JAMES STRECKER: Please tell us what you want the public to know about your current exhibition at the You Me Gallery.
ROBERT CLARK YATES: Well, first of all, the gallery is located at 330 James Street North in Hamilton, and this exhibition, which I call “Distant Landscapes and other observations,” will be on display until April 23, 2023. Please understand I am not a landscape painter in the traditional sense of those words. This is a selection of improvised inventions based on after-the-fact memories of things seen and felt while travelling in landscapes beyond Hamilton and Dundas. Most were painted in my Dundas studio during the covid pandemic when being a tourist was not the thing to do. The “landscapes” represented here are from Italy, Lithuania, Algonquin Park and Ireland. I was inspired by the architectural and sculptural fragments of the ruins of the Forum in Rome; the overwhelming abundance of Renaissance and pre-Renaissance art in Florence; the hauntingly beautiful and spiritually-charged forests and sand dunes of the Curonian Spit (which runs into the Baltic Ocean parallel to the mainland of Lithuania in eastern Europe, ancestral homeland of my beautiful wife, Donna); the very down-home, familiar and always inspiring wilds of Algonquin Park. And the Irish landscape is inspired by all the splendid Irish writers and the extraordinary Long Room Library above the home of the Book of Kells in Trinity College, Dublin.
JS: How is making art a significant experience in your life?
RCY: I don’t understand why some people are called to be artists and others aren’t. I was. Maybe it is something like the arbitrary colour of your hair or skin, your chance height or flip-of-the-coin personality. We all seem to be significantly different. My mother told me I was an easy child to bring up because all she had to do was give me some paper and a pencil and I would occupy myself for hours on end. I am an artist. It is my calling. It is all I have known.
JS: What exactly do you like about the work you create?
RCY: It is what I am and what I do. I feel the astonishment that accompanies being aware of the breath-taking miracle of having come-to-be. I love life. My response to it is to do something I like which, as it has turned out, is making art.
JS: In what ways is your creative work fairly easy to do and in what ways is it difficult to realize? Why is it so?
RCY: I am, and have always been, a chronic artistic maker. At all times, even when on holidays, I have an artistic project in mind, something I want to work on. It is not limited to the visual arts and could involve poems, fiction or song-writing. I guess you could call it “easy” because that is what I am and what I do, almost without thinking about it, as if I had no choice. The difficulty comes with the idea of presentation to the public, of what I have to offer to others. I don’t want to waste their time. I want them to find what I do meaningful. So, the big problem is what to do. I can’t help it that I am going to make art anyway, but I sure hope it is meaningful to someone besides myself.
JS: What are the most important parts of yourself that you put into your work in the arts?
RCY: The answer to this question is best decided by the viewer of my art.
JS: What are your biggest challenges as a creative person in the arts?
RCY: How to make a living that is financially untroubling has been a bit of a problem for me. I have not been able to associate making art with making money. They have had nothing to do with each other. Therefore, working at other jobs determined by other people has been necessary to make money. I have done commercial work as a graphic artist. I have worked as a stage-hand, and as a scenic artist for professional theatre and museums. Best of all, I have worked as a farm-hand bringing in the fall harvest, cutting cabbage and digging potatoes. I do the best I can, but all the while I have my own art projects in mind.
JS: Please describe at least one major turning point in your life that brought you to this point as a creative person in the arts.
RCY: My discovery (and on-going re-discovery) of both Art and Nature is a constant turning point for me. I have always loved what we call Nature, and as long as I can remember I have spent a large part of my time in the woods. Nature (which is trees, creeks and wildlife unspoiled by human activity) and Art (which is Human Nature at its best) have held a constant and unfailing attraction for me. Art and Nature provide me with daily turning points.
JS: What are the hardest things for an outsider to understand about your life as a person in the arts?
RCY: To the best of my knowledge, most people if they were to win a big multi-million-dollar lottery would quit their jobs and do whatever they want to do. This suggests to me that they don’t consider their work an essential part of who they are and therefore they understandably want to be free of it. On the other hand, if any artist, including myself, were to win a lottery we would say, “At last, no financial worries, now I can get down to work.” (I don’t buy lottery tickets so this hypothetical situation is unlikely.) What artists do may appear to be non-functional because it adds no appreciable value to our abnormally business-oriented society, whose most vital concern is the growth of the economy. But in the long run, what our society will be remembered for is what is produced by our artists. I think it is hard for an outsider to understand that if the world was more focused on the arts than money, acquisition and commodities, the world would be a better place. Private ownership is not that important. Through the arts an individual can lead a full and fulfilling life without obsessive material possessions. All the arts — music, writing, the visual — can be shared by everyone and provide everyone with an all-embracing meaningfulness.
JS: Let’s talk about the state of the arts in today’s culture, including the forms in which you work. What specifically gives you hope and what specifically do you find depressing?
RCY: The world seems a long way from embracing art as a primary collective concern. That is somewhat depressing because if we are to have a better world, art is necessarily essential. After everyone is fed and sheltered, art should be our first concern. I find it hopeful that those who are deeply interested in the arts tend to be more tolerant of their fellow human beings. They tend to have a sense of fairness and equality that promotes peace and well-being. But still war, brutal exploitation and the rape of Mother Earth is the way of the world. Concerning art in this wide world, I am going to make-up some sad statistics based on an impression I have, which may or may not be true. I have the impression that only about 10% of the general public are interested in what we call the visual fine arts. One in ten. That may be a generous estimate. Art itself is widely varied and the interest of that 10% is spread over the full range of art, from the most avant-garde to the most conservative. So, I will go on to say that probably only !0% of the 10% interested in art — that is, one in a hundred — would be interested in the type of art I do. That’s a pretty good statistic — if everybody in the world could see my art. But the truth of the matter is that less than one in a skrillion get to see it, and — as already noted — only one in a hundred of them would find they had found something that engaged them. There is a long way to go, both for me as an artist and the society I live in.
JS: What exactly has the impact of the COVID pandemic been on you, your creative work and your life in the arts?
RCY: My art is not conducive to collaboration, which means even at the best of times I tend to work alone. So, the pandemic has not impacted my solitary working habits. However, it has made me more acutely aware of our communal life together, the way we treat each other and the precautions we must take to give the human experiment a future.
JS: What’s next in the coming few years of your life in the arts?
RCY: Like everyone else, my personal future is getting shorter and shorter. I am approaching the end of my 77th year. I continued painting during the pandemic years, and I also wrote a book about travels around my own brain. I call it a “fiction” though I have a feeling that classification is as approximately accurate as calling the paintings in my current exhibition “landscapes.” In the next few years, I hope to continue painting and writing while trying to figure out a way to publish my book. It is entitled Now and Never Again, the subject of another interview.