ARTIST FEATURE | CALVIN HUNT

CALVIN HUNT

With keen eyes and outstretched wings, the Thunderbird is poised and ready to take off from the perch of the Killer whale’s tail. Orca balances with grace and power below. A proud chief, wearing the red cedar bark regalia of his ancestors, supports Orca and Thunderbird and stands on a Codfish base. This image of the Chief, carrying the weight of Killer whale and supernatural Thunderbird on his shoulders, is most striking. This pole, commissioned by Chief Norman Frank in 1988, celebrates his uncle Chief Andy Frank, a remarkable man and community leader who carried his culture, his people and the people of the Comox Valley on his shoulders. This beautiful, handcarved and painted Chief’s Pole was created by the internationally renowned Kwaguʼł artist Calvin Hunt.

Hunt is a highly respected Northwest Coast Artist, teacher and inductee into the prestigious Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. Since 1981, Hunt has worked out of The Copper Maker, his carving studio and

I'TUSTO

RISING AGAIN

gallery in Fort Rupert, at the northern end of Vancouver Island. He is a teacher, mentor, and cultural ambassador. Hunt has also undertaken prestigious national and international commissions from public and private institutions around the world for totem poles, masks and monumental sculptures.

Hunt has made a remarkable cultural and artistic contribution to First Nation art. In the Comox Valley alone, Hunt replicated Mungo Martin’s iconic totem poles in Lewis Park, carved poles for Comox Airport, Comox Marine Park, Courtenay Elementary School, the Puntledge RV Campground and a canoe for the K'ómoks s Nation. Most recently, he was the lead carver for the two poles on the K'ómoks First Nation’s administration building that represent the four families of the nation.

Calvin Hunt was born in 1956 and is the youngest son of Kwagu’l Hereditary Chief Thomas Hunt, and

Emma, the daughter of a great Mowachaht Chief and Shaman, Dr. Billy, from the Mowachaht of Yuquot. He is also the grandson of renowned carver Mungo Martin and grandmother Abayah. In 2004, Hunt was inducted into the prestigious Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, and honoured with the BC Creative Achievement Award for Aboriginal Art in 2009.

From 1972 to 1981, Hunt carved full time as an apprentice with Tony Hunt, Sr. (Arts of the Raven Gallery, Victoria, BC.). Moving to his ancestral home of Fort Rupert in 1981, Calvin and his wife, Marie, opened their carving workshop “The Copper Maker” and in 1989 opened the retail art gallery. The gallery’s prophecy has come true, as the gallery and workshop is steeped in a wealth of traditional and contemporary fine art.

Hunt’s 45 years of carving experience has generated an extremely knowledgeable Northwest Coast artist, whose passion for the arts is evident in the pieces he creates. Known for his expertise in his diverse range of totem pole carving, he has produced works of fine art whose sculpture stimulates influences and communicates thought, emotions and beliefs. His creativity and aesthetic sensibilities have been recognized by collectors around the world, giving him the reputation of an internationally acclaimed Kwagu’l artist. Hunt continues working in wood, carving masks, building canoes, and has a range of silk-screened prints, engraves gold and silver jewelry, and creates in bronze and stone.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Fine art constantly evolves; it allows a lens through which the fluidity and creativity of the art of the Northwest Coast is expressed. Working within the elements of traditional Southern Kwakiutl art, my art work crosses the continuum of history and the present. I enjoy sharing our culture with the world, and I feel very fortunate to have the capacity to pass on our Elders’ teachings. I am reminded of the diversity, spirituality, transformation and meaning of our Kwakwaka’wakw culture.

CALVIN HUNT • I'TUSTO RISING AGAIN WITH KARVER EVERSON Spirits of the West Coast Gallery in person or online Exhibition runs until the end of October 2020 www.spiritsofthewestcoast.com

ARTIST FEATURE

CALVIN HUNT

Killer Whales Calvin Hunt

spiritsofthewestcoast.com

BEING HUMAN

FOR OLD TIMES' SAKE

JAMES L. ANDERSON

It was a time and an age like no other. The 1960s. The worldwide surge of Baby Boomers— born in the jubilance following the end of the horror and brutality of a World War, and the escape from decades of austerity, restraint and depression—our young life force reached critical mass when we reached adolescence.

The healthiest, wealthiest and most precocious generation ever rocked the world in a massive shockwave of rebellion, expectation and hope. Blessed with affluence and freedom, we challenged the status quo to the limit.

