Hans Karl Hesse, known in later life as Carle Hessay (30 November 1911 – 1 January 1978), was a German-born Canadian painter. Although much remains uncertain of his early years, he immigrated to Canada in 1927, and later studied at art academies in Paris and Dresden. Hessay served as a Canadian soldier in World War II. After the establishment of peace, he moved to British Columbia, eventually settling in the town of Langley, where he took up art again in the 1950s. Some of his early paintings were done in the manner of Romantic realism. The influence of Expressionism soon became significant, with Hessay drawing on both the European and American movements, together with aspects of Emily Carr and the Group of Seven.
Hessay painted landscapes throughout his artistic life, as well as cityscapes, the Spanish Civil War, Biblical prophecy, and conceptions of the far future. A sizable fraction of his output consisted of abstract pieces. Over time, Hessay's depictions grew more symbolic, one commentator describing his late work as "brazenly metaphysical and apocalyptic". He often made his own pigments, and his style is distinguished by his use of colour, especially black. In 2014, a group of Canadian writers published poems based on his small abstracts. Hessay was the subject of a 2017 documentary film and art exhibition at the University of Victoria.
Hessay was born as Hans Karl Hesse in Dresden, Germany, on 30 November 1911. Accounts of the first few decades of his life are fragmentary and sometimes contradictory. His father worked as a shipping agent for Norddeutscher Lloyd until World War II. Hessay attended a boarding school run by monks in Vienna, but he ran away to Bulgaria and eventually to Constantinople. He was caught by police and deported back, where he was severely punished. Six months later, Hessay ran away again, this time to the Dutch coast. He worked on a herring boat and recalled scaling fish in Arctic seas. Despite these travails, Hessay received a well-rounded education that included art, history, languages, and gymnastics. In 1927, just before turning sixteen, he immigrated to Canada with his mother on the CPR steamship Montrose.
Having begun painting at the age of fourteen, Hessay soon returned to Europe where a sympathetic boat captain allowed him to attend art school during the off season. He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the Kunstakademie in Dresden. He learned how to isolate pigments and create glazes, skills he later used in making his own colours from minerals and plants.
Hessay left Germany when the Nazi party came to power. He then led a vagabond life, travelling the world periodically as a commercial mariner, rising to the position of second mate. For some time he did drawings and watercolours from medical slides in French Chad. His first glimpse of British Columbia occurred at Port Alberni, when his ship arrived to load lumber. Impressed by the climate, he wanted to record the geography, sea, and rocks of the area. Hessay fought in the Spanish Civil War for a short period. While his boat was docked in Spain, he was captured and imprisoned by Moorish guards. Since he spoke several languages, he was given greater freedom while being put to work translating letters. Hessay organized an escape party that stole a small boat and crossed the Mediterranean Sea to Africa. In 1938, he arrived back in Canada, and went on to serve in the Second World War as a corporal in the Royal Canadian Engineers. He was the sole surviving member of a platoon that cleared minefields.
Hessay's first home in British Columbia after WWII was a shanty on Passage Island. In spite of being impaired by posttraumatic stress disorder, he took up the life of a fisherman. He then worked briefly in a commercial arts studio in Vancouver where he made posters for the Lyric Theatre.
In 1950, Hessay moved to Langley, a town in the Fraser Valley. He soon met Langley resident Leonard Woods, a former student of LeMoine FitzGerald, and a multi-talented sculptor, musician, poet, and art historian. At the time of their first meeting, Woods was reopening the sculpture department at the Vancouver School of Art. In a later recollection, Woods described Hessay as being "in a very critical condition, mentally and physically". The pair became life-long friends, and Hessay valued Woods' encouragement within a loosely knit artistic circle that included the painter Peter Ewart, along with John McTaggart, an art teacher at Langley High School.
In Langley, he opened up a sign shop, in the days when signs were still made by hand. Hessay lived in a rear curtained-off area, his furnishings consisting of a cot, hot plate, and table and chairs. When he returned to creating art in the early 1950s, these spartan accommodations doubly functioned as a studio. According to Woods, "paintings were everywhere". On weekends, he often closed his shop to travel to the Fraser Canyon and the British Columbia interior, where he panned for gold. Hessay once had a prospector's shack near the Old Alexandra Bridge, in the vicinity of Spuzzum. He enjoyed visiting First Nations reserves, where he found social acceptance. His artistic output was initially reflective of his European training. Aware of experiments taking place in New York and California, he began to produce many works of pure or semi-abstraction, alongside his landscapes inspired by the British Columbia wilderness. A member of the Federation of Canadian Artists, he participated in group exhibits, displayed at local art galleries, and had one-man shows in British Columbia and elsewhere. Hessay died of a heart attack on 1 January 1978 while attending a New Year's dance at the Sasquatch Inn in Spuzzum. He is buried at Langley Lawn Cemetery.
Painting materials and technique
Hessay commonly experimented with mixed media. Having an interest in the chemistry of painting, he often made his own pigments from minerals and resins gathered on his prospecting trips. Black was derived from grinding manganese. He also employed cooked fruits and vegetables, such as onion-skin dyes, potato water, and carrots. Further materials included egg white and house paint. His canvases were prepared with fifteen coats of gesso ground made according to his own formula.
In the manner of action painting, Hessay frequently painted in a free and vigorous manner, spilling and dragging pigments over one another. One of his paintings was done with a toothbrush.
His early paintings from the late 1950s were in the style of Romantic realism, one critic describing them as "pretty but not sentimental". From his Dresden background, he retained the aesthetic qualities of the German Expressionist painters Emil Nolde, Max Beckmann, and Franz Marc. This enduring early influence, overlaid by the Canadian landscape tradition, gives a unique quality to much of his work. Hessay appreciated First Nations art, admiring the Kwakwaka'wakw artist Mungo Martin, and he knew Bill Reid. His aim in painting was to create a "new, original experience", and his paintings typically emote drama and intensity of feeling, rather than lyricism. Many contain a predominance of strongly contrasting shapes and angles. His painting Immigrant Mother and Child employs instability and distorted perspectives, a psychological reflection on his first arrival to Canada.
Hessay characteristically used colour to register a dominant emotional tone, reinforcing the thematic content. He considered black to be his trademark as a painter. The monochrome ochre and setting of Abandoned Village, a painting from his Cabins to Cities series, recalls the mood of Emily Carr's Blunden Harbour. At times his landscapes have parallels to those of the Group of Seven. Some of his works lack any reference points, and fit comfortably within the history of Abstract expressionism. Other semi-abstract pieces are infused with hints of nature, commonly oriented by a feature which directs the viewer's perception. Several abstracts relate to his prospecting in their evocation of rock formations.