Carle Hessay Painting Auction

“Abandonned Village” by Carle Hessay

FINAL BID: $3000

Last updated: November 19, 2016 at 6:30pm

Bids open: October 16, 2016
Bids close: November 19, 2016, at 9:30pm
Appraised value: $3500
Reserve price: $1500
Minimum bid increment: $100

Proceeds in support of the Leonard Woods Memorial Scholarship Fund at the Langley Community Music School, a registered charity.

Bids accepted by phone at 604-534-2848 or by email to development@langleymusic.com

The original work may be viewed at Langley Community Music School
4899 207 Street, Langley.  Oil on canvas 24″ x 30″, framed 30″ x 36″.

About Carle Hessay and Abandoned Village:

Abandoned Village is one of the most poignant and brilliantly executed paintings in the “Cabins to Cities” series by Langley artist Carle Hessay (1911-78). It documents the sort of pioneer settlement that was once found in the BC interior before progress passed it by. Carle Hessay often left his sign shop in Langley on weekends and journeyed deep into the wilderness to pan for gold and to collect pigments for his art. Scenes of abandoned communities, like his Forgotten Logging Camp on display in the Langley Community Music School, inspired many of his most memorable paintings.

For Carle, such remains of a former lifestyle might have echoed his own longings for an unrecoverable past following his losses after his grueling experiences as a Canadian soldier in World War II. As observed by Leonard Woods in his book, Meditations on the Paintings of Carle Hessay, this work is somewhat similar in mood to Emily Carr’s in which heraldic poles “constitute a deeply moving valediction on the collapse of an old native culture.” Abandoned Village is more multilayered and reflects the symbolic aspects of Carle’s art. In its intensity, it seems also to announce a cosmic “tragedy of apocalyptic magnitude and power” – relevant to our own times.

The strong emotional overtones of Carle Hessay’s paintings reflect the influence of German Expressionism from the time of his early art training at the Dresden Kunstakademie and the modernist trends of his schooling at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. A member of the Canadian Federation of Artists, Carle’s futurist paintings were part of a Canada Council Explorations project and were also exhibited at the juried NRC Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics “Universe Inspired Art.”