A delicate fusion of traditions distinguishes a painter, carver and musician who recently blended projections of his artworks with original songs during a performance of the Gibsons Dance Centre’s adult company.
Levi Purjue’s family heritage itself is an amalgam, combining the Tahltan Nation of Telegraph Creek and the Shoshone people of Nevada. Purjue was born and raised in Haida Gwaii before moving to the Sunshine Coast, where he completed high school studies at Chatelech Secondary School. His daughter’s name commemorates the Tlell River, which flows from Graham Island into Hecate Strait.
In 2015, injuries from a car accident interrupted his career in the construction industry.
“I had to take four months off of work to rehabilitate my back,” Purjue recalled. “I decided to try painting because I was bored and wanted to be a little bit productive. So I went to the dollar store and picked up a little canvas and some paint and just tried it.”
Three months later, his first acrylic work was for sale in a Gibsons gallery. The self-taught painter made the decision to make art his full-time vocation. In 2019, he became one of three artists anchoring the Silver Moon Gallery in downtown Gibsons.
Purjue’s works exalt the wildlife of British Columbia’s seas and rainforests through vivid realism. His canvas The Wanderer depicts the ecstasy of a breaching killer whale. Raven Over North Beach shows the bird in rapid flight against a rippled ocean streaked like freeway lights. Each painting gradually reveals a deeper story: formline shapes that characterize West Coast Indigenous art are overpainted in ghostly grey. The union of two magisteria — the physical world of flesh and feathers, and the misty domain of timeless legend — provides an emotional wallop.
“I have a fascination with whales,” said Purjue, “I always have. I represent them a lot in my artwork, and I like to have traditional elements in there too. And I put some totems in my artwork because they were meant to be depicting the figures also seen in natural settings.”
Two years after launching his painting career, Purjue began carving under the tutelage of Xwémalhkwu First Nation artist Derek Georgeson, who resides in the shíshálh homelands of his wife Shy Watters. In Haida Gwaii, Purjue had been surrounded by gold and silver artworks fashioned by his uncle, a master metalworker. Today, he inlays precious metals like copper into the yellow cedar of bas-relief carvings and paddles. In circle-bounded Eagle By Moonlight, the high-flying hunter surmounts a sparkling silhouette of the boreal landscape.
“I’ve always been kind of closer to my Tahltan side,” said Purjue, “because I grew up with stories from my grandmother all the time. She was in three different Indian residential schools in the Yukon. She was never allowed to speak her language. So any way that I can revive some of that culture and put it out there through the arts, I can see the pleasure it brings my grandmother because it’s a way of reversing the effect of the residential schools.”
Purjue, also a lifelong singer-songwriter, will return to the Heritage Playhouse in Gibsons for performances at the multidisciplinary Connections show upcoming on June 30 and July 1.
