Great art must be a living thing, or it is not art at all.
I consider myself one of the most fortunate of men, to have lived at a time when some of the old Haidas and their peers among the Northwest Coast peoples were still alive, and to have had the privilege of knowing them.
I've never felt that I was doing something for my people, except what I could to bring the accomplishments of the old ones to the attention of the world. I think the Northwest Coast style of art is an absolutely unique product, one of the crowning achievements of the whole human experience. I just don't want the whole thing swept under the carpet without someone paying attention to it.
It's hard to understand how you arrive at a design. It's far too complicated to get any overall picture of.
I have a sort of waking nightmare: to get this thing just about completed, and the last day to discover one little part that doesn't quite fit with the adjacent part.
I certainly and deliberately introduced a great deal of variety into the people in the clamshell, which I suppose grows out of growing up in an individualistic society we profess to have.
But I didn't think about this beforehand. I just went ahead and did it, and that's the way it turned out. So I guess there are lots of paradoxes which I'll leave for other people to unscramble.
It suits my own attitude toward the world and its people to believe that the Raven is this completely self-centered, uninvolved bringer of change, through inadvertence and accident, and so on... It's a version of the Raven myth for today, not for the time when it was created.
I have created the Raven in my own image over the years and insist that mine is the version of this personality that is correct - well, at least it is correct as far as I am concerned.
