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TORONTO
Antoine Mountain, an artist from Fort Good Hope, has begun a teaching assignment at a prestigious art college in Toronto.

Antoine Mountain, an artist from the NWT, stands next to one of his paintings in Toronto, where he is attending university and recently started teaching a course at an art college. - photo courtesy of Antoine Mountain

On Jan. 11, he taught his first class on 'Rethinking Abstraction from an Aboriginal Perspective' at the Ontario College of Art and Design University, and will continue the once-a-week, three-hour class every Friday until April.

"It basically has to do with the roots of modern art and its early influences from First Nations perspectives," Mountain explained, noting his class will look all the way back to impressionism and how earlier artists influenced modern art.

His class will look at the work of artists like impressionists Paul Cezanne and Edgar Degas, and techniques such as the use of multiple perspectives.

"Then we get into post-impressionism and then all the way to today's style of artwork," he said, noting that will include studying artists like Vincent van Gogh.

Mountain, who graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design University a couple of years ago with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, said he paints in the impressionistic style, but there are other influences in his artwork.

Currently, he is studying for a Master's in Environmental Studies degree at York University and plans to be finished by July.

His teaching assignment will be incorporated as research for the environmental studies degree.

The class will reflect the way learning is done in First Nations society and culture, he said. "So it's not like a Western concept where you just have a textbook and you try to memorize as much as you can. The First Nations experience has to do with your emotional, physical, psychological and spiritual life also."

The course, which will be based on the medicine wheel as a teaching tool, has been divided into four different sections.

"The first section that we are doing now it's all about planning and theory, the theory of what we are going to be studying," Mountain said. "The next month of February will be about basically First Nations/European relations – things like history, treaties, this new Idle No More movement. And then the third quarter will involve culture – how culture, any culture, influences the arts. The last section will have to do with spirituality, and how arts can be seen as a spiritual exercise."

As part of teaching in an aboriginal way, he changed the whole classroom seating arrangement to a circle.

"It makes people feel much more comfortable when they don't only have to look at the back of somebody's head," he said. "They can actually see everybody they're talking to. So they're much more relaxed and they get the idea right away. I can tell right away that the students are much more relaxed than they would be somewhere else."

For his first class, there were 17 students, and he expects it to fill up to the maximum of 20.

"There are students from everywhere. There's one from England, one from South America and even one from Korea," he said, although he noted none of them were First Nations.

Mountain applied for the teaching position a few months ago at the suggestion of Robert Houle, a former teacher of the course and a well-known Nishnawbe artist.

Mountain noted that, if everything works out, the art college may make it a full-time teaching position for 10 years.

That would be part of a big push to get more First Nations students signed on at the Ontario College of Art and Design University. Mountain noted there were only a handful of First Nations students at the art college a few years ago, but there are now well over 100.

"So I don't know what's going to happen," he said, noting he's also been offered a job in Fort Good Hope. "Everybody that's involved in this kind of thing told me that it's better to be teaching art than working in some kind of a place that is mainly to do with making money."

In addition, he said he has just applied to take a Master's in Fine Arts degree at the Ontario College of Art and Design University, noting, "I always like to put more on my plate than I think I can handle and usually it turns out OK."

One of those things is the column A Mountain View he writes every week for News/North.

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