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Hans Karl Hesse, known in later life as Carle Hessay (30 November 1911 – 1 January 1978),McMann 2003, p. 101.Hilmo, in Woods 2005, p. v. 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. He 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".White, 18 Jun 1980.Woods 2005, p. 25. 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.
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."Carle Hessay has painted for 51 years", 27 Apr 1977. He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the Kunstakademie in Dresden."One Man Show at Arts Centre", 22 June 1972. He learned how to isolate pigments and create glazes, skills he later used in making his own colours from minerals and plants.
Hessay left Germany when the Nazi party came to power. He then led a vagabond life, travelling the world periodically as a commercial mariner, rising to the position of second mate. For some time he did drawings and watercolours from medical slides in French Chad. 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.Anderson, 22 Dec 2006."Carle Hessay show at arts centre", 27 April 1977. Hessay fought in the Spanish Civil War for a short period. While his boat was docked in Spain, he was captured and imprisoned by Moors guards. Since he spoke several languages, he was given greater freedom while being put to work translating letters. Hessay organized an escape party that stole a small boat and crossed the Mediterranean Sea to Africa."Escape Artist", 2006. In 1938, he arrived back in Canada,MacDonald 1979, addendum. 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.Woods 2005, p. 21.
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.Hilmo, in Woods 2005, pp. v–vi. In a later recollection, Woods described Hessay as being "in a very critical condition, mentally and physically". 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.Sommer, Warren; in Wang 2017."Fort pupils react to art display", 11 June 1964.
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.Hilmo, in Woods 2005, p. iii.Woods 2005, p. 3. When he returned to creating art in the early 1950s, these spartan accommodations doubly functioned as a studio. According to Woods, "paintings were everywhere". 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.Hilmo, in Woods 2005, p. i.Woods 2005, p. 9. He enjoyed visiting Indian reserve, where he found social acceptance.Youssef, 25 Dec 2005. 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.Hilmo, in Woods 2005, pp. i–iii.Hilmo 2014, pp. ix., xii. 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.Hilmo 2014, p. viii. Hessay died of a heart attack on 1 January 1978 while attending a New Year's dance at the Sasquatch Inn in Spuzzum. He is buried at Langley Lawn Cemetery.
In the manner of action painting, Hessay frequently painted in a free and vigorous manner, spilling and dragging pigments over one another.Woods 2005, p. 5.Hooper, 11 May 2017. One of his paintings was done with a toothbrush.
Hessay characteristically used colour to register a dominant emotional tone, reinforcing the thematic content. He considered black to be his trademark as a painter.Woods 2005, p. 27. 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.Woods 2005, pp. 11, 25.Hooper, 6 Oct 2016. 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.Hilmo 2014, pp. x–xii. Several abstracts relate to his prospecting in their evocation of rock formations.
artist's landscapes frequently place the observer squarely within the midst of an untamed wilderness, in the deadfall of roots and tree trunks, the chaos of fallen rocks, a great depth of snow, or the center of a great swamp.Woods 2005, p. 23. 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.Woods 2005, pp. 21, 27. As a consequence of witnessing injustice and cruelty, he had a penchant for painting flames.van Loon, Sheila; in Wang 2017. Hessay was an advocate of social justice and protecting the environment. His landscapes often contain signs or remains of human dwellings: forgotten logging camps, a prospector's shack, derelict habitations.Woods 2005, pp. 7, 9, 25. Many paintings demonstrate his love of nature, illustrated by Above the Yalakom River, with its fluid design of trees and slopes.Woods 2005, p. 11. 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 Jordan River in a Canadian context. His last painting, the peaceful landscape Break of Day, completed in 1977, is atypical among those of his final decade, with its use of soft harmonies and rounded contours.
Hessay sometimes used religious allusions as metaphors illustrating the conditions that threaten modern society. The Number of Man refers to the Book of Revelation, and its complex montage of sinister apparitions and skulls is deliberately obscure.Woods 2005, p. 29. 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.Woods 2005, p. 13. 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.Hilmo 2025, pp. 82–83. Other war scenes are based on Biblical prophecy or classical history.Woods 2005, pp. 15, 17.
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.Woods 2005, p. 19. 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.
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. 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".
His artworks were next exhibited in the Grain Elevator Gallery in Dawson Creek in 1984, a month-long exhibition. 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.Oille 1984, p. 35.
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.
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.
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.Hilmo 2014, pp. vii–xiii.
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).Paré 2015, pp. 70, 72.
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.bisset, in Wang 2017.
Hessay's works are represented in the collections of the Langley Centennial Museum"Carle Hessay Exhibition", 12 November 1980. 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. (2025). 9781942954750, Clemson University Press in association with Liverpool University Press. . ISBN 9781942954750 Paintings by Hessay have appeared in literary and political journals, including the Boston Review, the Paris Review, and the revived Quarterly Review.
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