Some New Paintings!!

A couple of months ago I was picking my way through S. W. Welch when I found this weird little book called Disaster Canada by Janet Looker. It is a documentation of disastrous events throughout Canada organized into chapters by such elemental themes as FIRE, ICE and EARTH.
There are some wild stories of shipwrecks, tornadoes, sealing disasters (which was great reading prior to the David Blackwood exhibit at the AGO in Toronto) and "greatest hits" compilation of major fires.

It was the photographs of the mining collapses and avalanches that really got me sparked. There is a role in the recovery of trapped miners referred to as Drägermen. These are the miners who were lucky enough not to be trapped in a collapse who must travel back down the shaft to dig out their fellow miners. The title is derived from the German inventor Alex Dräger who developed the breathing apparatuses the men wore when working underground.

There is a series of photographs of such rescue workers returning from collapsed mine shafts. Even with the archaic photography is possible to discern the exhaustion and strain on their faces as they spend hour after hour moving earth, rock and corpses.

In the event of a collapse a century ago, those in proximity of the epicenter are exclusively considered a lost cause. The serious concern is the collapsed material that then separates the surviving miners from exit shaft. Before advanced prospecting and mineral estimation technology, mining was an act of digging through the earth in the search of a mineral vein. The beautiful mythology of the Drägermen becomes then of miners who must employ the same techniques to search for a very different vein. Often alone under the earth, excavating for isolated pockets of life.

Below are two portraits, and their respective details, of Drägermen taken from collapses in Quebec and British Columbia.

Drägerman 1
oil on paper
12 x 13

Drägerman 2
oil on paper
12 x 13