The war in Iraq greatly disturbed Pender Harbour artist Helen Broadfoot, especially when she heard President Bush talk about collateral damage, the death of civilians and children in the course of fighting.
"It stuck in my craw," she says. "But what could I do?"
At the time, her daughter was working on the anti-establishment film, The Corporation, and she put Broadfoot in touch with social activist and media critic Noam Chomsky.
He responded to her email with an honest answer: he didn't know. But he gently chided her for calling herself a little woman of no consequence. "There's no such thing as a little person of no consequence," he wrote, "though there are plenty of Big Powerful People of no consequence."
He encouraged her to find the answer through her art. The result, A Show of Respect, 10 oil paintings of children affected by war, opens at the Harbour Gallery today (April 15) for 10 days only.
"This is a memorial for the children of war. I wasn't going to take a journalistic approach to it and paint dead babies," she says. "These paintings are not horrifying; they're poignant and touching." The show encompasses over a year of intense research, as each painting is linked to one of the articles that form the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
For example, the picture Are We Home shows a Sudanese child, perhaps one of 200,000 refugees who have fled southern Sudan for neighbouring Chad. The accompanying text of the Human Rights article tells us that everyone has a right to a nationality. No one should be deprived. It is written in Dinka, a little known language of one of the peoples of Sudan. Just to find someone who could translate the article into Dinka took the artist on a worldwide Internet search. In Twisted, a painting that Broadfoot calls abstract, the accompanying text in Vietnamese corresponds to Article 25: "Everyone has a right to a standard of living." But the text describes "a horror that has no end," the use of the defoliant agent orange, laced with dioxins, that was dropped over the Vietnamese jungle by U.S. troops in an effort to expose the enemy. The resulting terminal illnesses and birth defects among the Vietnamese people showed up later. Shamrocks for Danny portrays a little girl visiting her brother's grave, two children caught up in the agony of Ireland's troubles. And how do you depict with respect the children who are abused, bought and exploited? In Broadfoot's depiction, the young girl's face takes the foreground, luminous and wistful, while in the background, money changes hands. It would be easy to compare the faces with a painting style of 30 years ago, the wide-eyed moppet look, designed to tug the heartstrings. The difference, of course, is that in these paintings the troubled innocence of the children is all too real. "It was important to get these kids right up in your face," she says. The fact that this show is a powerful statement surprises Broadfoot as much as anyone.
"I was a capitalist," she says of the many years she ran a retail bath and kitchen store in a mall. "I've never been touched by activism, then this epiphany."
Broadfoot went to the Vancouver School of Art (now known as Emily Carr), and left to teach school in India. She took up goldsmithing for eight years, a skill that set her artistic side free. In retirement, she took up painting. Many of her paintings depict another love: wildlife in its natural environment. The 10 paintings on show at the Harbour Gallery will be joined by two more in the near future. Then, the artist hopes to tour the show around the world as an exhibit for fundraising or for educational purposes. As she points out, she doesn't remember being taught in school about the articles of human rights. This show will give children a graphic illustration. Already, she has received some interest from a museum close to the Palestinian border that fosters peaceful coexistence between Arabs and Jews. None of the paintings are for sale but art cards and, later, prints will be sold to raise money for Doctors Without Borders, Unicef and international Red Cross. The show is on for only 10 days, April 15 to 25, open daily from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. The reception will be on Saturday, April 16, from 1 to 4 p.m. Each oil painting is on three-foot square canvases so should be viewed in person. However, for those not able to get to the Harbour Gallery in Madeira Park (beside the Music School), they can be seen on a website at www.oilpaintingforpeace.com.
