Nova Scotia Artist is Standing Tall

Standing six-feet-two-inches, with dark, lank hair that falls over his shoulders and noble, knowing eyes, it is difficult to imagine great, big Alan Syliboy flying under the radar anywhere. But fly under the radar he has.

"I call him the gentle giant of contemporary Aboriginal art," says Jim Logan, a program officer with the Canada Council in Ottawa and a former First Nations curatorial resident at the Nova Scotia Art Gallery. "I don't think the cultural community of Nova Scotia recognizes that they have a gifted native artist right under their noses, but I do think that recognition will come."

Logan says Syliboy could have gone down the road to Toronto or Halifax to earn greater recognition, but that thought really never occurred to him. He stayed instead in Millbrook, the reserve near Truro where he was born and brought up and where he has chosen to raise his three children.

He now sits on the board of governors of NSCAD University in Halifax, and has shows in Japan and France, but Millbrook informs every aspect of Syliboy's work.

"I've seen lots of people go away and feel lost and disconnected," says Syliboy. "But they come back, and that is part of their journey."

As a young child, Syliboy went with his grandmother to Truro to sell baskets. Later he went door to door in Millbrook selling his beautifully designed T-shirts because, as he puts it, "Most Mi'kmaq do not go to museums on Sunday afternoons."

He quit school in Grade 9 to work at his uncle's cabinet shop. Then, in a stroke of good fortune, Shirley Bear entered his life. The celebrated New Brunswick artist had come to Millbrook to recruit people to do art workshops in the Maritimes and the northeastern U.S. She selected Syliboy. "It was through this project that I got my first real paint set," says Syliboy. "Her instruction was really very basic, just how to mix colours and then she would leave us on our own."

Even with the workshops, Syliboy wasn't convinced. "I quit for about a year," he says. "It was the whole self confidence thing. I was 18, 19, and I was trying to decide." Eventually painting won out. "I decided I just had to paint. I came to that realization."

Like many artists, Syliboy experienced the balancing act between making art and making a living. He quickly had three children and a wife to support. He looked around the reserve at what trades brought in regular paycheques, and settled on burner mechanic.

He never lost sight, though, of painting. Whenever he was able he sold his T-shirts and tote bags, first on Millbrook and other reserves and later at trade shows around the Maritimes. In the prickly landscape of the art world, Syliboy is an anomaly: an artist who actually goes out and sells his artwork and moreover lets some of it be sold in the form of T-shirts and totes.

"He had a living to make and a family to support," says Logan. "I don't think he cares what the public galleries and the art world thinks. He also does it to set an example and promote the community. What message does it send to the community if Alan Syliboy thinks he's too good to be doing these shows?"

"I've been on Canada Council juries and I've rubbed elbows with the elite," says Syliboy. "Maybe selling their own art work is a taboo or beneath them, but I really enjoyed it. Sometimes there were 20,000 to 30,000 people, and we were the only sort of native business there."

Syliboy found artistic inspiration in the petroglyphs (rock etchings) of his forefathers, scattered around Nova Scotia. It is here he could bridge the past and the present, incorporate the symbols, legends and icons of Mi'kmaq living and culture.

Initially he struggled with the petroglyphs and icons. He admits to wondering whether he was expropriating them for his own commercial ends, or if there was a deeper purpose.

"Understanding the meaning of the petroglyphs is a whole lifetime process," says Syliboy. "I don't want to set myself up as some sort of expert, because they really are a mystery to me and I look at them that way. I'm searching like anybody else. I try to get them to talk to me and I try to understand.

"What the petroglyphs do is take you to a place where your ancestors are," he says. "You can think beyond the moment and the material world and everything that goes with that. We're a modern people, but they let you know where you come from and who you come from."

Jim Logan says Syliboy's deepened understanding and spiritual growth has led to his work becoming even more accomplished.

The artist has just returned from a Heritage Canada trade mission in France. He shares his work on a website www.redcrane.ca , and still finds time to play in a band with his son. He is doing the petroglyphs proud, because, as he says, "I owe them a lot."