Deryk Houston's Art Gallery

My son Samuel has just completed a new sculpture for the city of Nanaimo. It is called “Borrowed Light”.
The design is entirely his and I think it worked out just great. We don;t have a large workshop but this piece came together without any hitches. If I learned anything from my trips to Iraq, it was to learn to make do with what you have and I try to pass on this idea to Samuel. (One never has a big enough budget or a big enough work space or all the special tools we would like but with carefull planning one can do amazing things).
The tall arching steel was shaped in Vancouver to Samuels specs. It amazes me how much power must be in the machines that can nicely shape and bend four inch hard steel into a consistant form. It worked beautifully. Each section was delivered to our front lawn by a large truck. We then carried the pieces around to our backyard. The largest piece had to be carried through our neighbours yard in order to make it around corners and then carefully lowered into our back work space. The steel weighs about ten pounds a foot and so it adds up quickly to a deadweight. The first task was to get the main standing post into position. Samuel welded the heavy base onto the four inch thick steel and then calculated the shapes that would act as braces in order to carry the tremendous forces driving through the arching main shape. These special braces were cut at a shop near our home. We don;t have special overhead cranes to lift anything and so we had to improvise in order to get the main post up using sheer brute force. Our first priority is safety and so we decided to cut a few feet off the main arch in order to make the structure more manageable. We then created special arching brackets that would allow us to attach that section back on. Everything is heavy duty. We would rather overengineer than take chances with strength in design.
The other sections were then hoisted up into position using a pulley and rope. There is tremendous power in pulleys as they cut down the load several times and allow you to lift a substantial weight with a small amount of effort. Samuel added extra brackets to the design in order to carry the loads. The weght is carried in a simple way using several built in redundancy measures. The result is a clean design that is very strong.
After assembly here in our backyard and workshop, we dismantled the sculpture and installed it in Nanaimo. Everything went like clockwork thanks to the city engeneering department and Samuels careful planning. I was very proud how he took charge and set to work with the installation. Congratulations Samuel on a job well done!

Written by Uri Avnery
May 11, 2013

The Donkey of the Messiah

“THE TWO-STATE solution is dead!” This mantra has been repeated so often lately, by so many authoritative commentators, that it must be true.

Well, it ain‘t.

It reminds one of Mark Twain’s oft quoted words: “The report of my death was an exaggeration.”

BY NOW this has become an intellectual fad. To advocate the two-state solution means that you are ancient, old-fashioned, stale, stodgy, a fossil from a bygone era. Hoisting the flag of the “one-state solution” means that you are young, forward-looking, “cool”.

Actually, this only shows how ideas move in circles. When we declared in early 1949, just after the end of the first Israeli-Arab war, that the only answer to the new situation was the establishment of a Palestinian state side by side with Israel, the “one-state solution” was already old.

The idea of a “bi-national state” was in vogue in the 1930s. Its main advocates were well-meaning intellectuals, many of them luminaries of the new Hebrew University, like Judah Leon Magnes and Martin Buber. They were reinforced by the Hashomer Hatza’ir kibbutz movement, which later became the Mapam party.

It never gained any traction. The Arabs believed that it was a Jewish trick. Bi-nationalism was built on the principle of parity between the two populations in Palestine – 50% Jews, 50% Arabs. Since the Jews at that time were much less than half the population, Arab suspicions were reasonable.

On the Jewish side, the idea looked ridiculous. The very essence of Zionism was to have a state where Jews would be masters of their fate, preferably in all of Palestine.

At the time, no one called it the “one-state solution” because there was already one state – the State of Palestine, ruled by the British. The “solution” was called “the bi-national state” and died, unmourned, in the war of 1948.

WHAT HAS caused the miraculous resurrection of this idea?

Not the birth of a new love between the two peoples. Such a phenomenon would have been wonderful, even miraculous. If Israelis and Palestinians had discovered their common values, the common roots of their history and languages, their common love for this country – why, wouldn’t that have been absolutely splendid?

But, alas, the renewed “one-state solution” was not born of another immaculate conception. Its father is the occupation, its mother despair.

