Dragon's Eye. Duncan Regehr
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as a career or a job. It was a way of life.
As an adult, not much has changed except that I am more aware of art-making as a constant state of becoming—a way of life where the growing up never ends.
Since early childhood I have been making work. My father’s painting studio was in the house. Pencils, paper, ink and paint were always available. As far as I was concerned, art was as important to life as eating or breathing.
My attitude was not shared by other children, as I soon learned in elementary school in Victoria, Canada.
My teacher asked Rhonda Williams, the prettiest girl in the Primary Division to model for art class. She was wearing a dark sweater, tartan skirt, white ankle socks, and oxfords. Fairly standard attire for the early 1960s, but not very interesting I thought.
I mentally removed Rhonda’s clothing and proceeded to draw the little girl in the nude. I saw nothing wrong with this. My father was painting a nude at home. I wanted Rhonda to appear as a goddess of nature, like T. Hart Benton’s Persephone, a copy of which I had seen in my father’s book on American painting.
My ink drawings progressed and Rhonda grew breasts, hips, and long flowing hair. Suddenly the teacher loomed over my shoulder. She was horrified. Rhonda was mortified. I was tongue-tied. The drawings were confiscated, and I was caned across the backside in front of the class.
Pride swallowed humiliation. I knew my drawings were special. Even though my draftsmanship was never considered to be any good (I was told often enough that it looked like scribbling), it somehow seemed “right” to me. They were part of me. The episode gave me an early sense that my art work was growing up to be my life. Later, I discovered that acting and writing would also be a part of this life.
Rhonda INK ON PAPER
Crane“PRETTY” WORK
Crane “SPECIAL” WORK
Perhaps one negative result of the incident was that it drove me to work in secret. To this day, my process remains very private. I certainly stopped drawing nudes for many years.
I developed two types of material. “Pretty” work for school, which kept everyone else happy, and “special” work for myself, which dealt with my true feelings and ideas. I hid everything in the space where I slept behind the basement stairs.
I showed a little of my work to another teacher, Miss Pottinger, a gifted art instructor, who encouraged me to develop my colors. She would speak of color as though it were something rich and secret to eat, like dark chocolates, and referred to my paint box as “a treasure trove of jewels.”
She tried unsuccessfully to cure my habit of working with both hands. I had been trained to write the (supposed) right way, but I saw no reason why I had to apply the rule to art. I saw no reason for applying it to writing either, but I was told that I would always smear my own scribbles. I frequently and automatically changed hands whilst painting and was equally good at smearing with both.She called this ambidextrous switching “fidgeting.”
Miss Pottinger felt that my assignments were messy and lopsided (a kind understatement) and that fidgeting was due to poor concentration. She was correct, but only halfway. My creations were terribly confused, but only because I had not trained my hands to act harmoniously upon one subject, like those of a pianist. One hand thinks and feels differently from the other, hence it was not lack of concentration, but split concentration that caused my problems.
This syndrome threads its way through most of my life. I am of two minds about nearly everything (sexuality being an exception); having a compulsion to seek contrast, analogy, and balance in everything I experience.
Today, all of my painted efforts are the result of fidgeting, but my line drawings are formed singularly by one hand or the other (smears and all).
Crane “PRETTY” WORK
Miss P. WATERCOLOR 20” x 16”
Picasso OIL 30”x24”
Self Portrait (LINE DRAWING SERIES) PEN AND INK 18”x24” 1989
Skating, ten years old
Throughout the 1960s, my parents were taken with the idea that I might grow up to be a successful figure skater. Although I had other plans for myself, I pursued this artistic sport mostly to please them. They could ill afford the lessons. While I enjoyed freestyle skating, I resented the long hours of patch (precise lines, repeatedly etched one on top of the other and contained within a small rectangle of ice) which required my mind and body to focus on variations of the figure eight. During these sessions my imagination spiraled far away from those frozen patterns.
Skating was a backhanded gift. It taught me discipline and gave me an understanding of the moving body as an art form.
When I look at details of my pen and ink drawings and some of my earlier paintings, I see in their lines the swirling edges carved by a skate blade.
I was in awe of my father’s paintings. Peter Regehr emigrated from Russia in 1926. As one-tenth of a Mennonite family, he grew up in the cradle of poverty on a farm in southern Alberta. Prairie landscapes and animals often dominate his subject matter.
I envy his solid draftsmanship. His creations are powerfully connected to the earth. My strongest childhood memories of him always include the garden where we grew vegetables ... and built stone walls.
My father tried to give me pointers from time to time, but I was far too intimidated to show him any of my “special” work. I was an elusive pupil and I kept much of myself hidden from my family. Admittedly, I was attracted to the romance of keeping secrets, but I was convinced that I, my work and the way in which I worked, would never be accepted. I withdrew to develop on my own. In time, I grew more skillful and became comfortable enough to come out of hiding. I left home as the 1960s ended.
Nag’s Flight-Equus INK AND WATERCOLOR 18”x24” 1972
Peter the Rock-for my father
My father’s hands are seventy-five,
With gorges and lattice fissures,
Where oceans and prairie swept
An iron darkness in stained knuckles.
Shale-sheathed palms challenge gravel
Winds and tenderness.
Cobbling in fingers and callouses, inlaid
With sea shells, petroglyphs and lava
Is the need to never tire.
But never a changer
Or strip-miner bound by Midas’ gloves.
This rearranger heaves gravity
Delicate like a child.
And shifts granite by dainty fulcrum
To caress a flower’s bed.
— DR