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January-March 2016
Interview Michael Cadieux, Bisbee |
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Michael Cadieux
Michael Cadieux is a multiple award-winning artist and educator. A native of western Montana, Cadieux has taught at the University of Montana, the University of Arizona, Arizona Western College, the Kansas City Art Institute, and Cochise College. He is a dedicated environmentalist, and environmental themes appear frequently in his work. Cadieux lives and works in Bisbee. His studio is located in the Central School Project building in downtown Bisbee.
SAN: Thank you for agreeing to an interview, Michael. You’ve lived in several locations in the American West. How did you end up settling in Bisbee, Arizona?
Michael Cadieux: My journey to Bisbee began while fishing along the Big Blackfoot River in Western Montana. I initiated a conversation with a fellow angler and mentioned to him that I was on sabbatical leave from teaching and was looking for a small out of the way town where I would be able to focus my time and energy and just paint, paint,paint. He said '' Bisbee is your place,'' so I checked it out and fell in love with it. I immediately felt a kinship and within two months I had purchased a house.
I liked everything about the little city, the mountains, the weather, the compactness of the town. (Bisbee is a walking town, cars do not rule.) The people were interesting. There was an overall sense of energized thought, and housing costs were ridiculously low, but above all, Bisbee is a Post Industrial town. The copper mines had shut down so I figured the violence and destruction of the environment had ceased, at least for awhile.
SAN: Thank you for agreeing to an interview, Michael. You’ve lived in several locations in the American West. How did you end up settling in Bisbee, Arizona?
Michael Cadieux: My journey to Bisbee began while fishing along the Big Blackfoot River in Western Montana. I initiated a conversation with a fellow angler and mentioned to him that I was on sabbatical leave from teaching and was looking for a small out of the way town where I would be able to focus my time and energy and just paint, paint,paint. He said '' Bisbee is your place,'' so I checked it out and fell in love with it. I immediately felt a kinship and within two months I had purchased a house.
I liked everything about the little city, the mountains, the weather, the compactness of the town. (Bisbee is a walking town, cars do not rule.) The people were interesting. There was an overall sense of energized thought, and housing costs were ridiculously low, but above all, Bisbee is a Post Industrial town. The copper mines had shut down so I figured the violence and destruction of the environment had ceased, at least for awhile.
SAN: Are you still teaching either at Cochise College or private workshops? Or are you a full-time studio artist now?
MC: I cut loose from teaching five years ago, but i still present talks and occasionally write reviews and articles, mostly for art publications. I have taught in colleges and art schools for over 30 years, and I am simply burned out. I loved teaching as much as I love painting, but I just don't have the energy to pursue both. I taught '' art as a way of thinking. ''
SAN: What are the advantages and disadvantages of living in a small town for a working artist?
MC: Bisbee is outside the parameters of the greater ''art world'' and the ''cultural trance''so prevalent in larger cities. Bisbee is a buffer from the complexities and disorder of big cities. There are just less hassles and that allows me more time to get to the nitty gritty, making art. Living is simple in Old Bisbee and cars stop for pedestrians. All is good. I can not think of any disadvantages unless you count the fact I have to drive 40 miles to see my dentist and eye doctor.
MC: I cut loose from teaching five years ago, but i still present talks and occasionally write reviews and articles, mostly for art publications. I have taught in colleges and art schools for over 30 years, and I am simply burned out. I loved teaching as much as I love painting, but I just don't have the energy to pursue both. I taught '' art as a way of thinking. ''
SAN: What are the advantages and disadvantages of living in a small town for a working artist?
MC: Bisbee is outside the parameters of the greater ''art world'' and the ''cultural trance''so prevalent in larger cities. Bisbee is a buffer from the complexities and disorder of big cities. There are just less hassles and that allows me more time to get to the nitty gritty, making art. Living is simple in Old Bisbee and cars stop for pedestrians. All is good. I can not think of any disadvantages unless you count the fact I have to drive 40 miles to see my dentist and eye doctor.
Michael Cadieux at work in his studio.
SAN: Your website has a tantalizing selection of paintings and assemblages. However in this interview we will be focusing on your Nova Totem series of watercolors on environmental themes. What does Nova Totem mean?
MC: I want to thread a connection and weave a narrative through a series of my paintings which help structure both my rage at the disintegration of natural order and my yearning for an emotional spiritual life of primal innocence. Today nature is more like discontinuous fragments jammed between the ever expanding catastrophes of the man made world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson believed heaven and earth, man and nature, could be united.
The poet Patricia Catto ( a Bisbee writer ) echoes these sentiments in her poem HE-EEL.
