Bois Forte News - October 2007




 

Minneapolis Star Tribune

Autumn brings a new round of local art-gallery openings ...

By Doug Hanson

Finally, Joe Geshick and Celine Charpentier are at the Catherine G. Murphy Gallery at the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul until October 28 (2004 Randolph Ave.; opening reception Saturday, 6-9 p.m.).

Celine Charpentier’s handbuilt ceramics might suggest shells, cracked vessels or even brittle Scandinavian pastries. But the artist avoids outright representation in her effort to capture a topographic sense of place, inspired by her experience of the arid southwestern United States.

Ojibwe painter Geshick’s imposing oils are set in vertical compositions and loom with symbolic imagery that depicts the interpretation of spirit and earth worlds, with humans as intermediaries between the two. Geshick’s lush background patterns evoke nature forms, and his majestic frames echo formal elements in the work. Each painting stands as a complete and harmonious spiritual object.

St. Paul Pioneer Press
Saturday, October 17, 1998

Prison doesn’t bar St. Paul artists from re-connecting spiritually

By Mason Riddle

There is an unexpected serendipity between the works of two St. Paul artists, Joe Geshick and Celine Charpentier, in their joint exhibit, "Journey of the Spirit."

Geshick, a member of the Fort Bois Band of Ojibway who grew up on the Nett Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota, seeks a spiritual connection to tribal culture through his large, oil-on-canvas paintings.

Charpentier, a white woman who is a studio-arts instructor at the College of St. Catherine and was once a member of the Order of St. Joseph’s of Carondolet, seeks a spiritual connection to her life and community through her organic, stoneware sculptures.

The two met more than 30 years ago at Stillwater Prison where Charpentier went to champion art activities and Geshick was an inmate. Some years later, after Geshick left prison, their paths crossed again while they were both living in New York City. Since then, both have returned to St. Paul where they remain friends and artistic colleagues.

Geshick’s 12 works make up a painting cycle which he completed in the early 1990’s. They are large abstract works which incorporate stylized figures from the natural world.

Although each is defined by a structure that functions like a template, their meaning is not rooted in formal properties but in notions of communication, growth, healing, respect and spirituality. The idea of a god and the connection of all living things to nature is central to the work.

Initially, Geshick’s structured style might at first appear to overpower the work’s content, but it is a vehicle for conveying his beliefs. For Geshick, these richly painted works in muted earth tones are to be contemplated, taken in not only visually but also spiritually.

Each painting’s iconography is complex, but Geshick has wisely supplied a short explanation of each. Consequently, we know that the circle in each represents God, and thin wavy lines are the flow of communication, the line between people, animals and the earth, and that their colors are symbolic and sacred.

Thus, in "The Helper," we learn the medicine man is seeking communication from his spiritual helper, the crane, to find cures for sickness. In "The Going Away," a spirit is leaving the body and a red line connecting it to the Earth means the individual has lived an honest, respectful life.

Geshick’s series of four paintings titled "Four Seasons Thanksgiving" is the artist’s tribute to a universal thanksgiving. The shaman-like wood doll signifies the community offering, and its hole represents the Soul of the Season. The bowl of blue berries and wild rice holds not only food for the ceremony, but an offering to all of the seasons.

Charpentier makes hand-built, stoneware sculptures whose rough beauty is heightened by her use of salts, oxides and stains, and repeated kiln firings to achieve a desired effect. For the artist, the work is an investigation into the spiritual world, an aesthetic path inspired by her many summers on the Navajo reservation in Arizona and New Mexico, and recent travels to Australia to study Aboriginal culture.

Although nonfunctional, her organic works suggest platters, bowls and vases or suspended bags and shields. Bearing the colors of the Southwest and often placed in nests of sand, these textured vessels are intended to embody a notion of cultural continuity.

In addition to complementing Geshick’s paintings on a spiritual level, they also build a formal aesthetic bridge to his work through their color and textured surfaces. Although Charpentier’s work is sculptural, three-dimensional and abstract and Geshick’s is painterly, two-dimensional and figurative, their work evokes a quiet but shared sensibility.

As one walks through the exhibition, initially elusive visual relationships become apparent, the two bodies of work communicate with and respond to each other creating a journey of separate but symbiotic spirits.

Minneapolis Star Tribune
Wednesday, May 6, 1998

By Kevin Duchschere

Circle of life

Hardened by life on the reservation and behind bars, St. Paul artist Joe Geshick found spiritual comfort at his easel. Now he hopes others can find it through his work, which decorates the covers of books and the walls of judge’s chambers.

