Longing

Otto Rogers at his Morrison Point studio designed by his son-in-law Siamak Hariri.

A conversation with Otto Rogers

All I am trying to do is create a good painting,” says the artist in his studio tucked among the woods at the end of Morrison Point. The statement doesn’t feel true. It is something he offers, perhaps, to assure the visitor his feet are planted firmly on the ground. But after spending time with Otto Rogers one is taken with an entirely different impression of the man and his work. For Rogers’ painting, art and life points to an ambition beyond the fleeting gratification that comes with recognition, praise and commercial reward.

He is striving to help fill a void in our spiritual selves. He is seeking to offer nourishment for a society that has too easily subverted the needs of the soul for the convenience, speed and easy-to-digest consumer culture. He fears many of us have lost our ability for disinterested contemplation—that is, our capacity to connect with and appreciate the world around us, unless it is served up and packaged for easy consumption. The ease by which we absorb popular culture is as dangerous and threatening to our well being as an endless supply of Twinkies are to a diabetic nation.

“We need a capacity for meditative contemplation,” says Rogers. “It is natural for humans to have a thirst for spirituality. Yet we no longer know where or how to satisfy this thirst.”

Rogers points to rising rates of depression and suicide as evidence of this unquenched thirst.

Art in this context is a lens by which we can strive to see and understand our own humanity . Through his art Rogers, seeks to weave together diverse and conflicting threads to create a unified idea.

It is the diversity that it the important bit.

“Real unity comes from diversity,” said Rogers. “This is what inspires us. This is who I am.”

Unity in this context is not to be confused with uniformity, something he describes as a ‘mirage in the desert’.

He recounts a story of visiting a dance club in London a few years ago in which as many as 4,000 young people were moving in rhythmic waves under the influence of pounding music and hypnotic lights strobing across the throng.

“They were caught up in this idea of unity, but they were barking up the wrong tree,” observes Rogers. “They didn’t know what they were longing for.”

He will hate to see these words in print, fearing they make him appear grand and self-important. That is not the impression one gets spending time with the artist.

The son of a Saskatchewan wheat farmer and a mother he describes as a ‘very practical person’, Rogers sketches the outlines of an improbable life path. While in teachers’ college, an instructor recognized the talent in the young Rogers and encouraged his parents to send him away to study art.

Rogers earned a Masters of Fine Arts at the University of Wisconsin. He got a job teaching at University of Saskatchewan and three years later received tenure.

“I was only going to stay a year,” said Rogers. He stayed for 29 years and was head of his department for 12.

In 1988 he traveled to Haifa, Israel, where he spent a decade at the International Teaching Centre of the Baha’i World Centre.

He describes his art and his dedication to the Baha’i faith as his two great passions because the are “so mutually complementary.”

He landed in Prince Edward County al almost by accident. Upon returning from Israel, Rogers and his wife, Barbara, figured they would settle near Kingston. But they encountered too many tasteless renovations.

“I was too old and tired to fix someone else’s mistakes. A real estate agent suggested coming across the ferry to look at this house.”

“It was built with reasonably good taste,” said Rogers. “But most importantly it came furnished—no need to buy shovels or garden hoses.”

At 78, he has found a welcome tranquility at the end of Morrison Point.

“It is the first time in my life I’m free of responsibility— free to work more intensely. Away from the madding crowd. Undistracted from the tinsel and glitter of a decaying culture.”

Otto Rogers’ work will be shown in major exhibitions in Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver over the next 18 months. On Saturday Oeno Gallery at Huff Estates opens a new solo exhibition of Otto Rogers’ work that runs until November 17. On October 29 Rogers will speak about his work and his inspiration.

Rogers has chosen to dedicate this exhibition to his daughter Kin who succumbed to cancer a couple of years ago.