35 Facts About Carle Hessay

Hans Karl Hesse, known in later life as Carle Hessay, was a German-born Canadian painter.

The influence of Expressionism soon became significant, with Carle Hessay drawing on both the European and American movements, together with aspects of Emily Carr and the Group of Seven.

Carle Hessay painted landscapes throughout his artistic life, as well as cityscapes, the Spanish Civil War, Biblical prophecy, and conceptions of the far future.

Over time, Carle Hessay's depictions grew more symbolic, one commentator describing his late work as "brazenly metaphysical and apocalyptic".

Carle Hessay often made his own pigments, and his style is distinguished by his use of colour, especially black.

Carle Hessay was the subject of a 2017 documentary film and art exhibition at the University of Victoria.

Carle Hessay was born as Hans Karl Hesse in Dresden, Germany, on 30 November 1911.

Carle Hessay later left Germany to travel the world as a commercial mariner for many years, rising to the position of second mate.

Carle Hessay fought in the Spanish Civil War for a short period.

Carle Hessay's first home in British Columbia after WWII was a shanty on Passage Island.

In 1950, Carle Hessay moved to Langley, a town in the Fraser Valley.

Carle Hessay soon met Langley resident Leonard Woods, a former student of LeMoine FitzGerald, and a multi-talented sculptor, musician, poet, and art historian.

Carle Hessay lived in a rear curtained-off area, his furnishings consisting of a cot, hot plate, and table and chairs.

Carle Hessay once had a prospector's shack near the Old Alexandra Bridge, in the vicinity of Spuzzum.

Carle Hessay enjoyed visiting First Nations reserves, where he found social acceptance.

Carle Hessay died of a heart attack on 1 January 1978 while attending a New Year's dance at the Sasquatch Inn in Spuzzum.

Carle Hessay employed cooked fruits and vegetables, such as onion-skin dyes, potato water, and carrots.

Carle Hessay's canvases were prepared with fifteen coats of gesso ground made according to his own formula.

Carle Hessay appreciated First Nations art, admiring the Kwakwaka'wakw artist Mungo Martin, and he knew Bill Reid.

Carle Hessay characteristically used colour to register a dominant emotional tone, reinforcing the thematic content.

Carle Hessay considered black to be his trademark as a painter.

Carle Hessay liked his pictures to tell a story, but preferred to leave their interpretation up to the viewer.

In Woods' view, Carle Hessay drew on his childhood learning steeped in the Bible, and the mural reinterprets Mount Lebanon, the Sea of Galilee, and the River Jordan in a Canadian context.

Carle Hessay's last painting, the peaceful landscape Break of Day, completed in 1977, is atypical among those of his final decade, with its use of soft harmonies and rounded contours.

Carle Hessay sometimes used religious allusions as metaphors illustrating the conditions that threaten modern society.

Carle Hessay taught himself gymnastics by training on poles attached to two trees, and a 1943 letter of reference from the Canadian Armed Forces described him as an "all-around apparatus man", and being a capable instructor.

Carle Hessay believed that music, which he studied in his youth, was the highest art form, and he played the piano well.

Self-educated in many ways, Carle Hessay had an excellent knowledge of science, mythology, and ancient philosophy, and he could quote classical literature by heart.

Carle Hessay received minimal recognition for his paintings during his lifetime.

Carle Hessay's artworks were next exhibited in the Grain Elevator Gallery in Dawson Creek in 1984, a month-long exhibition.

The Toronto art critic Jennifer Oille, while regarding skeptically the events of Carle Hessay's life, described the works as ranging from objective landscape to mindscapes and expressionist symbols.

The 2014 book, For Kelly, with Love: Poems on the Abstracts of Carle Hessay, arranged and edited by Maidie Hilmo, commemorated an unusual project in homage of Kelly Parsons, a Victoria poet and medievalist, who died of breast cancer in 2008.

Carle Hessay's works are represented in the collections of the Langley Centennial Museum and the Penticton Art Gallery.

Carle Hessay's 1968 painting Port City was depicted on the cover of the book Late Modernism and Expatriation, edited by Lauren Arrington, and published in 2022 by Clemson University Press in association with Liverpool University Press.

Paintings by Carle Hessay have appeared in several literary journals and other types of publications, including the Boston Review, the Paris Review, and the revived Quarterly Review.