Carle Hessay 1965 Forgotten Logging Camp

Carle Hessay: Forgotten Logging Camp

"Like the kinetic art of the American abstract expressionist school, this work is large and spacious enough for the viewer to be virtually drawn into it and absorbed by its energies. A captivating enchantment of evening quiet, very immediate in its appeal, permeates the canvas with something of the quality of a Whistler nocturne.

The subject, common enough to the west coast of Canada, is an old-time logging camp occupying the marshy area bordering a lake. Backed by a phantom forest of coniferous trees, the roughly utilitarian buildings, supported on stilts over the pervading dampness, are highlighted and reflected in the motionless water. Having once housed a community of men, they are now deserted.

A common visual effect in the Pacific forest after a day of overcast skies and rain is that moment when the setting sun, sinking below the general cloud level, bathes the landscape in luminous light, intense and golden, powerful as a searchlight. Colours are amplified and unsuspected beauties stand forth in starling relief. There is always something revelatory and visionary about this experience. And here the old forsaken houses and the second growth vegetation are momentarily lifted from the plane of the mundane and transmitted into the splendour of some unworldly order of beauty." From Leonard A. Woods, Meditations of the Paintings of Carle Hessay (Tabarni, 2005)

(48 x 36 inches; 122 x 91.4 cm.; oil and enamel on board. Now in the Langley Community Music School.)