Carle Hessay

Hans Karl Hesse, known in later life as Carle Hessay (30 November 1911 – 1 January 1978), was a German-born Canadian painter. Although much remains uncertain of his early years, he immigrated to Canada in 1927, and later studied at art academies in Paris and Dresden. Hessay served as a Canadian soldier in World War II. After the establishment of peace, he moved to British Columbia, eventually settling in the town of Langley, where he took up art again in the 1950s. Some of his early paintings were done in the manner of Romantic realism. The influence of Expressionism soon became significant, with Hessay drawing on both the European and American movements, together with aspects of Emily Carr and the Group of Seven.

Hessay painted landscapes throughout his artistic life, as well as cityscapes, the Spanish Civil War, Biblical prophecy, and conceptions of the far future. A sizable fraction of his output consisted of abstract pieces. Over time, Hessay's depictions grew more symbolic, one commentator describing his late work as "brazenly metaphysical and apocalyptic". He often made his own pigments, and his style is distinguished by his use of colour, especially black. In 2014, a group of Canadian writers published poems based on his small abstracts. Hessay was the subject of a 2017 documentary film and art exhibition at the University of Victoria.

Early life Hessay was born as Hans Karl Hesse in Dresden, Germany, on 30 November 1911. Accounts of the first few decades of his life are fragmentary and sometimes contradictory. His father worked as a shipping agent for Norddeutscher Lloyd until World War II. Hessay attended a boarding school run by monks in Vienna, but he ran away to Bulgaria and eventually to Constantinople. He was caught by police and deported back, where he was severely punished. Six months later, Hessay ran away again, this time to the Dutch coast. He worked on a herring boat and recalled scaling fish in Arctic seas. Despite these travails, Hessay received a well-rounded education that included art, history, languages, and gymnastics.

Having begun painting at the age of fourteen, Hessay soon returned to Europe where a sympathetic boat captain allowed him to attend art school during the off season. He learned how to isolate pigments and create glazes, skills he later used in making his own colours from minerals and plants. Hessay fought in the Spanish Civil War for a short period. In 1938, he arrived back in Canada, and went on to serve in the Second World War as a corporal in the Royal Canadian Engineers. He was the sole surviving member of a platoon that cleared minefields.

British Columbia Forgotten Logging Camp. 1965.Hessay's first home in British Columbia after WWII was a shanty on Passage Island. In spite of being impaired by posttraumatic stress disorder, he took up the life of a fisherman. He then worked briefly in a commercial arts studio in Vancouver where he made posters for the Lyric Theatre. In a later recollection, Woods described Hessay as being "in a very critical condition, mentally and physically".

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. When he returned to creating art in the early 1950s, these spartan accommodations doubly functioned as a studio. According to Woods, "paintings were everywhere". He enjoyed visiting First Nations reserves, where he found social acceptance. 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. 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. Hessay died of a heart attack on 1 January 1978 while attending a New Year's dance at the Sasquatch Inn in Spuzzum. Having an interest in the chemistry of painting, he often made his own pigments from minerals and resins gathered on his prospecting trips. Black was derived from grinding manganese. He also employed cooked fruits and vegetables, such as onion-skin dyes, potato water, and carrots. Further materials included egg white and house paint. One of his paintings was done with a toothbrush. This enduring early influence, overlaid by the Canadian landscape tradition, gives a unique quality to much of his work. Hessay appreciated First Nations art, admiring the Kwakwaka'wakw artist Mungo Martin, and he knew Bill Reid. His aim in painting was to create a "new, original experience", and his paintings typically emote drama and intensity of feeling, rather than lyricism. Many contain a predominance of strongly contrasting shapes and angles. His painting Immigrant Mother and Child employs instability and distorted perspectives, a psychological reflection on his first arrival to Canada. The monochrome ochre and setting of Abandoned Village, a painting from his Cabins to Cities series, recalls the mood of Emily Carr's Blunden Harbour. At times his landscapes have parallels to those of the Group of Seven. Some of his works lack any reference points, and fit comfortably within the history of Abstract expressionism. Other semi-abstract pieces are infused with hints of nature, commonly oriented by a feature which directs the viewer's perception. Several abstracts relate to his prospecting in their evocation of rock formations. Some indirectly represent the destructive forces of history, as seen in a fairly literal view of Mount Baker in From Here to Eternity, with its overall pink ground colour; or the enameled hues of the large Magenta Fire. As a consequence of witnessing injustice and cruelty, he had a penchant for painting flames. Hessay was an advocate of social justice and protecting the environment. Many paintings demonstrate his love of nature, illustrated by Above the Yalakom, with its fluid design of trees and slopes. In 1967, he created a six by nine foot mural, a depiction of a waterfall cascading from a mountain lake, for the Langley Evangelical Free Church. In Woods' view, Hessay drew on his childhood learning steeped in the Bible, and the mural reinterprets Mount Lebanon, the Sea of Galilee, and the River Jordan in a Canadian context. Various late works are shamanistic and metaphysical, such as the sacral Wake for a Shuswap. This 1971 painting depicts a Secwepemc First Nations memorial taking place around a fire, the participants saturated in bright reds and blues, enveloped by the blackness of night. In Waiting at Wounded Knee, Hessay depicts the reenactment of the Ghost Dance by the Oglala Lakota during the 1973 Wounded Knee Occupation. Injustice to Indigenous peoples is also reflected in other works. A few of his canvases record his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, seen in the ethereal La Pasionaria (Dolores Ibárruri) at the Jarama River. Other war scenes are based on Biblical prophecy or classical history.

His ambivalence towards urban centres is captured in a small number of cityscapes, shown by The Great City, in which his crystalline treatment contrasts with the rubble-strewn setting at the base of an arched viaduct. As part of a Canada Council Explorations project, he created a series of futuristic paintings entitled The Hollow World, destined for the Vancouver Planetarium, but never exhibited in his lifetime. Imaginatively beginning in the year 3000 A.D., they reveal how civilization might unfold, when engineering feats could make possible the creation of new worlds. 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.

Legacy 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.

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.

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).

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.

Hessay's works are represented in the collections of the Langley Centennial Museum and the Penticton Art Gallery. His 1968 painting Port City was depicted 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. Paintings by Hessay have appeared in literary and political journals, including the Boston Review, the Paris Review, and the revived Quarterly Review.

Exhibitions of paintings Village Art Centre – West Vancouver, 25 February to 13 March 1965 Buchanan Gallery – Vancouver, Oct–Nov 1966. Richmond Arts Centre – Richmond, Sep–Oct 1969. Sixty piece exhibition. Stanley Park – Vancouver, annual exhibitions, until at least 1971 Mind and Matter Gallery (Arnold Mikelson, owner) – White Rock, 1971, C Hessay: Signs and Posters, Surrey Centennial Arts Centre – Surrey, 19 June to 8 July 1972 Heritage House Gallery – Langley, 12–20 October 1973 Langley Centennial Museum – Fort Langley, June 1980 Dawson Creek Grain Elevator Gallery – Dawson Creek, May 1984

Gallery Landscapes

Abstracts

Cabins to Cities series

The Hollow World series

The Spanish Civil War and Biblical prophecy