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Visual artist Karl MacKeeman believes that "everyone is potentially at some level an artist or a craftsman." With his inclusive sense of art, he has set up workshops and mentoring opportunities in painting and printmaking that have welcomed artists at every level of development. He has also had a leading role in a life drawing group that has included over 60 artists and models over more than a decade (operating out of over five locations before finding its most recent home, rent-free in the Kier Gallery). He is excited that the life drawing attracts not only people who identify themselves as artists, but also nurses and seniors and all manner of people with day jobs.
Fundamentally, Karl sees the value of any form of art-making as a means of people "enriching their lives." He has a broad sense of what the arts include. He dislikes the divisions made between "art" and "craft," emphasizing instead the worth of "unique work by hand," including "boat-building and oar-making" as much as painting or printmaking. Part of his love of printmaking stems from his belief that it is "in many ways the most democratic of the arts." In addition to printmaking, Karl also paints prolifically. Fish and shellfish are probably the most recognizable motifs in his painting-not surprising given his love of angling. (He also maintains five working aquariums in his living and working space.)
Karl spent much of his early life in Nova Scotia, with Island parents. He dropped out of school and made his way in the work force for a number of years before long-standing love of drawing led him to the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, where he made up high school work so he could train in painting and printmaking. After graduating, he worked in the school's printing studio creating editions in lithography and acted as director of NSCAD's Anna Leonowens Gallery.
He left Halifax for Papua New Guinea, with the idea of working in a gallery there. "The job evaporated before I got there," he says, "but I had already had my shots and everything . . . so I fell into' arts education." He stayed for four years, teaching. When he returned from PNG in 1982, he settled in Montague, PEI and spent a decade and a half operating a commercial art studio and doing signage before moving to Charlottetown.
He has maintained an interest in international art, only recently returning from a one-week study tour in Cuba, where he was impressed by Cuban artists who demonstrate "what you can do with very little." "They make do with cardboard and with scrap metal," he says, and marvels that they maintain old machinery and technologies here scrapped as obsolete.
"The Third World is way ahead of us in arts in many ways," he says. In PNG as well as in Cuba, he found little distinction between art- and craft-making and other activities of everyday life. He saw none of the elitist "us" and "them" attitude that he sees dividing "artists" in Canada from the general public. "We [artists] are not connecting with the public need," he says. "The idea of visual arts is to show art. We can't just show art to our friends and preach to the converted. We have to connect with the public. I don't think we fulfill that end of it very well." He speaks with sadness of the "generations of people lost to the arts" because they were discouraged from creating.
Despite frustrations, Karl sees potential for breaking down the artificial barriers constructed between arts and crafts and between artists and the public. With artists presenting a more "united front," Karl sees potential for more people to be able to live off their labours in the arts. In Cuba, he was inspired by artists ("great craftsmen, superb artists, and prolific workers") whose work is recognized as part of the island's tourist economy.
His greatest hope is for a flourishing in arts education-formal and informal, in public schools and dedicated art schools. Art education on the inclusive and expansive model Karl MacKeeman has continually practised would ensure that no future generations of Islanders would be lost to the arts; no one would have to see his or her creative and expressive potential unfulfilled.