The Arts

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

An environmentalist before it was trendy

By: Alison Gillmor

Posted: 01/28/2012 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

DARCY FINLAY / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Enlarge Image

Impasse: Dog Team at Chasm Edge, by Manitoba artist Clarence Tillenius, who died last week at the age of 98.

In her new biweekly column, art historian Alison Gillmor looks beneath the surface of newsworthy art.

What it is: Impasse: Dog Team at Chasm Edge, one of almost 200 works by Manitoba artist Clarence Tillenius in the collection of the Assiniboine Park Pavilion Gallery Museum.

What it means: Tillenius, who died last week at the age of 98, was a good old-fashioned artist-adventurer. Born into an Interlake homesteading family, he worked as a trapper and a logger and rode the rails during the Depression.

A real outdoorsman, Tillenius made long, tough treks into the Canadian wilderness to research the animals and environments he painted. He followed caribou migration trails in the north, studied wolf packs in the Riding Mountains, and occasionally had what he called a "hairy time" with frostbite, blackflies or a single-engine plane developing fuel leaks at 7,000 feet. Impasse comes out of a trip he made in 1968 to Southampton Island in Nunavut, where he travelled by dogsled with Inuit hunters tracking polar bears.

While there were a few "hairy times" in this particular hunt -- Tillenius's vivid written account reads like a Jack London story -- the artist has chosen an intriguingly anticlimactic moment for this large canvas. We view the scene from a high, rather remote point. Hunter and dogs are discouraged -- halted by a steep drop-off -- and the retreating polar bear is now just a speck in a vast snowscape.

Tillenius is known as an illustrator -- he got his first break doing covers for The Country Guide magazine -- but he was also deeply influenced by European Impressionism and by artists like John Singer Sargent and James McNeill Whistler. Impasse is very painterly, in the daringly deep blue shadows of the snow, in the ochre patterns of the rock, in the way the artist sketches in the sled dogs with a few quick, sure brushstrokes.

Why it matters: Tillenius was passionate about his art. His commitment never wavered, even when he lost his right arm under a CNR rock car in a 1936 construction accident and had to learn to draw and paint again with his left hand.

He was just as passionate about Canada's wilderness, being an environmentalist back before that was a trendy word. Writing in 1998, he explained his "urgent need to make people aware of the threats to their natural heritage."

"To this end, I used whatever time I could take from painting and drawing to write and lecture -- always on my favourite themes: the singular beauty of animals as seen in the wild and the need to preserve their habitat."

(The Assiniboine Park Pavilion Gallery Museum will hold a major retrospective of Clarence Tillenius's work beginning on March 5.)

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition January 28, 2012 G8

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