Artist paints province

OLGA LIVSHIN

Renowned Canadian artist Yehouda Chaki is visiting Vancouver for Toba River Series Revisited: Recent and Selected Works from 1979-Present, an exhibition of his work at the Buschlen Mowatt Gallery, showing until the end of the month.

Since the age of seven, Chaki has used visual arts to communicate. “When we emigrated to Israel in 1945, I didn’t know any Hebrew,” he told the Independent, “so I sketched on a piece of paper whatever I wanted.”

His mode of self-expression hasn’t changed in more than 60 years. A man of few words, the artist lets his canvases tell his life story. “My paintings are a dialogue between me and the world,” he said.

Chaki was born in Greece in 1938. A Greek Orthodox family sheltered his parents, him and his brother from the Nazis, but all of his other relatives – uncles, aunts and cousins – perished in the Holocaust. After the war, already in Israel, he remembers his mother rushing to the radio when the program Mi Makir – which helped hundreds of people find their lost relations – was aired. His mother didn’t find her lost relatives – they had all been killed in Auschwitz – but Chaki’s Mi Makir series, featuring portraits of the lost, was born of these recollections.

After serving in the Israeli army, where one of his duties was to sketch topographic landscapes of the Golan, Chaki studied fine arts, first at Avni Academy in Tel Aviv and then at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris. In 1963, he married and moved to Canada, settling in Montreal. In the four decades since, he has had more than 80 solo shows in North America, Israel and Europe, and his works hang in museums and collections all over the world. Among his patrons are banks and universities, city halls and embassies.

Chaki has painted many different styles, starting with abstracts and progressing to portraits, figurative compositions and flowers. In 1979, he began painting large landscapes and they remain one of his favorite subjects. Until recently, his landscapes were saturated with warm, lush colors: reds, yellows and oranges, reminiscent of the sun-drenched hills of Israel and Greece. Several such landscapes are presented in the current exhibit.

Chaki’s landscapes are not realistic, they are impressionistic renderings of fantasy. Fascinated by nature, it seems he cannot abide anything man-made in his landscapes: no houses or electrical poles appear, for example.

The Toba River series is a departure from Chaki’s customary palette. The series emerged out of his friendship with Donald McInnes, chief executive officer of Plutonic Power Corp. In 2007, McInnes, a collector of Chaki’s art and a personal friend, conceived the corporation’s new and challenging project: the Green Power Corridor. Impressed by the rugged shores of Powell River and the Toba Valley, the projected sites of the company’s hydroelectric plants, McInnes invited Chaki to fly to Vancouver and visit the region by helicopter, landing wherever Chaki directed.

“I thought he would create a painting and we would make reproductions and present them to all the bankers and officials,” McInnes recalled. Instead, Chaki embarked on a new artistic journey. He created 63 paintings, some of them wall-sized. “I was drunk on those images,” Chaki recalled.

The untamed panorama of northern British Columbia galvanized Chaki into changing his customary colors. Greens and blues, mountains and the river, dominate the series. Its first two exhibitions, in Vancouver in 2008 and then in Toronto, were successful. “Instead of one reproduction, we now present our visitors with a book of reproductions – the catalogue from that show,” explained McInnes.

The paintings in the current exhibit form a second series, After the Toba River. Created in 2010, they sprouted from the artist’s memory. Dramatic gray crags and evergreen mountains manifest with orange and yellow highlights add to the joy of the images. The water of the river sparkles in all the colors of the rainbow. Every wave is an explosion of light and color, a dance of brush strokes. It seems no wonder that the flow of such sparkling energy produces electricity.

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She is available for contract work. Contact her at [email protected].

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