The occupation has already created a de facto One State – an evil state of oppression and brutality, in which half the population (or slightly less than half) deprives the other half of almost all rights – human rights, economic rights and political rights. The Jewish settlements proliferate, and every day brings new stories of woe.

Good people on both sides have lost hope. But hopelessness does not stir to action. It fosters resignation.

LET’S GO back to the starting point. “The two-state solution is dead”. How come? Who says? In accordance with what scientific criteria has death been certified?

Generally, the spread of the settlements is cited as the sign of death. In the 1980s the respected Israeli historian Meron Benvenisti pronounced that the situation had now become “irreversible”. At the time, there were hardly 100 thousand settlers in the occupied territories (apart from East Jerusalem, which by common consent is a separate issue). Now they claim to be 300 thousand, but who is counting? How many settlers mean irreversibility? 100, 300, 500, 800 thousand?

History is a hothouse of reversibility. Empires grow and collapse. Cultures flourish and wither. So do social and economic patterns. Only death is irreversible.

I can think of a dozen different ways to solve the settlement problem, from forcible removal to exchange of territories to Palestinian citizenship. Who believed that the settlements in North Sinai would be removed so easily? That the evacuation of the Gaza Strip settlements would become a national farce?

In the end, there will probably be a mixture of several ways, according to circumstances.

All the Herculean problems of the conflict can be resolved – if there is a will. It’s the will that is the real problem.

THE ONE-STATERS like to base themselves on the South African experience. For them, Israel is an apartheid state, like the former South Africa, and therefore the solution must be South African-like.

The situation in the occupied territories, and to some extent in Israel proper, does indeed strongly resemble the apartheid regime. The apartheid example may be justly cited in political debate. But in reality, there is very little deeper resemblance – if any – between the two countries.

David Ben-Gurion once gave the South African leaders a piece of advice: partition. Concentrate the white population in the south, in the Cape region, and cede the other parts of the country to the blacks. Both sides in South Africa rejected this idea furiously, because both sides believed in a single, united country.

They largely spoke the same languages, adhered to the same religion, were integrated in the same economy. The fight was about the master-slave relationship, with a small minority lording it over a massive majority.

Nothing of this is true in our country. Here we have two different nations, two populations of nearly equal size, two languages, two (or rather, three) religions, two cultures, two totally different economies.

A false proposition leads to false conclusions. One of them is that Israel, like Apartheid South Africa, can be brought to its knees by an international boycott. About South Africa, this is a patronizing imperialist illusion. The boycott, moral and important as it was, did not do the job. It was the Africans themselves, aided by some local white idealists, who did it by their courageous strikes and uprisings.

I am an optimist, and I do hope that eventually Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Arabs will become sister nations, living side by side in harmony. But to come to that point, there must be a period of living peacefully in two adjoining states, hopefully with open borders.

THE PEOPLE who speak now of the “one-state solution” are idealists. But they do a lot of harm. And not only because they remove themselves and others from the struggle for the only solution that is realistic.

If we are going to live together in one state, it makes no sense to fight against the settlements. If Haifa and Ramallah will be in the same state, what is the difference between a settlement near Haifa and one near Ramallah? But the fight against the settlements is absolutely essential, it is the main battlefield in the struggle for peace.

Indeed, the one-state solution is the common aim of the extreme Zionist right and the extreme anti-Zionist left. And since the right is incomparably stronger, it is the left that is aiding the right, and not the other way round.

In theory, that is as it should be. Because the one-staters believe that the rightists are only preparing the ground for their future paradise. The right is uniting the country and putting an end to the possibility of creating an independent State of Palestine. They will subject the Palestinians to all the horrors of apartheid and much more, since the South African racists did not aim at displacing and replacing the blacks. But in due course – perhaps in a mere few decades, or half a century – the world will compel Greater Israel to grant the Palestinians full rights, and Israel will become Palestine.

According to this ultra-leftist theory, the right, which is now creating the racist one state, is in reality the Donkey of the Messiah, the legendary animal on which the Messiah will ride to triumph.

It’s a beautiful theory, but what is the assurance that this will actually happen? And before the final stage arrives, what will happen to the Palestinian people? Who will compel the rulers of Greater Israel to accept the diktat of world public opinion?

