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North Shore Artist Launches New Book and Germany Exhibits l i t e r a r y by John K. Grande N orth Vancouver artist A r n o l d Shives is an artist's artist who sculptor Stephen De Staebler: ice formations, sprigs and trees, massive mountain ranges, and seemingly infinite skies had patterns, colour, and textures. Shives sought to render these into a singular expression that caught the attention of senior artists such as Tony Onley, Jack Shadbolt, G o r d o n Smith, and Canada's dean of abstract painting Jack Bush, who recognized Shives talent, commenting, " H e is young, talented, with something of his own to say, with a very interesting West Coast flavour." Bold and intriguing.Arnold Shives had one work recently included in the Vancouver A r t Gallery's summer show Face to Face: Four Centuries of Portraits. A recently published book of A r n o l d Shives' pencil, pen and ink, and conte drawings titled The Valley of Melting Sand (Prospect Press) includes many early works sketched and drawn by Shives during his formative years studying in California. As a document of the period, Shives' comments in the book are fascinating: "These drawings were produced when I was a student in the Graduate Program in Painting and Sculpture at Stanford University. I lived in a worker's cottage on vineCompetition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern A r t and has exhibited in Japan, Yugoslavia, and the United States. His From the Heart of the Wild: New Works from the Healing Place series, exhibited at the DeLeon W h i t e Gallery in Toronto in 1996, marked another milestone in this B C artist's 25 years of artistic practice. Shives works from this show c o m bined steel grids with various media, including oil, encaustic, and acrylic on plywood cutout compositions. Sensation and experience of depth are not only transferred from the BC forest to the panel but again through the use of the grid structure to the gallery space. The sense of the experience of being in nature is all the more expansive and informed in A r n o l d Shives' latest works on paper to be exhibited at the Galerie Lindenthal in Cologne. Germany, where he will be the subject of a solo show running from November 28, 1999, to January 31,2000. John K. Grande is an art critic and writer. He is the recent author of Intertwining: Landscape,Technology. Issues, Artists (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1998) and Playing with Fire; Armand Vaillancourt: Social Sculptor (Montreal: Zeit and Geist, 1999). u has for some 20 years been involved in painting and printmaking. A native of British Columbia and distant relative of the 19th-century Canadian painter Paul Peel of London, Ontario, Shives comments:"! don't think I have a Romantic idea of nature, but I love nature, being in the woods and the mountains." W h e n he studied painting at the San Francisco A r t Institute and postgraduate fine art at Stanford University in the 1960s, Shives discovered a whole w o r l d of painting that he would later bring into sharp focus painting the wilderness of British Columbia. His early abstract paintings reflected the awesome beauty of such regions as the Nass River Valley, the Coast Mountains, and Central Interior, areas that were at the time largely untapped by local artists Shives found forms in nature that were every bit as awesome and challenging as those he experienced studying in California with Richard Diebenkorn, Nathan Oliviera, and Snow Flying by Arnold Shives ^ £ < 9 The Valley of Melting Sand, Arnold Shives The Valley of Melting Sand yard acreage in an area that has now been transformed into Silicon Valley. In the fall, the abandoned vineyard provided me with ample grapes, and in the spring of 1968 the glorious wisteria climbed in a towering cascade of fragrance forty feet up one of the oaks." Many of the sometimes surreal, other times lyrical, images of nature in Valley of Melting Sand evoke the presence of nature in myriad and a multiplicity of forms. A r n o l d Shives' first major catalogued solo show was held at the A r t Gallery of Greater Victoria in 1983 and included many of the linocuts, etchings, and monotypes for which Shives is renowned across Canada and overseas. He won Special Edition Purchase Award at the W o r l d Print Arnold Shives