Try as you might, you cannot take your eyes off the painting: a figure with the luminous skull of a deer, wrapped in a bear robe and Ojibwe breech cloth, rising between two windows in a room with no ceiling. One window is barred, the other open.

It’s Joe Geshick’s self-portrait. true, Van Gogh and Rembrandt may be scratching their heads. The oil looks nothing like the stocky, round-faced St. Paul artist whose work is helping to change the face of native American art.

That’s because it is, he says, a portrait of his spirit.

"I don’t like those other kinds, the ones you get from an image in the mirror. I don’t know why --I just don’t feel right about it," Geshick said, studying the still-unfinished canvas. "But I thought this one fit me pretty nice."

The skull recalls the deer spirit that helped Geshick breathe during a strenuous sweat lodge ceremony years ago. The robe honors the Ojibwe medicine man of the bear clan who gave Geshick his Indian name, Mishakeebaneesh (big bird coming down from the sky). The breech cloth reflects his sun dancing in South Dakota; the barred window, his years of incarceration.

But it’s the open window that seems an especially apt touch just now. After more than 20 years laboring with limited recognition in a field still dominated by the traditional Indian imagery of the Southwest, Geshick may finally win the wider following his admirers say he has long deserved -- through the nation’s bookstores.

Minneapolis writer Louise Erdrich chose Geshick’s distinctive work to illustrate the cover of her latest novel, "The Antelope Wife," and reissued paperback editions of four of her other acclaimed books on Indian themes. The covers show Geshick’s art at its earth-hued and evocative best.

Geshick first met Erdrich when she learned that the photograph on the cover of her first book, "Love Medicine," included his mother and brother. A framed book jacket inscribed by Erdrich, who has taken art lessons from Geshick, hangs on a wall in his downtown St. Paul studio.

"Dear Joe," she writes, "I am so honored to have your work on my books."

Galleries in Arizona, New Mexico and Wyoming display Geshick’s art, and his canvases have been featured in New York art shows. U.S. Art magazine last year included his work on its short list of the best Native American art in print. A show is planned this fall at the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul.

A personal vision

Those who expect headdresses and horses will be disappointed. Geshick’s art is symbolic and profoundly spiritual, reflecting experiences with Sioux rituals and immersion in his own native Ojibwe customs and traditions.

The narrow, wavy vertical lines that run through much of his work represent communication between the spirit world and the earth. Circles, a favorite Geshick device, signify God. Lanky figures so ethereal they would make El Greco swell with pride suggest a long life. Layers of rich, textured earth tones suffuse the paintings with serenity, a sense of centeredness and well-being that Geshick himself radiates.

"His work is probably the purest form of true Native American art there is," says Penni Cross, who features Geshick’s lithographs and serigraphs at her gallery in Jackson, Wyo. "It’s not encumbered by time. You know that it means something and you want to find out what it’s all about."

John Boler, a Minneapolis-based American Indian art specialist, said that most contemporary Indian painting is done in acrylic or watercolor. But Geshick works in oil, a time-consuming and painstaking process.

"He fuses a classical medium, oil, and classical techniques with a knowledge and respect for native heritage and a uniquely personal vision," Boler said. "His pictures have a strong visual sense, haunting and compelling."

The same words could be used to describe Geshick’s many-layered life. At 54, the gentle and contemplative artist of today bears little resemblance to the angry, isolated man who had the words "love" and "hate" tattooed on his knuckles back when he was doing time in St. Cloud.

Born to raise hell

"I was born, actually, in a ditch," Geshick said, taking a drag on a Marlboro in his downtown St. Paul studio. "My mother was on the run at the time, from my dad. He was very abusive. It was a good thing that she was with a friend of hers. Her friend helped her with the delivery. They didn’t have a car."

Eventually, Cecilia Geshick settled her five children into a log home on the Nett Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota. The eked out a living, netting suckers and cutting pulp wood along the logging trails north of Duluth. Like their ancestors, they picked blueberries, harvested wild rice and made maple sugar.

Although Geshick’s mother fashioned birch-bark baskets and his brother carved model airplanes, chores left little time for art. Geshick drew pictures at school, mostly cartoon characters like Mighty Mouse, and there was the occasional watercolor lesson. But he dropped his pencils when he left high school to work as a logger for his family.

