Jack Shadbolt and the Coastal Indian Image

Edwin G. Higgins was a freelance writer in Sudbury, Ontario.

Of the societies dependent upon gathering food from nature, the Pacific coast societies were the richest in the world. The culture had a caste system, chiefs, and a nobility with hereditary resource areas. With the acquisition of metal, replacing stone wood-working tools, their culture probably reached its zenith in the 18th century.

In these societies, disease was thought to be caused by evil spirits. The role of the native healers, the shamans, was to vanquish their power and drive them out of the victim. They employed visions, fasting, incantations, rattles, dance aprons, masks, and soul catchers. What fascinated Emily Carr, who influenced Jack Shadbolt, was the deterioration of this culture and the brooding forest which overshadowed the remains of villages.

This beautiful small book consists of colored and black and white illustrations. It introduces and attempts to explain Shadbolt’s abstractionism and primitivism. Just as Eskimo soapstone carvers feel they are releasing the image within the stone, Shadbolt grasped the Coastal Indians’ concept of spirit as something shaped from within and tried to bring this to the surface as he carved a mask, door portal, or totem.

Raised in Victoria, Shadbolt first began sketching with his friend Max Maynard who probably introduced him to Emily Carr in 1930.

Shadbolt acknowledges being influenced by Carr and Varley. He began his first serious drawings of Indian artifacts in the Victoria Provincial Museum. He also made sketches on the Cowichan Reserve near Duncan where he took his first teaching job. While he studied in Paris and England he was shaken by the horrors of war. After he returned to Victoria, he began to integrate significant elements of Indian art into his work. Perhaps his strong emotional sympathies with the Kwakiutl, Haida, and Tlingit are most prominent in “Elegy for an Island” (1985) and “Storm Warning” (1986).

In this book author Marjorie M. Halpin, professor of anthropology, stresses the communion of native and non-native artists in expressing univeral concerns. The work adds to the growing literature on Jack Shadbolt and the various movements in which he has been involved. It portrays an artist deeply influenced by the west coast Indian cultures.