Exploding Totem in Art and Biology

hat could be better than dying in the place you spent your life work-ing…? " Jack Shadbolt's wife Doris mused, as she and friends moved his bed into the studio during the final days of his life. " When I can't paint, I don't want to live, " he had said (1). Around the bed was Blue Breaking, a triptych he had painted, filled with shadowy forms, " like butterflies' footprints. " A few days later, Shadbolt died of heart failure in Burnaby, British Columbia, where he had lived for more than 50 years. Born in Shoeburyness, England, Shadbolt grew up in Victoria, Canada, to become an iconic figure, not only as artist but also as author and teacher. He began painting early in life, copying scenes from calendars with his father, a craftsman and amateur painter. He studied at Victoria College and Normal School, but his career took off when he started sketching the Victoria area with his friend Max Maynard, who introduced him to Emily Carr 1 (2). " To come under the immediate spell of a famous artist one admires tremendously and, at the same time, encounters personally in one's own local community, " he wrote, " is the most compelling influence for an artist " (3). Shadbolt traveled widely. He studied in London and Paris and at the Art Students' League in New York City. He became interested in the work of Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró and is linked to these and other modern masters. During World War II, at work with the Canadian Army War Artists in London, he sketched war scenes, barbed wire fences, watchtowers, and the bleak life of prisoners. This brush with darkness affected his individual brand of mod-ernism, " …when the bomb blows the building apart it abstracts it, the pieces fall back together again and you get a memory image of what was there but vastly altered and psychologically made infinitely more intense than the original thing " (2). Yet, throughout his long career, his main inspiration was the regional West Coast culture and indigenous arts, " The nearest symbolic mythology at hand " (3). " The shapes of knowledge are always ineluctably local, " wrote anthropologist Clifford Geertz (4). The artist draws strength from the community. The more intensely William Faulkner focused on his unpronounceable county in Mississippi, the more intelligible he became to readers in all corners …