Hello! Welcome to my world.
Normally this page would present imagery of my work with a bit of description. Due to our crazy times and some personal troubles in the art world I’m going to reduce the imagery and explain my philosophy of art. I’m going to argue on behalf of a unique humanist drive that comes naturally to many artists.
I am a writer and visual artist known primarily for my children’s picture books. I live in Thunder Bay, Northwestern Ontario. I won two of Canada’s top awards for a book called The Boy from the Sun in 2007 when I had a publisher. In 2012, as an experiment I self-published my picture book, The Love Ant. It sold like hot cakes. So in 2013/14 I put all my award money and every penny I had into printing four more hardcover picture books. And they too sold like crazy.
In Thunder Bay, with a population of just over a hundred thousand people I sold more books than I did with a Canadian publisher distributing my books in the United States, England, Canada, and Australia. (I had a terrible publisher.) Also, each book earned me ten to twenty times more (depending on where I sold my books) than what I earned with a publisher. (Too many middlemen.) Children love my books. I’ve sold thousands of them. And sold hundreds of my poetry books, short stories, and novels. My fellow Thunder Baynians are very supportive of their writers and visual artists, providing the works are as good, if not better than, anything on retail book shelves. Also beneficial was receiving a number of grants (I lost count) from the Ontario Arts Council, which bought me time to create new work. Special Thanks to the OAC and all the jurors.
I have a number of books coming out this year and next. I’m feeling quite accomplished, with one of my few problems being that I have too many ideas and not enough time.
Last year (2024) I started my own publishing company, Rogue Planet Books, with the help of my business partner Tracy Pinet, former owner of Foodbebe (Video). Tracy wrote and illustrated her first book, The Legend of Dim. Her second book is due out in 2026. We are a little publishing company looking for local talent (please contact us) to distribute locally and soon, nationally. We do not yet have the staff to take submissions from outside Thunder Bay. Check back in about a year or so, if you’re interested.
And so, I’ll reiterate. Due to all sorts of circumstances, personal and public – the vagaries of contemporary life, I’m going to share my philosophy of art. However, I’ll try to keep this short as details will be cumbersome for both of us.
Historians divided art into three categories; High Art, Low Art, and Fine Art. For most of my stories, a few of my paintings, and especially my illustrations I attempt to mix the best properties of High Art and Low Art (Popular Art). In doing so I employ the four primary historical functions of art that are perennial to human nature. These four functions have been employed by our ancestors for thousands of years in all cultures the world over, which continue to operate today, primarily in popular culture. Each of the four functions have many sub-functions. Knowing what these functions are and how they operate gives me confidence in my choices and expands dramatically on a great idea when I get one. They also direct me to endless sources of subject matter. This kind of focus and execution puts a substantial number of my works into the category of Classicism.
Classical Art is the result of a nature based philosophy which applies six basic humanist principles that constitute what we know so far to be the most beneficial for human flourishing: Beauty, Morality, Democracy, Human Commonalities, Human Continuity, and Variety. Classicism is a system of belief where each principle/category works best with the others. For example, Beauty benefits from Morality, Morality benefits from Democracy, Democracy benefits from understanding our Human Commonalities, etc. All the principles are positively influenced by one another and most fruitful when used to engage an audience using art.
If you have talent, but lack a subject matter that interests you and/or you think will interest the public it really helps to look at the growing list of cultural universals. Look up Donald Brown’s List of Human Universals as a good start.
Classical Art is a living imitation, or counterpart, to nature. Classical Art offers “an active rival or duplication of the ordered process of nature herself….” “Because we are the better for knowing what is true with as vivid and full a realization as we can…” we “attempt to imitate or duplicate an ordered nature or reality” to fulfill the goals of nature herself. (Pgs 5, 6. Criticism: The Major Texts, W.J. Bate, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970)
We are by extension, as witnesses to the Universe, expressing nature’s goals, giving voice and imagery to share what would otherwise seem to have never existed. And this will likely, and hopefully, be the goals of any other sentient beings out there in space. Classical artists as a result can learn from those who more closely study nature. These are the growing variety of researchers and scientists and the amazing amount of knowledge offered to us about ourselves and… well, just about everything.
Classical Art is not ideology. Ideologies are dangerously static. They are anti-reality belief systems with dictates that create a Soldier Mindset for the believer. Dangerous ideologies include communism (utopian egalitarianism), postmodernism (choose your own reality), modern/contemporary art ideology (nonsense devices – choose your own adventure art), wokeism, (choose your own identity/reality in the oppression Olympics) and some religions. These are all envy driven ways of levelling the playing field. Envious people are fearful of being shown up, of being wronged or just wrong, of missing out or being left out. They are fearful of change, fearful of people with natural talents, fearful of… well… adversity – basically all those tough unfair aspects of life that we all have to deal with. If they’re lucky, aspects of the ideology can become pathogenic enough to frighten non-believers into silence and obedience.
