Modern painter and Chilly Lake First Nations resident Alex Janvier died on July 10 at age 89, as confirmed by his household, who shared the information on the artist’s Instagram account. Remembered for his vividly colourful work melding Indigenous Denesuline artistry with trendy and up to date types, Janvier and his work are celebrated in museums and personal collections throughout North America and internationally.
Janvier was born in 1935 on Treaty 6 territory in jap Alberta to Mari Janvier, a Saulteaux (Ojibwa) lady, and Harry Janvier, the final hereditary chief of the Chilly Lake First Nations earlier than the federal authorities imposed elected officers. The artist, one among 10 siblings, spent a lot of his childhood studying the Dene language and Denesuline customs for the way to reside off the wind up till age eight, when he was taken to the Roman Catholic-run Blue Quills Indian Residential Faculty. Janvier has recounted the trauma he endured on the faculty through the years. In an interview with CBC Information, he shared his expertise of being loaded onto a chilly truck with different kids, forcibly stripped, and showered in a bunch earlier than having their culturally important braids reduce off.
Disconnected from his household and tradition for 10 years, Janvier embraced the therapeutic advantages of drawing and portray on the Blue Quills faculty, the place he was supplied with supplies and artwork instruction. “I discovered a sure time of the week, you may escape from the entire outlay of controls,” he instructed Ottawa Morning‘s Hallie Cotnam in an interview. “And for about three hours, you’re in your individual world, and that’s once I started to find my capacity to work on paper and exquisite colors — every kind of colors.”
As a teen at St. Thomas Extra School in Saskatchewan, Janvier was beneath the tutelage of College of Alberta professor Carlo Attenberg, who launched the younger artist to the work of Wassily Kandinsky and Joan Miró. By 1960, Janvier accomplished his Effective Arts training on the Alberta College of the Arts in Calgary, and taught briefly earlier than committing his time totally to portray. In 1968, he married Jacqueline Wolowski, with whom he went on to have six kids. The couple remained collectively till his passing.
Within the early ’70s, Janvier grew to become a part of a bunch known as the Skilled Native Indian Artists Incorporation (PNAI, but in addition informally known as the Indigenous Group of Seven) with artists Daphne Odjig, Jackson Beardy, Eddy Cobiness, Norval Morrisseau, Carl Ray, and Joseph Sanchez. The PNAI offered trendy and Indigenous paintings to the mainstream Canadian artwork market, extracting it from the everyday narrative of First Nations handicraft work. Not solely did they exhibit and market their inventive output as fantastic artwork, however additionally they promoted artmaking in Indigenous communities throughout Canada by instructional alternatives and scholarships funded partly by their paintings gross sales.
In his personal work, Janvier is finest identified for his colourful abstractions combining Denesuline geocultural references with European Modernism. Starting from daring, vivid acrylic compositions of flowing strains, natural shapes, and dotted patterns to shifting and bleeding sweeps of watercolor on paper, Janvier evoked the pure world, Denesuline cosmologies, and his familial relationships by his work for the final 70 years.
Janvier has been included in numerous group and solo exhibitions since 1950, with extra specialised consideration paid to his distinctive apply beginning within the early 2000s. The artist and his household established the Janvier Gallery in 2003 and later moved it to Chilly Lake First Nations land, the place he maintained his studio apply, exhibited and offered his work, and featured the work of different Indigenous artists throughout Canada. Along with a number of solo reveals at Bearclaw Gallery and Canada Home, Janvier had a retrospective on the Nationwide Gallery of Canada in Ottawa in 2016, and lots of of his public commissions stay on show all through the nation.
The artist is survived by his spouse, Jacqueline; their six kids; and 22 grandchildren, in addition to numerous buddies and relations.