If Israel now refuses to bow to world opinion and enable the Palestinians to have their own state in 28% of historical Palestine, why would they bow to world opinion in the future and dismantle Israel altogether?

Speaking about a process that will surely last 50 years and more, who knows what will happen? What changes will take place in the world in the meantime? What wars and other catastrophes will take the world’s mind off the “Palestinian issue”?

Would one really gamble the fate of one’s nation on a far-fetched theory like this?

ASSUMING FOR a moment that the one-state solution would really come about, how would it function?

Will Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs serve in the same army, pay the same taxes, obey the same laws, work together in the same political parties? Will there be social intercourse between them? Or will the state sink into an interminable civil war?

Other peoples have found it impossible to live together in one state. Take the Soviet Union. Yugoslavia. Serbia. Czechoslovakia. Cyprus. Sudan. The Scots want to secede from the United Kingdom. So do the Basques and the Catalans from Spain. The French in Canada and the Flemish in Belgium are uneasy. As far as I know, nowhere in the entire world have two different peoples agreed to form a joint state for decades.

NO, THE two-state solution is not dead. It cannot die, because it is the only solution there is.

Despair may be convenient and tempting. But despair is no solution at all.

I have to say that I am super pleased with the comments made by Justin Trudeau regarding the bombings in Boston.
On the other hand, Canada’s current prime minister, Steven Harper, has shown his lack of logic by stating that we shouldn’t be trying to understand why these bombings took place in the first place.
I’m much happier with Justin Trudeau’s open mind approach and it is encouraging to get a glimmer into what might be his foreign policy stance were he to win the next federal election.
We have to understand why these terrible events are happening. This doesn;t mean forgiving or condoning these acts in any way but if were to find out the basic root of the problem it might go a long way in preventing future attacks.
People do things for love or hate. We must try and understand where that hate comes from.
Drone attacks have killed thousand of innocent people. Often it is children. I believe that our world would be much safer if we did not kill peoples children with drone attacks. I believe that our world would be much safer if we did not ignore international law such as engaging in “regime change” as we did in Libya and Iraq. (Many of the politicians who supported the idea of regime change in Libya now regret that move because of the horrible way events have unfolded since with continued cival war.) The same kind of mess is happening in Iraq with bombings on a daily basis. Same with Afghanistan and Syria.
I would like to hear Justin Trudeau explain what his foreign policy will be. So far no one in the LIberal party has been able to tell me what his stand is. This has been annoying for me as you can read and hear in my previous blog posting.
But….I am hopeful just the same that this young man might be about to breath a breath of fresh air into Canada’s sails.
I sure hope so because Steven Harper is leading Canada down a path of ruin.

For the last several weeks I have been trying to find out what Justin Trudeau’s position would be on foreign policy if he became leader of the Liberal Party of Canada.
I would love to know because I am interested in the Liberal Party of Canada and I always had a lot of respect for his father. I liked how Canada used to be known as a “Peace Keeper” before we sold our souls to America by horse trading away our beliefs.
My phone calls and e mails have been ignored and I have been hung up on several times when I call Justin Trudeau’s office for answers to my basic questions. The folowing clip is just one of many phone calls that I happened to record when I phoned his office. You can listen to it here.

Keep in mind that several times I have been promised that someone will get back to me and no one has to this date.

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Please click on the link below to view a video of another call made to the same office. Once again, the person hung up on me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgRtBbJhC8cPr0T0&feature=youtu.be

Title: “Shadows Under The Surface”
Medium:Acrylic on canvas
Size:36″X36″
Price: $3,600.00

When the gallery asked me what kind of fish were depicted in the painting I said I wasn;t sure. I’ve never been able to tell one fish from another! It might sound odd that I wouldn’t care but it is not important to me. It’s the same when I paint flowers. I am never sure if I am painting tulips or roses. (I do know the difference but it is just that the actual choice is not important to me. It is always about all the other stuff.) It’s about the spirit of the subject and what that represents in the work. The magic of a creature that can defy logic and still breath while under the water takes me into another world. I also love the abstract shadows that follow the fish everywhere they explore.

