Titles, humor convey Littlechild's messages

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When George Littlechild first entered Red Deer College to earn a diploma in art design, he remembers the first bit of advice that would shape his early paintings.

"The head of the program said, 'I hope you're not going to draw Natives with bows and arrows because all the other Indians who did that have dropped out'."

Littlechild, dressed in a beaded fringed buckskin tunic and holding an eagle feather, was explaining his art to about 80 people assembled one recent evening at the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia.

A 90-minute discussion of Littlechild's art, aided by slides of 60 of his 300 paintings, is less a seminar on art appreciation than it is a history lesson, a therapy session, a spiritual journey, a religious denouncement, a political treatise.

Using anecdotes and sometimes quiet humor, he guides the audience from his early childhood with alcoholic parents at Hobbema, in central Alberta, to five foster homes before he was four, through his mother's tragic death, to his 30s, as one of Canada's most successful Native painters.

He relates each story quickly and with little emotion, explaining the significance of recurring symbols, like the gold star, and the different influences on his work - like the college instructor.

Steered away from traditional Indian symbols, Littlechild drew doll-like figures, like She Danced All Night, a one-dimensional, almost stick figure with a face that resembles the doe-eyed beauty of old velvet paintings.

"I felt as First Nations we didn't have any control of our lives," said Littlechild.

Some included marks on their palms to represent the stigmata of Christ's crucifixion wounds, because Natives suffered as a result of Christianity and the church's arrival in North America, he said.

Littlechild's younger years were tough. Born to a non-Native father and Plains Cree Indian mother, he was taken away by welfare and separated from his four siblings, whom he didn't see until adulthood.

His mother - immortalized in a painting of four images of a woman, entitled She was an Indian Princess. She loved to dance. She drank. She died. - died of cirrhosis of the liver on Edmonton's Skid Row when she was 36.

One set of foster parents beat him and he did poorly in school, not graduating from Grade 12 and not always achieving the all-important gold star, a symbol that reappears frequently in his mostly abstract paintings.

When he graduated from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and realized his worth as a painter, he said, "I gave myself a gold star."

Circles represent a positive image ("a broken circle means a culture is tampered with") and the prevalent color pink stands for his mixed red and white blood. His paintings, which have been shown around the world, also often include an image of a horse, a spiritual symbol, as he learned later from an Elder.

Many of his paintings also include the printed word, often a title, like the urban Indian's Pain Dance, or a typical suburban home with "this is the home we never lived in", or the rows of identical Natives entitled "Not all Indians look alike."

"My titles are important, and I like to use humor as well."

Not to mention using strong images to make a point. Like the red water to represent bloodshed during Europeans "arrival to"- and not "discovery of" - North American 500 years ago.

In another he purposefully uses degrading terms like "squaw" and "chief" and incorporates a real postcard of a bare-chested warrior Indian with crossed arms saying "How!"

"Art can talk politically; it can tackle issues," said the soft-spoken artist, who has donated a painting to a Vancouver hospice for terminally ill patients and another on a leader of last year's Mexican revolution for a role model for Wetaskiwin, Alta. school kids.

Littlechild also used his paintings to explore personal issues, surrounding copies of sepia-toned provincial archival phonographs with this trademark bold strokes of color for a kind o public photo album.

And the Metis artist also tries to celebrate his Native culture while drawing from other cultures, as in the painting of the Native riding a horse through a urban jungle, entitled "Look Back to the land that was once yours."

"There are a lot of urban First Nations who have to accept both ways and both cultures," said Littlechild, who has just published a children's book called "This Land Is My Land."

In his new work, the artist said he's moving towards realism as he held up a four-by-six foot acrylic painting on 300-pound watercolor paper. It's a young Indian's head against the backdrop of an eagle, surrounded by bright splashes of color and his familiar circles and stars.

"I was taught in art school realism was a bad things," he said, explaining how the image had come to him in a dream and he'd painted it only the night before.

"But now I'm going full circle and using some realism as well as abstract."