Maurice Richard Libby

Cream:  You've studied art, anthropology, martial arts, are a visual artist and a musician; how do you see your creative work having been shaped and expanded by your formal education, and then by your personal experience?

Maurice Richard Libby:  Everything I've done has led me to where I am now. OK, that's a bit trite, but it's true enough, nonetheless. Formal education taught me the value of linear modes of thought, and more importantly, the limitations. Maybe it would be more accurate to say my limitations. I was not a very accomplished academic. The experience, however did teach me discipline, as did the study of martial arts, which I began while at university. Really, though the major benefit of higher education was that I learned how to study and learn. I also learned some very useful theories of the mind, especially about the way the unconscious mind works - not unlike Zen - which have helped in my work. Part of that is the idea that there is a part of the mind that is constantly running, so that every moment of your life experience is preserved and will eventually be manifest, which leads to that delicious moment of surprise and delight when you produce something that is totally unexpected.

The third result of my academic experience is the exposure to and respect for the arts and culture of the rest of the world, there is a lot to draw on in the post post-modern world. The fourth is that I got to study the roots of post-modern theory first hand (the less said about that, the better!).

Cream:  Tell us about your new book, and the process you are engaged in now regarding its publication.

MRL:  It's called "Moose Jaw: People, Places, History", I wrote it with John Larsen, and it was published by Coteau Books in November of 2001. It's a history of the city where I grew up. It's a fascinating place with a history that includes cowboys and Indians, bootleggers, hookers, cops and robbers, lots of artists, writers, and musicians. I really think that Moose Jaw is a real microcosm of Canadian history (in the forward to the book Peter Gzowski calls it "the most Canadian of cities"). Now we're just engaged in the process of pushing it, interviews, readings-- all that sort of thing. I'm going to be selling the book on one of my web sites

Cream:  In your biography, you mention Otto Rogers and Peter Kahn as teachers of yours. I know of them by association with the Baha'i community - do you have a relationship to the Baha'i Faith?

MRL:  I once was a kind of dilatant in the Baha'i Faith Although you might call me now a kind of not-quite-orthodox Christian. Otto Rogers taught me that your personal faith could be the fount of your work without the work becoming painfully didactic. I didn't even know that Peter Kahn had a Baha'i connection. He was very influential in showing me the value of design, especially negative space, and he showed me that graphic design was as "artistic" as oil painting.

Cream:  Your photographs show the geography of the prairies, and your paintings and drawings more of the 'geography' of the human body. They are not without similarities. What is your inner eye drawn to in order to find fascination with open space, for instance?

MRL:  Part of it is the idea of negative space that I mentioned before. Growing up in the prairies you learn to either love or hate the vastness. It's also got to do with the idea that we look but we don't really see (I think that actually comes from something that Sherlock Holmes once said to Watson). That's another concept that you find in Zen. My own way of getting my mind around it is that we tend to see things "inside the box". We never (or more accurately "hardly ever") take the time to really look at anything. We glance at something and then immediately slot it into a handy pre-fabricated  category. We look at a human figure and think in some kind of sexual cliché (the thing I hate most about pornography is that the pornographers have co-opted the human body to such an extent that it is difficult to get outside their limited, anti-sensual context). So I take the human figure and concentrate on the geography, as you so succinctly put it. Get into the details and you re-humanize it and see it for the first time. Same thing for landscapes, especially prairie landscapes. You concentrate on the vastness, the apparent lack of detail, and you find things you would never have seen. What I'm trying to get at, it just occurred to me, is the geography of the soul.

Cream:  As a commercial artist, do you find you have to move outside of your 'center' to achieve the desired results? Is there a conflict for you there?

MRL: It depends on the assignment, and more importantly, the client. Most of the time, I'm given the task, and just play with it until I get something I like, which I then give to the client. They usually like it too. I think "play" is the operative word here. If you don't have fun with it, it's basically whoring, and if it’s just whoring, it will disappear without ever making any kind of a statement.

Cream:  How would you advise someone who is attempting to bridge their personal creative work with the commercial market?

MRL:  Don't be a whore. Be patient, "build it and they will come". Make your own vision strong and vibrant, and people will see the value in it. Don't be so anxious to get jobs that you forget those things. If a client isn't willing to let you do that, dump them.

Cream:  How do you view the "artist as shaman", and is this a reasonable goal for anyone involved in creative work?

MRL:  The shaman in many pre-industrial cultures is a kind of mediator between the spirit world and humanity. I think the artist is almost obligated to do this to some extent. The Artist's gift is the ability to do this, and people who forget it are often doomed to madness of one kind or another. Find your spiritual center and let God do the rest. The best work is bigger than the artist, bigger even than the artist's ego, and even bigger than the work itself.

Cream: What's ahead of you, creatively?

MRL:  I'm working on a new series of "Spirit Paintings", and some new drawings. The hardest thing is to continue the process without becoming trapped in my own clichés and preconceptions. My brother Michael just re-introduced me to Edward Hopper, and I'm being drawn to that kind of exploration of loneliness and ‘mise en scene’. I love the narrative quality of Hopper's work - you feel like you've dropped into the middle of a story--you don't know the details but you know exactly what's going on - or maybe not. I'm exited by this because it's a return to a kind of painting I haven't done since I was very young.

I'm also working on a coffee table book of the photos of Lewis Rice, a turn of the century photographer who came to Moose Jaw from Nova Scotia. He was one of those great early photographers who was a fabulous artist and who documented their era. He was also a kind of social historian and an early environmentalist. He documented the change from horse-drawn ploughs to internal combustion threshing machines, and tried to rescue the rivers from the ravages of pollution - which was a problem even back then. I'm just trying to find a publisher for that, and I'm thinking of a sequel to the Moose Jaw book.

Cream:  What did you eat for breakfast today?

MRL: A smoothie made of unsweetened soy beverage,soy protein oranges and an apple, with a little olive oil,
plus some glyconutrient supplements.

visit Maurice's website