Envious people are more easily persuaded by emotional appeals dressed up as logical or even scientific sounding arguments. And the ideological solution to an unfair world with the promise of a better future is made more convincing with group solidarity and group-thought. The comfort of like-minded thinking mitigates against the vagaries of real life. Yet, most people understand that these static ways of thinking can become dangerous rather quickly. Anyone who has escaped from an ideological trap will tell you that living with constant cognitive dissonance makes you depressed. It certainly doesn’t help to be constantly catastrophizing when life isn’t really all that bad if you learn the ropes.
Often, the people pushing an ideology don’t believe a word of what they say. They are con-artists with ulterior motives such as revenge, power, money, etc. who need others to be sheep to do the dirty work to distance themselves from the fallout when it happens. And there are a small percentage of clever psychopaths and sociopaths who love to manipulate others, abuse people and get a thrill thinking they can contribute to the world going up in flames. Unfortunately, in our time, the Internet is giving this small number of psychopaths and sociopaths more opportunity to indoctrinate people than ever before.
Classical Art is a philosophy which benefits artists greatly as it is guided by a greater reality existing outside of our own heads and our own experiences (and is likely even a good approach to life) because it relies on the Scout Mindset which asks us to draw a map of our reality, one that will be more accurate because it is the result of really looking, digging deep into the world around us and the well of our minds. Classicists do this open-mindedly without fear. And without envy or needing anyone to blame for personal failures. Classicism has no political agenda. Classicism is akin to science, the study of nature. To fully appreciate the differences between a Scout and Soldier Mindset, I highly recommend my source for these terms, Julia Galef’s book, The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t.
Artists who embrace the Classical philosophy will find a never-ending wealth of subject matter. Understanding the primary functions of art allows you to better apply what you learn and has the side benefit of allowing you to understand people’s motivations throughout history. History is in our High and Low art.
The classical approach is incredibly beneficial to me as a children’s book author. Classicism’s scope is vast and its reach is deep. The goals for my children’s books are all positive and ultimately the idea is to give children hope. Classical philosophy guides you to an underlying humanist reality and avoids the temptation to lie or invent complete nonsense solely to entertain. The gripping “entertainment” of classically based art is the result of the art aligning itself with truths about ourselves and the excitement of its discovery when relayed through imagery and stories that are engaging. Since the classical approach is evidence based, connecting with an audience is not accidental, but most often predictable. This is, in part, encapsulated by T.S. Eliot’s term, the Objective Correlative. So, even if the audience doesn’t have the language to explain why they were entertained, enlivened, enriched or elevated by a work of art, the audience can sense and intuitively appreciate the realness of a scene, the honesty and insights.
Classicism is a highly imaginative and very creative way of thinking, and can even employ what appears to be surreal or nonsensical. Allegory, for example, can appear to be silly to some, especially adults, but for children allegory can mean the world. Well thought out allegory based on reality and underlying truths connected to human nature can be a powerful means of engaging an audience. Such approaches can instruct without the reader/viewer being aware of the instruction because the story can connect to the reader/viewer as if by magic. Take any bit of wisdom – “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” You can repeat this phrase as much as you like, but it might not stick when the real world comes at you. Wrap this bit of wisdom within a good story and when the real world bites you the story is so much more likely to come to your mind. The well-meaning Biblical phrase is all good, but doesn’t capture the imagination nearly as much as the story that encapsulates it. Allegory and other approaches can cause you to reflect and engage you so powerfully that it can change your mind, change your course of action, and even affect your core beliefs. Stories are wonderful this way.
Yet, stories can also be used negatively to push the Soldier Mindset. Stories can be used to indoctrinate you into nonsense. Children, who are not as naive as some would like them to be, can more easily sense the forced ideology of such stories (Stories that employ the Scout Mindset are much better at fully engaging children.) Adults, sadly, are less likely to have their minds changed. They are more likely to already be hemmed in by static ideology or religion. Stories employing the Scout Mindset can be very scary for indoctrinated adults. Stories that employ the Soldier Mindset to push an ideology or religious belief will annoy most audiences, especially younger people, simply because the story will be unimaginative, too on the nose, obviously didactic, feel condescending and simply grate on everyone’s nerves.
Classical Art requires talent and lots of thinking combined with a resolve to entertain while simultaneously revealing our true nature, which may do some good for everyone. Research can be key, but as an artist, if you’re looking for inspiration, all you have to do is look at what many researchers and scientists are up to these days. I highly recommend reading books by Steven Pinker as a starting point: The Blank Slate, Enlightenment Now, and Pinker’s new book When Everyone Knows that Everyone Knows. When reading on art it’s best to find history books written before the 1980s. (Or even before the 1890s.)
The amount of nonsense out there these days is incredible and it takes time to suss out the con-artists from serious thinkers and researchers. (Some nonsense can be fun and have value – think of the Surrealists, Van Halen, Edward Lear or Monty Python.) Yet sadly defenders of nonsense routinely attack Classicists and make arguments that defend nonsense sound attractive.
