Blog

    I’ve always been fascinated by seals and sea lions but I know they are the bane of commercial fishers’ lives. I mostly thought in romantic terms and I idealized them.
    It was on the news that I saw footage of sea lions entering commercial nets containing salmon. The nets were high enough to keep the fish in but not to keep the sea lions out and they feasted on the salmon while the fishers stood helplessly by.  Those log booms and rocks where sea lions congregated suddenly became staging areas for a marauding host.
    It’s interesting that what seems normal and beautiful to one group is the opposite to another. We can look with eyes that see beauty or a species at risk while another group looks at the loss of a way of life.

    This conflict reminds me of the work of an artist, Alex Colville, whose work has been labelled magical realism. He was from the east coast of Canada and his artwork that is particularly impressive is the Horse and Train, from1954. In it a dark horse runs between some tracks towards an oncoming train. It is impressive because the beauty and majesty of the horse is going to lose to the mechanization of the train. It could point to the conflict of the change over from horse powered energy to the machine age or could be more personal and deal with the fear of someone we know who is on a path to self destruction. The horse, like the person we know, just needs to step off the track to be safe. They don’t, or won't, and instead are headed towards tragedy.

Alex Colville