Carle Hessay

Hessay was born as Hans Karl Hesse in Dresden, Germany, on 30 November 1911.[nb 1] Accounts of the first few decades of his life are sometimes contradictory.[8] He immigrated to Canada in 1927.[9] Having begun painting at the age of fourteen, he returned to Europe and received an extensive art education at academies in Dresden and Paris.[6] Hessay later left Germany to travel the world as a commercial mariner for many years, rising to the position of second mate. His first glimpse of British Columbia occurred at Port Alberni, when his ship arrived to load lumber. Impressed by the climate, he wanted to record the geography, sea, and rocks of the area.[10][11] Hessay fought in the Spanish Civil War for a short period.[11] In 1938, he arrived back in Canada,[12] and went on to serve in the Second World War as a corporal in the Royal Canadian Engineers.[11][13]

Forgotten Logging Camp. 1965.

Hessay's first home in British Columbia after WWII was a shanty on Passage Island.[14] In spite of being impaired by posttraumatic stress disorder, he took up the life of a commercial fisherman.[13][15]

In 1950, Hessay moved to Langley, a town in the Fraser Valley. He soon met Langley resident Leonard Woods, a former student of LeMoine FitzGerald, and a multi-talented sculptor, musician, poet, and art historian. At the time of their first meeting, Woods was reopening the sculpture department at the Vancouver School of Art.[10][16] In a later recollection, Woods described Hessay as being "in a very critical condition, mentally and physically".[10] The pair became life-long friends, and Hessay valued Woods' encouragement within a loosely knit artistic circle that included the painter Peter Ewart, along with John McTaggart, an art teacher at Langley High School.[17][18]

In Langley, he opened up a sign shop, in the days when signs were still made by hand. Hessay lived in a rear curtained-off area, his furnishings consisting of a cot, hot plate, and table and chairs.[19][20][nb 2] When he returned to creating art in the early 1950s, these spartan accommodations doubly functioned as a studio. According to Woods, "paintings were everywhere".[20] On weekends, he often closed his shop to travel to the Fraser Canyon and the British Columbia interior, where he panned for gold. Hessay once had a prospector's shack near the Old Alexandra Bridge, in the vicinity of Spuzzum.[24][25] He enjoyed visiting First Natiions reserves, where he found social acceptance.[26] His artistic output was initially reflective of his European training. Aware of experiments taking place in New York and California, he began to produce many works of pure or semi-abstraction, alongside his landscapes inspired by the British Columbia wilderness.[20][27][28] A member of the Federation of Canadian Artists, he participated in group exhibits, displayed at local art galleries, and had one-man shows in British Columbia and elsewhere.[29] Hessay died of a heart attack on 1 January 1978 while attending a New Year's dance at the Sasquatch Inn in Spuzzum.[2] He is buried at Langley Lawn Cemetery.[7]

Hessay taught himself gymnastics by training on poles attached to two trees, and a 1943 letter of reference from the Canadian Armed Forces described him as an "all-around apparatus man", and being a capable instructor. Even in his sixties, he liked to entertain by doing handstands, and perform diving feats.[19][52] Hessay believed that music, which he studied in his youth, was the highest art form, and he played the piano well. At the Lion's Club and the Canadian Legion, his music often paid for his supper, and he liked to listen to operas while painting. Self-educated in many ways, Hessay had an excellent knowledge of science, mythology, and ancient philosophy, and he could quote classical literature by heart.[53]

Abstract No. 25, or letting th brush danse (after a poem by bill bissett).