Bored and restless as a teen, Geshick became a car thief and burglar in the Duluth area. "It started out like most people today. They use drugs and do things for the excitement of it, sort of like a challenge," he said.

At the St. Louis County jail, he attacked a prisoner who was making derogatory statements about Geshick’s mother and his Indian heritage. When another inmate pulled a knife, Geshick turned it back on him and was handed an additional 20 years in St. Cloud for attempted first-degree murder. Official refused to let him attend funerals for his father and sister.

"I really had no hope during that time," he said. "That explains my tattoos, you know. ‘Born to raise hell.’ I was actually living according to my tattoos."

Changing his ways

Then Geshick met an inmate named Kenny, who liked to paint and agreed to teach him. They scavenged trash cans for leftover pigment from paint-by-number sets discarded by other inmates, and bought canvas panels with money sent by Geshick’s mother.

After being transferred to the state prison in Stillwater, Geshick took art lessons from volunteer instructors and discovered his own past, reading and re-reading speeches given by the great chiefs and gobbling up books on Indian culture. And he thought long and hard about the debt he owed his ailing mother. "It was because of her, really, and because of the family that I decided to change my ways," he said. After 17 years behind bars, Geshick was released from Stillwater prison in 1975.

He drove to western South Dakota with a medicine man he had met, participating in Sioux healing ceremonies and other rituals. From there he moved to New York City, where he spent four years taking night classes at the Art Students League and inking catalog drawings by day for the American Indian Museum.

He taught art at an Indian college in Reno, Nev., and on an Ontario reservation, all the while perfecting his oil style and developing a spiritual foundation for his work. He began sun dancing on the Cheyenne reservation in Green Grass, S.D., and ran sweat lodge ceremonies as a pipe carrier.

It was outside north of Stillwater that Minnesota Appeals Court Judge Jim Randall first met Geshick. Randall, who has a deep interest in Indian culture and regularly attends Indian ceremonies, calls Geshick his friend and spiritual counselor. Geshick’s "Circle of Life," and work by other Indian artists crowd his Judicial Center chamber walls.

"Geshick’s art rises to a level not reached by other Native American artists that I am familiar with, because he pours into each painting his own intimate relationship with his culture and his spirituality," Randall said. "To me, it takes a very special person -- a great person -- to create that art."

Into the arena

Geshick nestled into a loveseat, a slate blue T-shirt exposing massive arms, hair tied in a long queue draping down his back. Indian flute music drifted through the airy studio on the seventh floor of the Rossmor Building, a warehouse-cum-artist’s colony overlooking police headquarters and Interstate Hwy. 94. A cassette box brimmed with tapes by Ofra Harnoy, Benedictine monks, Van Morrison and a Lakota pianist.

On Geshick’s easel this day is a canvas called "Winter Thanksgiving," one in a series of four seasonal paintings. Each centers on a faceless doll representing thanksgiving participants. A hole in the middle of the doll reveals "the soul of the season," he said: a leafless tree in the winter version, a budding tree in spring. A circle envelopes the doll’s head like a halo. Using two canes, Geshick moved heavily to the easel. He underwent surgery twice last year, the first a triple bypass heart operation and three months later a kidney transplant. The kidney was donated by his 23-year-old son, Joe Gurneau. The anti-rejection medication has left his joints and muscles sore and slowed his painting, he said.

He usually begins painting at 9 p.m. and works long into the morning hours; it’s peaceful and there are no distractions, he said. But he never works until he’s in the proper frame of mind. The flute music helps.

"It calms me and puts me into the mood that I want to express on canvas," he said. And that is?

"I’m trying to share some of the spiritual experiences I’ve had as a means of helping other people find a spiritual foundation for themselves," he said. "It doesn’t necessarily have to be the Indian way. But that’s how it started with me, going to these Sioux Indian ceremonies. If it hadn’t been for the ceremonies, I would most likely be still locked up in Stillwater right now."

Geshick often works on commission. he recently finished a $6,000 painting for a Rhode Island couple. His art has sold for as much as $10,000, and some of his friends have encouraged him to do more self-promotion.

"When I first met Joe, he was almost afraid of success. He didn’t want his life to change. He was at peace and he didn’t want that peace destroyed," said Mike Grossman, a Geshick patron and owner of Grossman Chevrolet in Burnsville.

Geshick said that he no longer worries that success will ruin him.

"I guess you could say I’m modest," he said. "But I’m ready to go into the arena. I don’t see myself losing my spiritual qualities."