RIP: Jim Willer, painter, sculptor, science fiction novelist, environmental activist, role model, friend: the first full-time artist I ever met, aged five or thereabouts, when he drove his youngest daughter Sophie down from Sunset Beach to my kindergarten classroom.

I wrote about Jim's work twice; once for Artichoke magazine, and once in an catalog for the Richmond Art Gallery (Out of The Garden: The Contemporary British Columbia Landscape, the first visual art exhibition I ever curated). I also commissioned a small watercolor from Jim some time in the early 1990s, thereby fulfilling a promise I originally made to him in grade 2 or 3. That painting, Very Like a Micro-Circuit #2, which depicts a fallen Haida mortuary pole slowly dissolving into organic computer circuitry, still hangs in my apartment's front hall, beside one of Sylvia's EK photographs and a Ron Terada painting of an Artforum ad for Thomas Struth.

Jim's obituary, from the Globe:

"WILLER, James Sydney Harold

Beloved father, artist, sculptor, environmental activist and writer, Jim passed away peacefully on Sept. 6, 2007 at St. Paul's Hospital, Vancouver. Born in London, England in 1921, Jim studied at the University of Manitoba, the Hornsey School of Art in London and the Royal Academy of Amsterdam. His paintings are included in Permanent collections at the National Gallery of Canada, the Winnipeg Art Gallery, and the Vancouver Art Gallery. Jim exhibited his work for the National Gallery Tour in both 1953-54 and 1970-71. He won the Canadian Overseas Award in 1967 and from 1973-96 showed numerous group exhibitions and one-man shows at the Bau-Xi Gallery, Vancouver. Jim's science fiction novel Paramind written in 1967 won the Canada 2000 Award. A celebration of Jim's life will be arranged and announced in the future. He is survived by his three daughters Kathleen Willer of Coleman, Alberta, Xanthe Charov of New York City, NY, Sophie Reen of Greensburg, Indiana, by Chris Cavers (first wife and mother of Kathleen) and by seven grandchildren."

(Image: Jim's drawing Autotem, 1980, an excellent example of his thematic concerns (man-made objects transforming into animal spirits; into organic circuitry; into "thinking machines" capable of reflection on their own place in the world), but not, unfortunately, of the peculiar Vermeeresque brilliance of his watercolors)
- posted by cjb @ 10:20 AM