Cree art celebrated
While his paintings have become quite coveted by their lucky owners throughout the Cree nation, never before has Tim Whiskeychan been bestowed with the honour of having one blown up large scale and reproduced on tiles for a mural at a school.
A few months ago Whiskeychan entered a contest in Nemaska to have a painting turned into a mural at the Luke Mettaweskum School and he won.
According to Whiskeychan, the group in charge of the contest decided to have the painting transferred onto ceramic tiles to form a 30-x-10 foot mural for the school and the community to enjoy.
“The original work depicts the old post and the new post. The centre of the painting features a mural of a walking-out ceremony and then it has a wooden shovel that the Crees used to use divide the picture on the left and on the right I made a paddle to divide the other side of the image. I also made a birch-bark canoe and there is a butterfly flying over the scenery along with syllabics and other animals so it is quite the composition. The syllabics pertain to each of the first letters for the animals that are found in the painting,” said Whiskeychan.
Because the name, Nemaska, roughly translates to a place with much fish, Whiskeychan said he made the fish in the painting the most prominent of all of the species in the composition to reflect the community.
For the last few months, Whiskeychan has been traveling back and forth from the Cree communities to participate in having his work painstakingly transposed onto ceramic tiles. Though he has sculpted and carved clay in the past, he by no means would consider himself a ceramist.
“The last two weeks I have gone into the shop to work on the faces of some of the women in the image to add character, while the technicians worked on the other parts of the mural like the landscape and the teepees and the rest of the composition. I was actually just there to see how it was done,” said Whiskeychan.
The original painting he created was done with mainly acrylics and some airbrushing. After seeing what the process has been like to transfer from one medium to another, Whiskeychan admits he could have perhaps made something simpler.
The ceramists are recreating Whiskeychan’s work by first creating a maquette of the original work on paper to divide the painting into each tile and then tracing the work on to the tile. Whiskeychan has been inspecting the process to ensure that each hue and each line is exactly like the original.
This process has been difficult in the sense that when ceramic tiles are painted, the colours are not the same as they are after they are fired in the kiln. To ensure that the work comes out the right colour and for safety’s sake as tiles will break, the ceramists working on this project have been creating two of each tile as a precaution.
Doing this project has been tremendous for Whiskeychan’s creativity, since it has inspired him to possibly work with the medium again in a different context, like a kitchen, a washroom or a swimming pool.
“I want to think beyond those margins. Just like the great masters long ago, the Egyptians or the Sumerians, they all did a lot of tiles. The way they applied their paint was more of a mosaic process. I am thinking about doing a mosaic but a Cree version with each tile painted in different hues and then creating a big puzzle,” said Whiskeychan.
Ideally, this could be a project done with the youth in the communities.
Whiskeychan likes the idea of working with clay again as a wonderful blue clay has been discovered in Eeyou Istchee that when fired turns out a stunning brownish-copper-gold colour that is unique.
Whiskeychan said his final work will be unveiled at the school probably in November once all of the tiles are completed and then mounted.
While the final project has yet to be revealed, from the way Whiskeychan described his work, Nemaska’s school children are certainly in for a treat.