His eyesight moves crooked
Like the leg of a cricket
but wherever it falls
A grid soon appears
Mountains become molehills
Skies fill with jet
Bobcats are smelted
And wonder turns to farts
He-eel being spirit
Assumes many forms
Is present in the moment when
Something stops struggling
Arrives neatly coiffed with the poacher's pay
If you've ever been ball-peened or
Pinned or skinned by a wriggling form
In grey flannel pants
Or dined with the skeletons of real estate
Then surely you've seen him
His leathery eye
Fixed on the colors
Of your favorite basket
My paintings are about the connectedness of all things and the insufficiency of any one thing. They signify an energetic transcience of form by hovering between pattern and representation. The paintings rely on antagonistic elements: the active way one form tends to erupt into the other,making its mark like a wound, a transgression. The title of the series Nova Totem signifies these energetic antagonisms. Totem implies a memory narrative, an externalization of an inner history, a personal tribal past, renewing contact with crucial points, a journey into space and time, opposed to Nova, emblem of new outbursts, an excitable state of disintegrative expansion. Apocalyptic visions and hectic attitudes toward form hopefully bring to light a mood of sensuous but wary premonition. The French writer Paul Valery says it best, ''I propose to evoke for you the disorder in which we live."
SAN: Your Nova Totem series is described as “a stunning portrait of an injured planet, highlighting the need for environmental preservation and restoration.” What led you to become such an ardent environmentalist? How did this series come about and what is your overall message in this series of paintings?
MC: Back to the Blackfoot. The Big Blackfoot merges with the Hellgate river, just east of Missoula Montana, to form the Clark's Fork of the Columbia river. Sometime ago driving past the confluence of the two rivers I noticed the Hellgate was flowing blood red with thousands of trout floating belly up like chunks of cholesterol.The Big Blackfoot merged its crystal clear water with the toxic red liquid of the Hellgate (aptly named) creating a vivid contrast between the polluted and the unpolluted. The toxic flow originated one hundred miles east of Missoula at the settling ponds of the Butte Montana works of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company. The ponds had never been upgraded by the company and they fractured during a heavy rain. The toxic mixture flowed directly into the river. The company, which controlled the state, was simply given a slap on the wrist and told to build new ponds. The river was never cleaned up and still shows the scars of the catastrophe. The toxins were measured as far away as the Pacific ocean. I have never forgotten this image. It is etched in my consciousness. The emotional trauma I felt planted the seeds of Nova Totem.
[click on images to enlarge]
MC: I want to thread a connection and weave a narrative through a series of my paintings which help structure both my rage at the disintegration of natural order and my yearning for an emotional spiritual life of primal innocence. Today nature is more like discontinuous fragments jammed between the ever expanding catastrophes of the man made world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson believed heaven and earth, man and nature, could be united.
The poet Patricia Catto ( a Bisbee writer ) echoes these sentiments in her poem HE-EEL.
His eyesight moves crooked
Like the leg of a cricket
but wherever it falls
A grid soon appears
Mountains become molehills
Skies fill with jet
Bobcats are smelted
And wonder turns to farts
He-eel being spirit
Assumes many forms
Is present in the moment when
Something stops struggling
Arrives neatly coiffed with the poacher's pay
If you've ever been ball-peened or
Pinned or skinned by a wriggling form
In grey flannel pants
Or dined with the skeletons of real estate
Then surely you've seen him
His leathery eye
Fixed on the colors
Of your favorite basket
My paintings are about the connectedness of all things and the insufficiency of any one thing. They signify an energetic transcience of form by hovering between pattern and representation. The paintings rely on antagonistic elements: the active way one form tends to erupt into the other,making its mark like a wound, a transgression. The title of the series Nova Totem signifies these energetic antagonisms. Totem implies a memory narrative, an externalization of an inner history, a personal tribal past, renewing contact with crucial points, a journey into space and time, opposed to Nova, emblem of new outbursts, an excitable state of disintegrative expansion. Apocalyptic visions and hectic attitudes toward form hopefully bring to light a mood of sensuous but wary premonition. The French writer Paul Valery says it best, ''I propose to evoke for you the disorder in which we live."
SAN: Your Nova Totem series is described as “a stunning portrait of an injured planet, highlighting the need for environmental preservation and restoration.” What led you to become such an ardent environmentalist? How did this series come about and what is your overall message in this series of paintings?
