A BIGDoer.com Classic from 2018. Presenting Moodonna & Child, a print (serigraph – a silk screening) by artist Manwoman of Cranbrook British Columbia and discovered in the window of a thrift store in Calgary Alberta. It’s both a completely random and magical find. Saw it, knew what it was, bought it, got it and now we’re twelve bucks poorer.
Here we “bring it home”, down some back alley in downtown Cranbrook and to the very place from which is was created. Over there in a room of cinder blocks, in that nondescript building with the roll up door to the left. This was the back side of Kemball’s Jewellers and the workshop where this piece and much (all?) of Manwoman’s artwork emerged.
Moodonna & Child by Artist Manwoman: a random connection to a personal past. With Chris Doering & Connie Biggart (BIGDoer/Synd)
Thanks to “Dale” for sponsoring this and many other posts at BIGDoer.com. Be like Dale…
It doesn’t look like much, but back there and back in time, some rather special things happened in that utilitarian place. Chris here and I got to go inside in the 1980s. I only knew MW in passing, but via some mutual friends his son was an occasional acquaintance.
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Picture it, a game of Dungeons and Dragons, the players: Ivan, Manwoman’s kid and also a creative type, brothers Al and Trevor and some gangly guy named Chris (me), and others, battling demons in the underworld. It happened right here. Oddly shaped dice, no clue how the game works, vodka spiked Super Big Gulps and surrounding us, many prints and sculptures. Some were complete and others works in progress.
I recall a custom snake-shaped guitar…and maybe some animation cells for a short film project.*
Manwoman’s gone now, having passed a number of years back. He stood out and was a fixture in Cranbrook back then. Always dressed in bright yellow, with his big yellow van and big yellow everything. Hmmm, yellow’s become our trademark colour too, but it’s totally coincidental.
And there were his many Swastika tattoos for which he became a sometimes controversial figure…among those that were ignorant to the symbol’s true meaning and backstory. For eons it was associated with spirituality and positivity, but later hijacked by the Nazis and made bad.
Manwoman made it his life’s work to repatriate the symbol and take it back. Reclaim it…but still most people today see it as something awful. They ruined it, those damn Nazis ruined it, but he tried.
There’s no ceremony here, just a photo or two and a moment of silence. And some chuckles…hard liquor makes it so much easier to understand the game. Roll for…what? Which shaped dice do we use? And where are we again? I’m lost. Oh, pretty colours (looking at a can of paint). Then some demon offs you before you know what to do next.
Interestingly, the building in behind is home to another jewellery place. Kemball’s was the family name by the way, which Manwoman ceased to use once he found his awakening I suppose.
Moodonna & Child presently hangs on the wall at BIGDoer World HQ (aka, a small corner in our dining room). Now if only we could find a “Sisters of Mercy Dumptruck” and place it beside this one. That one always struck a cord – recall them making copies of it back then. Nuns, singing, in a dumptruck – you got it. How quirky and strange and for that reason, it’s perfect.
Interestingly, the very image of two cows seen in this print showed up prominently in Manwoman’s old web store. That page seems to have vanished, but he did pass on some time ago now. Cows were a big thing for him. A dancing top-hat-wearing skull guy (Mr Death) shows up often in his work too, and that memory comes flooding back. And nuns…lots of nuns.
This is another older piece brought back for your (and our) enjoyment. We’ll do this for select articles found in the archives and post them anew. This one retains the original photo, even if that darn reflection is driving me mad, but was rewritten for better clarity and flow.
Madonna and Child (“my lady” in Italian, so Mary and baby Jesus) is the subject of many works of Christian art. It inspired this print and Moodonna & Child presents it with a little reimagining.
Thank you thrift store for this Moodonna flashback and now I only need to turn right a bit, to get those memories flooding back again. There’s those cows, there on the wall and they’re staring right back.
*No amount of searching brings up a Manwoman made animation flick, but still I swear he and Ivan (Cat) were doing something for the National Film Board of Canada(?) or some such entity. Spray on Joy is the name that comes to mind, and while some prints with that title come up, I can’t help think it was an extension of those. But then again, the liquor made the whole thing a blur.
“Chris and Connie have a unique way of documenting the places they visit, not copying the style or technique of others, but making it their own.” Alex Craig, Filmmaker.
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