Returning to our Canada trip for a moment, heres a picture of the famous sculptor/artist Bill Reid (who was largely responsible for the revival of the Haida culture) with this gorgeous carving (you will see my reflection in the glass, because it was a photo under glass and I had no polarizer to wipe out the reflections). Gives you a sense of scale of this piece of work. There is an excellent web site discussing his life and his works. Reading this article made me realize we missed one of his great pieces of work at the Vancouver Airport and we stayed within blocks of that for 3 days! bummer.





Click here to see what the work above looked like in reality (as shown previously on my vacation blog). Remember all pictures shown on this blog are clickable and lead to full sized images.
Here's another sculpture of one of Bill Reid's works outside the Vancouver Aquarium.



For some other examples of exquisite Northwest Indian art, visit this
link.

"Of all the arts of which traces remain that of the Indians of the Northwest coast is certainly one of the greatest. But at a time when the statuary of Egypt, Mesopotamia and Greece, those of Soong China and of the European middle ages have irretrievably disappeared along with the men whose dreams they fed, our debt to Bill Reid, an incomparable artist, is that he has tended and revived a flame that was so close to dying. That is not all; for Bill Reid by his example and by his teachings has given rise to a prodigious artistic flowering, the results of which the Indian designers, sculptors and goldsmiths of British Columbia offer today to our wondering eyes." Claude Lévi-Strauss, from the catalogue for "Bill Reid: A Retrospective Exhibition", Vancouver Art Gallery, 1974