Hessay received minimal recognition for his paintings during his lifetime. When newspapers wrote articles on his exhibitions, they dwelt more on his person than the paintings on display.[26]

In 1980, a retrospective of Hessay's life and art was held at the Langley Centennial Museum in Fort Langley, curated by Warren Sommer. It included photographs, watercolours, and oil paintings.[3][34] Writing for the Vancouver Sun, Brenda White declared that "inside the exhibition space is the still ringing voice of a man who reached into his soul to understand the world he reached out to embrace", and for all their diversity, "the themes originate from the same deep well of emotion and restlessness".[3]

His artworks were next exhibited in the Grain Elevator Gallery in Dawson Creek in 1984, a month-long exhibition.[2] The Toronto art critic Jennifer Oille, while regarding skeptically the events of Hessay's life, described the works as ranging from objective landscape to mindscapes and expressionist symbols.[55]

In 2005, Leonard Woods authored a slim coffee-table book, Meditations on the Paintings of Carle Hessay (Trabarni, 2005), an exploration of the thematic content of the artist's paintings.[49][30]

Four paintings of Hessay's The Hollow World series appeared in public for the first time, in 2009 at the juried exhibition, Universe Inspired Art by Canadian Artists, sponsored by the NRC Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics. The scenes were accompanied by poems from bill bissett, Leonard A. Woods, and Terence Young.[15]

The 2014 book, For Kelly, with Love: Poems on the Abstracts of Carle Hessay (Treeline Press), arranged and edited by Maidie Hilmo, commemorated an unusual project in homage of Kelly Parsons, a Victoria poet and medievalist, who died of breast cancer in 2008. Sixteen Canadian poets were invited to finish a project contemplated by Parsons, but never begun due to her declining health, by each writing one or more poems inspired by Hessay's small abstracts. The collaborative effort included poets such as bill bissett, Patrick Friesen, Linda Rogers, and Patricia Young, among others. In her contribution, Dorothy Field links how Hessay applied "black ink like tar", to Parsons' use of her hands in making arts and crafts, both "undamming the heart". Several poets felt a kinship between writing poems and painting. The abstracts spun a variety of responses: divination of personal relationships, glimpsed mythical forces, expressions of mirth, even Oscar Wilde. The book launch, at the Templed Mind Gallery in Victoria, featured the authors reading their poems, and concluded with a talk on Kelly Parsons by Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, a medieval scholar who knew Parsons well.[52][56]

Arleen Paré wrote two poems, She Asked For Birds, and City Slants, after a pair of untitled paintings by Hessay. They appeared in her 2015 book, He Leaves His Face in the Funeral Car (Caitlin Press).[57]

A documentary film about Hessay, directed by Guochen Wang, screened at the University of Victoria in 2017, in conjunction with an exhibit displaying some of Hessay's futurist views, renditions of the Spanish Civil War, and wilderness landscapes. The film, narrated by Linda Rogers, consists of interviews with twelve people who either knew the artist personally, or were familiar with his work. It closes with bisset's performance of his poem letting th brush dance, which reimagines Hessay's process of creating an action painting.[34][58]

Hessay's works are represented in the collections of the Langley Centennial Museum[59] and the Penticton Art Gallery.[60] His 1968 painting Port City appeared on the cover of the book Late Modernism and Expatriation, edited by Lauren Arrington, and published in 2022 by Clemson University Press in association with Liverpool University Press.[61]

• Village Art Centre – West Vancouver, 25 February to 13 March 1965[12][62]
• Buchanan Gallery - Vancouver, Oct–Nov 1966.[63]
• Richmond Arts Centre - Richmond, Sep–Oct 1969. Sixty piece exhibition.[64]
• Stanley Park – Vancouver, annual exhibitions, until at least 1971[65]
• Mind and Matter Gallery (Arnold Mikelson, owner) – White Rock, 1971,[65] 1979[66]
• C Hessay: Signs and Posters, Surrey Centennial Arts Centre – Surrey, 19 June to 8 July 1972[67][21]
• New Westminster Art Gallery - New Westminster, 11 to 16 September 1972[68]
• Heritage House Gallery – Langley, 12–20 October 1973[5]
• Langley Arts Centre – Langley, 7–8 May 1977[6]
• Langley Centennial Museum – Fort Langley, June 1980[69]
• Dawson Creek Grain Elevator Gallery – Dawson Creek, May 1984[2]
• Templed Mind Gallery – Victoria, March 2014[52]
• Audain Gallery, University of Victoria – Victoria, 14 to 17 May 2017[34]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Carle Hessay.

• Carle Hessay: Canadian Artist (1911–1978)
• Artists in Canada
• British Columbia Artists