Not To Be Trusted With Knives

My Wise Owl

November 16, 2009 by Beth

My office is in a different building than the Director to whom I report.  A little while ago he was in my office building for a meeting and dropped into say hello.  Jokingly, he said that he was going to put on my performance report that I need more artwork on my walls – my office is too bare!  Although I do have some photos on my desk and one piece of art on my bulletin board, the giant wall that my my desk faces was blank as blank can be, so he did kinda have a point.  And so it got me on the look out for artwork.  Now, I have to admit that I’m not much of an art connoisseur – basically, I just look at picture and think, “hey, I like that” or “eww, that’s ugly” ((my sister got all the visual art genes in our family)).  But I finally found a piece that I really liked – I actually bought it when I was over on the Island visting Dani:

It’s a print of a commissioned artwork by artist Jason Hunt.  He was selling his work at a farmer’s market that we went to when I was in Victoria and I got a chance to talk to him about the piece.  The image is of an owl (at the top) that is being chased home by the rising sun (bottom). Jason explained to me that in Kwaguilth culture, mice are considered messengers and owls are wise because they “intercept” those messages.  The image really struck me when I saw it and since, in my job , I talk to a lot of people/explore a lot of literature as I conduct evaluations on a variety of different programs and to try to take all these “messages” that I’m “intercepting” and piece them together into a coherent whole – and, as I do this, I’m building up knowledge that I can then impart on my future work – I felt like this was an especially appropriate image for my office.  It reminds me to take good care of the “mice” I’m collecting.  Every evening when I turn off the light in my office at the end of the workday, this piece of artwork makes me smile.

You can learn more about the artist, Jason Hunt, at his website ((he shares his works in progress on the blog there!))

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