Killer whale and man Item Number: 3475/1 from the MOA: University of British Columbia
Painting of a diving killer whale overtop of a rectangular face. Whale is painted black and blue, with highlights of green, red and white. It is shown in profile. Male face, along bottom centre, is in frontal view, painted brown with red lips and green highlights over the eyes. Sun painted in the top right corner, background done in grey-green. Surfaces are unevenly painted. Signed in lower right corner, “C.B. Greul 1959”. Painting is framed, and has work information written across back. (Hanging hardware on back.)
Greul was a Canadian printmaker who produced images that drew on and appropriated Northwest Coast First Nations art styles. His most popular work was a series of black ink silkscreened images of crest motifs on rice paper. These images were also available in a series of postcard booklets. Greul was not Indigenous. Historically, the first use of silkscreening by a Northwest Coast artist was in 1949, when Kwakwaka’wakw artist Ellen Neel had her designs screened onto cloth scarves. Soon after, Greul began to market his silkscreen designs on rice paper. His designs were mass distributed through the Hudson’s Bay retail stores in the 1950s. He was one of the first artists to make Northwest Coast-style designs available commercially in the mid-20th century. His work sold quite well to a public largely unknowledgeable about Northwest Coast art, but eager to buy “Indian” images. Greul’s work reflects his lack of training in the art’s forms and cultural meanings. It was partly in reaction to Greul’s works that some Indigenous Northwest Coast artists decided to begin producing silkscreen prints of their own, hoping to create a better understanding and appreciation of their inherited art styles and forms, to develop a market for Northwest Coast art, and to assert their cultural rights to such art practices.
Gifted to the donor by Dr. Peter Wing; previously gifted to Wing by one of his patients, Charles Greul. Greul based the painting off of a Haida killer whale design he saw on a drum in a logger's home.