People try to understand their world in their own way. When I was travelling by horseback in the wilderness with a group of friends, I was struck by how differently each of us interacted with the experience. Some would pour over maps trying to understand exactly where they would go. Some would have a device that could tell them where they had come from. Some would have their focus on the inner workings of the camera trying to record every minute. I tended to spend my time just taking it all in with my eyes and I didn;t particularly care where we had come from or where we were going. Everyone was different and had their own way.

I was drawn back to this image after having created a series of these works in the past. Sometimes it is good to take a look back and see what you can do with it in a new way. I was always fascinated by the fish in the small streams in Scotland as a young boy.

Life is full of shadows and light. Contrasts help us  fully appreciate every aspect of our lives.

Title: “Cobble Cottage”   (House On Monterey avenue, Victoria BC

Medium: Acrylic on canvas

Size:24″X32″ (Frames out to 35″X47″)

Price: $2,100.00  (Available through Eclectic Gallery on Oak Bay avenue, Victoria, BC Canada  250 598 8095 )

I have let my imagination run loose with this scene. I’ve changed some things and moved some things around which helps me express the actual feeling and spirit that I get when I stand and gaze at this house on the street.  In reality the house is more structured, more functional, but I am very happy the way I have been able to overlay reality with dreams and fantasy, while still feeling fairly true to the house. It really is what the place is like in my mind when I observe the little house as it sits in our community.

I love this little house. It has been under renovation for some time. The house was already a beautiful and charming little house and yet I feel that the addition has been done in a careful way without sacrificing any of the original charactor.  My hats off to the owners and the builders who carried out the work. A job well done.

First of all I feel lucky to live in Canada. We are blessed in so many ways. My problems with the choice of our governments is more with details on issues. But…..Many issues are still quite serious and extremely disappointing……such as the NDP and the Green Party of Canada agreeing with the idea to use bombs and force in Libya for example. They were suckered into that mess because the issue was framed by the question, “Do you want another Rwanda?. The proper question to have asked should have been, “Do you believe in international law or not?”. And if you do…… then you should know that regime change is against international law. (Our Prime minister, Steven Harper had come out of a very early meeting in Europe and stated that the issue in Libya was all about regime change, so everyone should have known what they were voting for.)

When I hear of Justin Trudea planning to run for the leadership of the Liberal Party then it gets my interest. But……when I read an e mail from Liberal candidate, Karen McCrimmon, it rubbed me the wrong way.

She seemed to think that the best way to promote herself in a positive way was to point out that she had served time in Afghanistan.

She said. “I spent Canada Day of 2004 serving in Afghanistan. Celebrating your national holiday in an impoverished country on the other side of the world doesn’t sound all that fun, but it actually made for some great memories. We played road hockey, enjoyed pancakes with maple syrup and sang O Canada at the top of our lungs”.

It bothers me that anyone would mention  how impoverished the Afghanistan people were and then brag in the very next sentence  how they enjoyed stuffing their face with pancakes and maple syrup.

I would like to encourage the Liberal Party of Canada to rethink everything about Canada’s role in foreign affairs. The former prime minister, Mr. Pierre Trudeau, would never  have horse traded Canada’s sovereignty. 

He would never have allowed us to be dragged into other countries bloody and costly  civil wars.  We would still be known as peace keepers. (Sending our troops to help keep the peace between two groups who have already agreed to a peace deal.

Pierre Trudeau would never have sent our troops or our air power to help bring about regime change.

I have asked the Liberal Party of Canada for their stand on these issues and I have yet to have any answer back.

So far………I am not impressed with Justin Trudea.

He has a lot to explain before he gets Canadians’ support.

Deryk Houston: The Service and Resource Centre indoor art for the city of Nanaimo BC., Canada.

Title: “Marks left by People”
Dimensions: 60 inches tall X 120inches wide

When I think of Community I like to include the history and the marks that we leave as we work to support our families; How we house, feed, communicate with and understand our fellow man.

I can’t think of anything more compelling than the images left on the cave walls by ancient peoples. Their drive to alter their space must have offered them security, a sense of place and helped define their community.
Every generation leaves its mark and I want to create a work of art that focuses on this idea.

When I started refining my final proposal for this project I had two main priorities.
One was to produce a robust and durable piece of art that could physically stand the test of time in a public space. (This space is in close quarters to chairs and tables directly below the work.)
My other priority was to create something lasting and meaningful from an artistic point of view and tells a story about the people of this place.

