The first Jim Logan painting I saw was in the waiting room of the medical clinic when my oldest two were preschoolers. The painting was on the wall behind several chairs, 3 feet wide or so, and the waiting room was small, so there was no ignoring it.
That painting is not one of Logan’s that can be found on the internet, so I’ll have to describe it as I remember it and, since it’s a twenty-year-old memory, I guarantee I’ll get details wrong. What I won’t get wrong is the impression the painting gave. There are young children in a run down kitchen, with the older making toast for the littler ones. On the kitchen table and around the kitchen are several empty booze bottles, so we know the kids are fending for themselves because the adults can’t fend for them.
It was a powerful painting, but I wouldn’t have wanted it on my living room wall.
Here are a few others of Jim Logan’s work. His paintings, he says, “are snapshots of life in an Aboriginal community,” including, I suppose, Whitehorse’s Kwanlin Dun Village where he was once an Anglican lay missionary, and they “explore feelings of wanting to belong, about feeling abandoned, about living in poverty and of hope for something undefined.”
