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visual arts From the Healing Place by Trevor CaroJan Referred to as the most underrated visual artist in the country, Arnold Shives is poised with his forthcoming Toronto show to join the visionary elite of Canadian art. Transcendent, spiritual and shamanic are words writer Trevor Carolan uses to describes Shives' new works. > Arnold Shives above Elton Lake, September 1988, at the Save the Stein Artists Expedition. Photo: R. Woodsworth 4 Both seductive and arresting, the works on the studio walls are large, hrightlyhued anthropomorphic fonns carpentered from plywood sheets. They have been routered and carved and then painted, amended, reworked and annealed by the Oneness of a sin gular creative vision. Collectively entitled F,vm the Heart of the Wild: New Works from the Healing Place, the dozen major works will be in North Vancouver painter and printmaker Arnold Shives' forthcoming Toronto exhibition at the DeLeon White Gallery in January. An augury resonant with the numina] forms of some large, visceral Otheniess, From the Heart of the Wild is the culmination of Shies' 30-year career as a landscape-based artist, and of his lifelong practice of the wild. Persistently referred to as the most underrated visual artist in the country, at age 52, with increasing demand for his work both at home and most notably in Europe. Shives is poised with his forthcoming show to join the visionary elite of Canadian art. Raised in Vancouver, Shives has lived and maintained a studio on the metropolitan area's North Shore for the past 15 years. Treatments of the region's nearby mountains and wilderness are at the core of his cre ative endeavours--a symbiosis that began when he joined the British Columbia Mountaineering Club at age 15. Exploring West Coast peaks with veteran climbers like Dick Culbert, Shives packed a sketchbook along on expeditions and, while still a relative novice, provided illustrations for the earliest guidebook to the Coast Range which Culbert authored. Shives' drawing ability earned him a place in a special high school arts program taught by Gordon Smith. On entering UBC in 1962, Shives luckily found his mentor still teaching there. He was also intro duced to Toni Onley and these early associations have proved invaluable to him ever since. While at UBC Shives also befriended poet bp Nichol, then in his first year of teaching. "bp was nearly going out of his mind with it," Shives recalls..'He wasn't really cut out to be a teacher. We were great friends and had a little group that used to meet at Warren Tallman's place--a kind of salon. Curiously, our friend ship was only really consolidated when we both left town--bp to Toronto, me to San Francisco. We maintained an extensive correspon dence; I've known nothing like it shice." Two years of studying art history convinced Shives his real path led to the studio. Determined to become a working artist, in 1964 he enrolled at the San Francisco Art Institute, study ing oil painting with Richard Diebenkorn and sculpture with Stephen DeStaebler. As a student he lised in bohemian North Beach and remembers its Beat culture vividly: "There was a sense of poetry and jazz in it all," he relates. "We'd hear Charlie Mingus at The Nighthawk, or I'd be chasing down books for bp at Ferlinghetti's City Lights. Jack Kerouac's influence was very real and my own outdoors expe rience qualified me as a natural candidate for it. He was French- --