by Kerry McCluskey
Northern News Services

NNSL (Mar 09/98) - His simple act of human kindness has provided fodder for his brush for nearly five decades.

At 73, painter Gabe Gely is still going strong and painting the portraits and the landscape scenes that he fell in love with and lived in for more than half of his life.

Gely arrived in Canada in 1952 and got a job as a cook's helper in Ennadai Lake, a weather station west of Hudson Bay.

During his employment, Gely noticed that many of the Inuit people were starving and he stole food and gave it to them to stop them from dying.

They called him Taraami, meaning "he who comes from downstairs," because the food storage room was located downstairs.

"There were very few non-Inuit people there and for some reason, the caribou changed and the Inuit relied solely on them and they were starving to death. Gabe used to sneak food to them out the back door and that was the beginning of his love for them," says Marg Baile, the owner of Arctic Art Gallery in Yellowknife and a close friend of Gely.

The Inuit in the area were eventually transferred to the community of Eskimo Point, now called Arviat.

Gely remained in the North as an arts and crafts supervisor and worked as an arts resource person for the government, spending time in most of the Inuit communities.

"I was preparing the way for the co-op movement. It wasn't there then," says Gely who, in 1984, made his home in Eskimo Point with the friends he had made years earlier.

In 1985, Gely organized a two week trip for 36 of his friends to return to Ennadai Lake for a drum dance and traditional Inuit celebration. He says that he noticed that many of his friends still missed Ennadai Lake and had not properly settled into Eskimo Point.

Gely left the NWT in 1987 but 11 years later, he still misses his friends.

"They're a whole world away from me and yet I still feel I have a connection with them. I bought a house right on the Bay of Fundy and the only thing missing is the Inuit people but I can have the illusion because there's an ocean and I can shut my eyes and imagine I'm in Baker Lake or wherever," says Gely.

His 45-year career has consisted solely of painting the Inuit people and their way of life with most of the scenes revolving around the people of Ennadai Lake.

His work has travelled as far away as Mexico but Baile continues to exclusively show Gely's work.

Trained in France under the impressionists, Gely is currently at work on seven new paintings that will eventually come to the NWT to be sold.

While Gely jokes about taking time off to rest, he says he has to keep painting.

"In my business, you have to get on with the work now, even if it won't be shown for years. I always thought it would be nice to sit down and do nothing," says Gely.

"If I was not painting, I would do something exciting like hold up a bank."

"I often painted small stuff. Regrettably so but there were limitations and now I'm doing large paintings of things. I need to get it out of my system before I leave this planet, before I'm too lazy to even think of it" says Gely.

"I spent 45 years away from my family in the Arctic and the Inuit people became my family. I'm very emotionally involved with my painting and painting them is like painting my family."