MC: Back to the Blackfoot. The Big Blackfoot merges with the Hellgate river, just east of Missoula Montana, to form the Clark's Fork of the Columbia river. Sometime ago driving past the confluence of the two rivers I noticed the Hellgate was flowing blood red with thousands of trout floating belly up like chunks of cholesterol.The Big Blackfoot merged its crystal clear water with the toxic red liquid of the Hellgate (aptly named) creating a vivid contrast between the polluted and the unpolluted. The toxic flow originated one hundred miles east of Missoula at the settling ponds of the Butte Montana works of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company. The ponds had never been upgraded by the company and they fractured during a heavy rain. The toxic mixture flowed directly into the river. The company, which controlled the state, was simply given a slap on the wrist and told to build new ponds. The river was never cleaned up and still shows the scars of the catastrophe. The toxins were measured as far away as the Pacific ocean. I have never forgotten this image. It is etched in my consciousness. The emotional trauma I felt planted the seeds of Nova Totem.
[click on images to enlarge]
MCadieux_ BeamsOverTheContinentalDivide
SAN: Please comment on the following paintings from the Nova Totem series. Tell us a little about each painting, what the imagery represents, how to “read” the painting….anything that will help the casual viewer understand the depth of information in each painting.
MC: Beams Over the Continental Divide. The soft enveloping darkness of the mountains is invaded. On every side the light beams, like knife blades, map the perfect trajectory. The assault on the natural order continues. Martin Heidegger tells us that ancient peoples "receive the sky as sky, they leave to the sun and moon their journey, to the stars their course. They do not turn night nor day into a harassed unrest.''
MC: Beams Over the Continental Divide. The soft enveloping darkness of the mountains is invaded. On every side the light beams, like knife blades, map the perfect trajectory. The assault on the natural order continues. Martin Heidegger tells us that ancient peoples "receive the sky as sky, they leave to the sun and moon their journey, to the stars their course. They do not turn night nor day into a harassed unrest.''
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Train Wreck
Train Wreck records a steam engine plunging into the Lochsa river in Northern Idaho, fifty miles West of Missoula Montana. The Lochsa marks the eastern limits of the Pacific salmon run. The salmon share the waters with discarded tires and other detritus of humankind. The mountains in the background exhibit the scars of clear cut logging. 
MCadieux_Train Wreck_
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Dancing Mountains
Dancing Mountains was suggested by the half--mountains around and in the open pit copper mine in Bisbee. One side of the mountains are semi-pristine while the other side is ripped apart. Dancing Mountains is cluttered with the debris of mankind's operations. The natural order is overcome. The half mountains sway and lean toward one another as if in a slow dance of death. 
MCadieux. Dancing Mountains_
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Pricks
This work was suggested by the Trans America tower in San Francisco. Sharp towers pierce the gentle flow of hot air balloons. Natives are holding council in a brightly lit tee pee. Earth, in the background, is dried up and dead. The painting is filled with human marks. Here is a small inventory of the debris field. A chalice, lakes with towers, an eroded brown mountain, a shark like figure, highway sign boards depicting hot air balloons, and a person uniting with himself ( that is me) and much more. Everything is everywhere.
Canyonlands
The idea of the painting came to me on a flight from La Guardia to LAX. The flight left La Guardia in the early evening and passed over southern Utah at sunset revealing dazzling patterns of light and dark. The grid, so prevalent in the Mid-west slowly surrenders to the twisting and turning of a primordial dance. Of course all this was enhanced by a few cocktails.
Jackson Hole Wyoming
Elk spend the long cold Yellowstone winter in the fields and prairies of Jackson Hole Wyoming where they are monitored by national park rangers. I may have gotten carried away in this painting. I envisioned Jackson Hole completely taken over by dark forces minding monstrous smokestacks, like ovens, in which elk were being purged.This work hints at total destruction. Genocide.
Screwed
Suggested by the road from Alpine Arizona to the mines at Morenci. Going from Alpine to Morenci is like passing from heaven to hell. The red fiery terraces of the mine are juxtaposed with pristine mountains in the background. Electric lines guide the power of destruction into the heart of the painting. We are screwed again by the powers that be. Note the comic relief of the screws being screwed.
[click on images to enlarge]
This work was suggested by the Trans America tower in San Francisco. Sharp towers pierce the gentle flow of hot air balloons. Natives are holding council in a brightly lit tee pee. Earth, in the background, is dried up and dead. The painting is filled with human marks. Here is a small inventory of the debris field. A chalice, lakes with towers, an eroded brown mountain, a shark like figure, highway sign boards depicting hot air balloons, and a person uniting with himself ( that is me) and much more. Everything is everywhere.
Canyonlands
The idea of the painting came to me on a flight from La Guardia to LAX. The flight left La Guardia in the early evening and passed over southern Utah at sunset revealing dazzling patterns of light and dark. The grid, so prevalent in the Mid-west slowly surrenders to the twisting and turning of a primordial dance. Of course all this was enhanced by a few cocktails.
Jackson Hole Wyoming
Elk spend the long cold Yellowstone winter in the fields and prairies of Jackson Hole Wyoming where they are monitored by national park rangers. I may have gotten carried away in this painting. I envisioned Jackson Hole completely taken over by dark forces minding monstrous smokestacks, like ovens, in which elk were being purged.This work hints at total destruction. Genocide.