I have chosen to work on a single stainless steel sheet 60” X 120” wide (The one sixteenth inch thick steel does not project out from the wall in anyway, other than the thickness of the steel itself)
If someone were sitting below the work with an umbrella for example, sticking out of a backpack …….it would be very unlikely to hook under the edge when they stood up.

As I developed the actual image, I found myself searching for an anchor image to dominate the overall design and convey the story.

I went for walks through the graveyards and dug into books at the Nanaimo library and archives. I was searching for something that would reach to the heart of the story I wanted to tell…………something that would not simply focus on one event, one famous person or one important building, because I felt that this would freeze and limit the conversation. I imagined something much broader and in some ways more abstract .
I still wanted to tell the story of the marks left by people.

I fell in love with the early petroglyphs surrounding Nanaimo and how these marks left by these ancient people very much related to the marks left by the modern street lines of Nanaimo today. The images carved into the surface of those rock faces helped that community mark good fishing and hunting locations.
The maps and street grid of today also help people find their place in the community.
I am drawn to the purity of petroglyphs and am reminded that Nanaimo’s history is deeply rooted with thousands of years by the proud nation of the Snuneymuxw nation and so I saw this idea as a beautiful focus for the work.
I also wanted to incorporate an early map of Nanaimo in a gentle way but during the process of working this out, I discovered the rigid pattern and lines tended to overshadow the main visual story and so I decided to soften the ridged grid lines by simply writing the street names instead. This gave me the general radiating lines that Nanaimo is famous for and the street names also allowed me to pay homage to some of the people in Nanaimo’s history, post colonization.

I have left one strip of polished stainless steel down one side of the panel in order to represent Nanaimo’s future possibilities. The faces of visitors reflected in the steel surface will decide the new directions and goals of an already vibrant city.
Some of the panel edges would have oversize, rounded bolt heads down the sides referencing Nanaimo’s early mining, heavy equipment and pioneering history.

The black wash of acrylic paint across the top section of the surface indicates the coal history of Nanaimo. I have also included some words across the surface at random, gleaned from records of how people were injured in the mines. (“Mine flooded” etc)
The records list an amazing number of people who lost their lives or were badly burned or injured.

I have also included a list of dates down one narrow strip indicating a “Time Line” of important dates since colonization. (For example: The signing of the treaty with the Snuneymuxw nation etc.)

I believe in the power of art and the marks left by mankind and would be proud to work on this project.

Thank you
Deryk Houston
250 598 9908
www.derykhouston.com

Structure of the Work: The surface of the stainless steel sheet would be primed with an acrylic primer, followed by several layers of acrylic paint needed to create the painted images. The surface would then be coated with a couple of coats of an isolation acrylic varnish, followed by an oil, UV protecting, coat. This final varnish protects the colours from sunlight and can be removed in future years if it is seen to be needed.
Maintenance: The removal and replacement of this protective UV varnish is a very simple process that could be carried out by any picture restorer. Once every twenty years would be reasonable. (The future projected cost of removing and replacing the varnish, based on 2013 dollars, would be approx. $500.00 and could be done on location with no need to remove the structure from the wall.)

Installation:
The flat stainless steel would have holes along the top which would be fastened by hanging over sturdy bolts anchored into the studs inside the wall.
Everything would lay flat against the wall and be extremely durable, secure and safe from any movement of people.
I will install this work.

Budget

Stainless steel sheet 60”X120”
$1,300.00
Creation of the work by the artist including paints, varnishes, etc.
$12,000.00
Studio Space rental requirements for the layout
$1,000.00
Installation: (Two people)
$500.00
Truck rental for delivery
$200.00
Total
$15,000.00

Schedule for completion of installation of the work: Six weeks after the final approval the work will be ready for installation. Installation itself can be completed in one day.

Creation of the work location: The research and the core of my ideas have been formed by my experiences in Nanaimo. (Nanaimo graveyards, Nanaimo Public Library, The Nanaimo Archives, Petroglyph Park and the new Nanaimo SARC building.)

Materials, such as stainless steel, fasteners etc, will be sourced as close to Nanaimo as possible.