LITERATURE
Ian M. Thom, Challenging Traditions, Contemporary First Nations Art of the Northwest Coast, McMichael Canadian Art Collection, 2009, page 184

Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun is one of the most influential contemporary artists to emerge from the West Coast. Of Coast Salish origin, Yuxweluptun is well known for his expression of political views about the environment and the treatment of First Nations people through his art. His father was Ben Paul, an official of the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs, who was involved with the struggle to establish ancestral rights.

Regarding Yuxweluptun’s ovoid paintings, Ian Thom wrote that he “emancipates the ovoid from its traditional roles in Northwest Coast art, as a joint, an eye, a filler element or a form that encompasses entire creatures.” In each of these two striking works, Yuxweluptun has isolated a single ovoid, painted in saturated, vibrating hues, and made it monumental. Yuxweluptun further states, “They are an extension of an existential conceptual symbolic of duality of colour and thought. They are an expression of the time that I live in. So that it is free thinking, to think and express what I am thinking, the feelings of death, the feelings of residential schools, anything is possible. They are a very expressionistic symbol.”

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