Screwed
Suggested by the road from Alpine Arizona to the mines at Morenci. Going from Alpine to Morenci is like passing from heaven to hell. The red fiery terraces of the mine are juxtaposed with pristine mountains in the background. Electric lines guide the power of destruction into the heart of the painting. We are screwed again by the powers that be. Note the comic relief of the screws being screwed.
[click on images to enlarge]
MCadieux_Pricks_
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MCadieux_Canyonlands_
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MCadieux_JacksonHoleWyoming_
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MCadieux_Screwed_
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MCadieux_TheColorOfBeingBorn_
SAN: You published a book titled The Color of Being Born: Paintings by Michael Cadieux which includes commentary by scientists and journalists. Tell us how the book came about, and how it has been received.
MC: I was approached by Jaded Ibis Productions, a Seattle multimedia company that publishes and produces literary, artistic and musical talents,while advocating for environmental, cultural and intellectual sustainability. There intent is to facilitate the convergence of diverse media and art forms. The book is part of the publishers Giving Project which donates all proceeds from the sale of the book to the Natural Resources Defense Fund and other environmental charities.
The title, The Color Of Being Born, was taken from Quatrain number 921 by the Sufi mystic Rumi. Here's the Quatrain-
Poles Apart, I am the color of dying
You are the Color Of being born
Unless we breath in each other there can be no garden
so, that's why the plants grow and laugh at our eyes
which focus on distance
The book has been well received.
MC: I was approached by Jaded Ibis Productions, a Seattle multimedia company that publishes and produces literary, artistic and musical talents,while advocating for environmental, cultural and intellectual sustainability. There intent is to facilitate the convergence of diverse media and art forms. The book is part of the publishers Giving Project which donates all proceeds from the sale of the book to the Natural Resources Defense Fund and other environmental charities.
The title, The Color Of Being Born, was taken from Quatrain number 921 by the Sufi mystic Rumi. Here's the Quatrain-
Poles Apart, I am the color of dying
You are the Color Of being born
Unless we breath in each other there can be no garden
so, that's why the plants grow and laugh at our eyes
which focus on distance
The book has been well received.
SAN: Finally, what do you think is the role of the arts and artists in addressing the environmental crisis, especially climate change?
MC: Here is a quote from Suzi Gablik (an art critic for the magazine Art in America.) '' The environment is merely a reflection of what is in us and if the environment is to change, something in us must change.'' Nothing will change, however, as long as we remain unconscious of the fundamental forces which shape our lives, embedded as we are in the general cultural ambience ( cultural trance.) At this point, we need some fairly coherent organizing picture of what has been happening to us, so that we can weigh the costs of what we are doing. If we can penetrate to the true inwardness of a situation, if we do not dull our minds to its dangerous or unpleasant features, we are less likely to be seriously manipulated . We have the possibility of choice, once we see clearly what is going on. Then, perhaps, we can find a way to pass through these conditions and transcend them. We need to resist sinking into the maelstrom through understanding the nature of the vortex, and thus be carried up by the same forces that seek to sink us.''
By painting and documenting the destruction caused by the heat of '' progress'' I hope to expose, in a tangible concrete way, this danger to our way of life. It is much harder for people to be in denial when something is portrayed and remains as a document. Artists can provide an image of the issue rather than have it lost in words. Artists bear witness to the realities of the time we live in.
See more of Michael Cadieux's work at: Michael Cadieux
MC: Here is a quote from Suzi Gablik (an art critic for the magazine Art in America.) '' The environment is merely a reflection of what is in us and if the environment is to change, something in us must change.'' Nothing will change, however, as long as we remain unconscious of the fundamental forces which shape our lives, embedded as we are in the general cultural ambience ( cultural trance.) At this point, we need some fairly coherent organizing picture of what has been happening to us, so that we can weigh the costs of what we are doing. If we can penetrate to the true inwardness of a situation, if we do not dull our minds to its dangerous or unpleasant features, we are less likely to be seriously manipulated . We have the possibility of choice, once we see clearly what is going on. Then, perhaps, we can find a way to pass through these conditions and transcend them. We need to resist sinking into the maelstrom through understanding the nature of the vortex, and thus be carried up by the same forces that seek to sink us.''
By painting and documenting the destruction caused by the heat of '' progress'' I hope to expose, in a tangible concrete way, this danger to our way of life. It is much harder for people to be in denial when something is portrayed and remains as a document. Artists can provide an image of the issue rather than have it lost in words. Artists bear witness to the realities of the time we live in.
See more of Michael Cadieux's work at: Michael Cadieux