And for every sign carrying protester, long haired flower child, marching anti-war protester and social revolutionary being tear gassed there were thousands and thousands of us living conventional and passive lives that shared the same rebellious hope, felt the same revolution inside us, longed for the same liberation. All of us were carrying the same dream that we secretly shared. The dream to change the world. To make it better.

In our foolish youthful blind ignorance we believed the impossible… that miraculous change would come. That truth, justice, compassion, equality and peace would come to a tormented and inhuman world if everyone could simply see the outrageous wrong. Witness the wretchedness. Feel the desperate suffering and savagery. But nothing really changed.

Trying to digest this shattering truth that no one really cared caused an entire generation to collapse and self-destruct.

We wanted change desperately, but we really had no idea how deep that change had to be. We didn’t understand that to change anything we had to change everything. The rock hard reality we could not understand and comprehend then was that to truly change our world and make it better, we had to change the human mind itself.

You and I have to recognize that truth today.

And now all of us old rebels and flower children are in the years of twilight.

Somehow we survived those desperate years of despair and self-destruction. We have made bargains and concessions, but somewhere deep in us all the dream and the flower still grows.

We are all close to the end of the road, now. But, in the most vulnerable and desperately weak positions we have ever been in, perhaps we don’t have much to really lose anymore.

Remember what it once felt like to believe that we could change the world? What a legacy it would

be if we could finally finish the job we started half a century ago. Maybe we can believe again, one last time… For old times’ sake.

I was born in 1946, after my father returned home from flying 100 missions in the horror, lost air war in Mainland China. He was a young “rocket man” flying his P-51 technological wonder–part of the “Divine Wind” air corps that tried desperately to protect and defend the Chinese people from the merciless slaughter of insane, mindless, inhuman war.

But in the end, hopelessly alone, hung out to dry flying night and day running out of ammo, fuel, spare parts and daylight in 100 ft ceiling torrential monsoons hopelessly overwhelmed the entire shattered 14th Air Force along with millions of destitute, starving and helpless peasants were left running for their lives half a world away so long, long ago in wretched, savage, unimaginable Hell on earth. And somehow he survived. It had to be something beyond belief to live through, and he never breathed a word about it, ever.

But, he finally came home. And like hundreds of thousands of courageous, impossible men and women survivors of Hell on earth who stood and reached beyond dark, savage madness that had engulfed seemingly forever our life force on this earth… he impossibly found within himself to dream again, and somehow with invincible hope gathering together for a better world, one more time.

My Dad came home and, with my mother, made me. To somehow make a better world. To make the world “Human” again. And so, I and my brother and sisters are part of his dream. We are his dream. The dream of walking this earth, “Being Human” once again… against all odds.

Like his world almost a century ago that had been brought to its knees with a global depression and a monstrous, insane World War all of us are being brought to our knees once again.

And the odds are that in this deranged, inhuman world today where You and I are lost in hate, war and alien, monstrous savagery what lies ahead is simply the insane horror of tactical, nuclear holocaust Hell on earth and a New World Order that is clandestinely and covertly being engineered around us now… beyond which no one will ever be able to walk this earth “Being Human” ever again, and the dream of a better world where at last and finally we truly CARE for each other will be lost forever.

This time it simply does not seem possible that anyone will survive to come home from that monstrous global catastrophic “end game” to piece together this world and find the way to dream a New Human World where our children’s children can live “Human” again. This time the Human Dream must finally die.

It is up to us. Like all of our courageous ancestors before us, we have to do the impossible… again.

The odds are against us. They always have been. We have always been riverboat gamblers, one in a million dreamers gaming everything we are and love in a never say die blood wager against impossible odds. Always.

And our greatest gift has always been in the secret strength we have of reaching out, coming together and hand in hand finding the way through against all odds, believing invincibly somehow that we will do the impossible again, and make it through.

It is our little secret. And our ace in the hole is that the roulette table is actually Universe itself, fulminating towards the impossible dream of perfect, total UNION of all creation. And everything everywhere is at stake in this magnificent quest. It is why LIFE has been breathed into us.

They say that we are all living in a world of cognitive dissonance. But the simple truth is that we will not let the Human dream die, and we are just sleepwalking through our lives now, waiting.

Waiting for the new dream to form within us that will lead us through…

Together.