Today many more professors in the humanities have not only become ideologically captured, they are the source for many new nonsensical ideas. As a result they have become anti-talent, anti-art, anti-classical, and even anti-human. And none of it is necessary. Scientists have discovered, (what many artists have already known), that at heart the vast majority of us humans want to get along. We really do want peace and prosperity. We are naturally curious and naturally loving what is beautiful and just.
My advice to young people is that it’s best to avoid taking humanities courses in any Western university, including English Literature and especially Fine Art (often disguised as Visual Arts), certainly beyond the undergraduate level. I dropped out of my Masters program in English Literature at Lakehead University in 2018 because the professors and guest speakers were distorting history, politics, economics, and surprisingly denigrating the value of literature and its authors. English lit was taught as activist sociology.
For 35 years my father, Geoffrey Weller was a professor. He also took on roles as a Dean and Vice President at Lakehead University and the founding president of the University of Northern British Columbia (the first university to be built in Canada in 25 years back in 1990). My father grew up lower middle class in England. He went to a community high-school, one level down from a typical high-school. While in school he took advantage of a Michigan Council of Churches Exchange Program, which sent him to an American high-school in Ann Arbour, Michigan. One of his high-school teachers suggested he study at university. And so he ended up studying political science and economics at three different universities, moving to Canada, and ended up teaching at Lakehead University. Throughout his administrative tenure he routinely fired and tried to fire professors who were either incompetent or indoctrinating their students into worlds of nonsense. Coming from a lower class background he had inherited a common sense approach to life from the world around him and from his father, Raymond, who served with ground forces in World War II.
The war was a clear example of the results of ideological thinking. My father’s numerous bookshelves in the basement were filled with studies and histories of every kind of political fallout resulting from ideology. He was obviously opposed to ideological thinking. He told me when I was a young adult that he worried about entire departments of universities being taken over by “twits.” He was also very much opposed to the British ideology of the Class System. He told me that had he stayed in England there was no chance in hell that he would ever have been able to one day write to Windsor Palace and invite the Queen of England to an opening ceremony at a newly founded university where he would be president. Even today, upward mobility is nearly impossible for the majority of Brits.
I mention my father and grandfather to point out how my philosophy of classism is in part a result of my upbringing. My grandfather was only nineteen or twenty years old when a Messerschmitt fighter plane came out of the sky and fired into groups of soldiers waist deep in the waters at Dunkirk. Early in the war soldiers were often sent with their classmates from school to help improve their morale and camaraderie. All of my grandfather’s classmates who were with him that day in 1940 were cut into pieces around him. He had to wade through shoulder deep sea water turned red with his friends’ blood. A few days later, returning to his small home town of Tonbridge Wells he took on the task of going from house to house to inform his friends’ parents that their sons were dead.
Sixty years later in Victoria, B.C. my grandfather told me that he’d made a new friend, a German who was his age and also fought in WWII. My grandfather served from early in the war in 1939 to its very end in 1945. Having been in many battles, he killed lots of German soldiers. During a fishing trip with his new German friend my Grandfather asked him what he thought about the Holocaust. The old former German soldier had nothing positive to say about the Jews. He hadn’t changed his attitude towards Jewish people in 60 years. My grandfather told me that during the war they heard about concentration camps, but with so much propaganda at the time he thought it couldn’t be true. When the truth came out, he was even more glad that he had served in the army. And regarding his new German friend my grandfather said, in very English fashion, “I couldn’t be friends with him. After all that’s why we fought the war; to stop that kind of nonsense.”
Do your research before you waste tens of thousands of dollars on an “education” in the humanities. If you want to be an artist, there’s almost nothing these days that you can’t learn from other artists on YouTube. And you can make really good money in the Trades while studying and practicing art on the side. Learning the Trades will improve your art. I had a 24 year old boss in the Play Industry who made 70k a year back in the 90s. She had a welding certificate, some drawing and sculpturing skills and was capable of building anything. Companies fought over her.
Politically, I think I’m still left-wing. I used to be a New Democratic Party supporter (based on policies I liked), but I despise communism and other ridiculous ideologies. (Communists have a habit of killing thousands artists when they get into power.) It’s a side-gig for many of us artists (especially comedians) to take on the extremists, whatever the politics. And I plan to do so too. Politically I’ve become more of a centrist these days as the policies and even the moral positioning of the left and right seem to be switching and becoming more extreme. Sadly, many people who I thought were lefties have lost their marbles, some becoming clearly anti-Semitic (although they claim they are not), which really shocked me.
However! Despite all this, and maybe because of it, I have never been so productive. New ideas spring up as if by magic and I am loving the results of my projects, gaining fans every time I put out a new book or have a show of my artwork.
If any of the above offends you, that’s too bad. I felt it necessary in these crazy times to explain to the general public a little bit about my philosophy of art.