Directions: Recent Work by Rick Rivet

Patricia Morley is a professor of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University, an associate fellow of the Simone de Beauvoir
Institute, and author of Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home.

This slim catalogue contains full-page reproductions of 13 of the 20
large acrylics on canvas that made up a 1991 exhibition at the Thunder
Bay Art Gallery. Five are in color, the rest in black and white.

Curator Janet Clark introduces the works with a sketch of
Métis-Canadian Rick Rivet’s development and the relevant contexts for
his work— namely, shamanism and North American Native masks.

Rivet’s bold and impressionistic canvases have been influenced by
both non-Western and Western art traditions, including the work of
aboriginal peoples and of Edvard Munch, Matisse, and Gaugin. The artist
describes his own style as “expressionist primitivist.” He believes
that, through the creative experience, “artists confront the on-going
history of the human spirit.”

This short but impressive monograph is relevant to a study of North
American Native art, shamanism, and masks.