think about painting. The snaky line of the river, which flows up into Great Slave Lake from northeastern Alberta, slid across my mind’s eye and overlapped with Alex Janvier’s Five Stone Markers. Their contours merged, as did their variations of green. The painting became a map. The satellite topography became a painting.

Janvier doesn’t paint maps or aerial views, per se. He’s regarded as a master of abstraction, exploring more subconscious terrain in the manner of Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky. But Janvier has, over seven decades of making art, been preoccupied with land and nature.

He doesn’t paint maps, but the human eye insists on finding recognizable forms within abstract compositions. Critics called Cy Twombly’s white splotches “clouds,” his dark splotches “earth” and his scribbles “graffiti.” Concrete things emerge from splotches and splatters of paint, and occasionally wild things too. Pablo Picasso once saw a squirrel in the middle of one of Georges Braque’s cubist paintings and, as the story goes, Braque struggled for eight days trying to find it and kill it. Maybe painters are hunters, too.

Janvier is Denesųłiné and Salteaux, born in northern Alberta near Cold Lake. On the Cold Lake First Nations website, there is a map of northern Canada. A large yellow triangle demarcates Denesųłiné land, stretching as far northeast as Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, westward to Churchill, Manitoba, and then south to Cold Lake. A new vision forms in my mind, the Dene triangle as an under-painting — painted before the pale pink circles in Five Stone Markers, before the mukluk lace that is the Slave River, before the herd of bison in spring snow.

Janvier has been called The King of Cold Lake. He doesn’t wear a crown but he does seem to have quite the collection of cowboy hats. He’s been called a giant, a real mover and shaker, a powerhouse artist who insisted that Indigenous art be taken seriously in this country. Janvier signed his paintings with his personal treaty number, 287, from 1966 to 1977, to protest government policies against Indigenous peoples. His activism paved the way for future generations of artists. His biographers say he finds peace living close to the lake.

Five Stone Markers is indeed harmonious, the application of paint looks considered, slow. Tracking a bison is slow work, too. When herds of bison move, they walk single file, as it is an efficient way to traverse depths of snow.  Janvier’s painting contains rivers and roads, hills and plains. I see a meeting place in it too — a place for ceremony, with four teepees. I see Dene Land.

Sarah Swan is the director/curator of the Art Gallery of the Northwest Territories.