His Work in Hawai‘i: Interview 6 with Jean Charlot, April 24, 1978, John Pierre Charlot

Papa, we were talking about the physical types in your frescoes.  You did partly research just looking at people, but you also did a lot of research on the photos at the Bishop Museum, didn’t you?  Could you tell me about that?

Well, I was telling you about a rush job, which was that summer, the first summer I was here.  We had a nine-week, I think, fresco class.  The Bachman Hall was being built, and I had to finish the fresco within those nine weeks.  The plan, or at least the understanding, was after nine weeks, I would get out of Hawai‘i.  So that is, of course, a little hurried.  And it is probably why I looked at photographs, because they were available.  And there were two sources, I told you.  The photographs of the Bishop Museum were one, and the other one was the trip we took with Juanita Vitousek, where I contacted people that, I’m sorry to say, mostly were Filipinos, but they were nice guys.  And I made many drawings.  I have a little book actually of, oh, perhaps forty, fifty—you could call them nearly portraits because the people who posed for me were nice.  And some of those are used in the fresco.  I told you the warrior on the extreme left is one of those fellows, part of a large family, and I liked their physical make-up, both boy and girls.  Unhappily, they didn’t have the traits that you expect usually in Hawaiians.  I think Madge Tennent has done a much better job than I did at that time, anyhow, in representing my people.  I also told you that the visits with Aunt Jennie, for example, were crucial.  And at the time, Mrs. Pukui, to whom Juanita also presented me, gave me quite…my first ideas, I would say, on the Hawaiians living: the Hawaiians of ancient times, if you want, but the way they would live and so on, always around that idea of hers which is connected with music and specifically drumming.  I was very interested in that.  And I mentioned that photograph of myself drumming.  And I still now, I mean thirty years later, work with the drummers.  That last landscape silk screen has a drummer which is, you could say, a direct descendant of my experience of drumming.  And the drumming was suggested or guided, if you want, by Mrs. Pukui.

How do you think your depictions of Hawaiian racial types have changed over the years?

Well, I’ve known lots of Hawaiians, which I really hadn’t at the time.  And I wouldn’t say that I’m coming closer to the Madge Tennent idea because Madge obviously was both a good observer of Hawaiians, but also worked for the liberation of women.  She never said that, but it’s obvious in the things she writes and in her types.  The man that happens in her pictures usually is a weak guy.  And it is matriarchal society, and she enjoys it to the hilt.  So that her women are all of them rather strong and ali‘i nui, we could say.  The Ka‘ahumanu type is the one she liked best because of her position of power.  Now, I wasn’t interested in that specifically.  In fact, in all my people, the…it’s not the relation of people to people as much as the relation of people to the gods.  I have a streak in me that is interested in that.  In the plays, you found a lot of things that illustrate in words, we could say, the same thing: for example, how, when you walk with the gods, walk on tiptoe.  Or something like that.  I don’t remember the quote.  But that sensation of man in relation to the gods—maybe perhaps represented by nature because I have to give a body, of course, to the idea of God—is my angle; it’s my bailiwick.  And I don’t mind if the people are men or women.  Actually, I don’t think that I chose between them.  They’re both in the same situation of precarious, we could say, survival in relation to the other world.  That may be the deepest key perhaps to the representations I make.  Already, and that wasn’t as much my idea as the fact that Aunt Jennie was by then very old, and of course, she herself had that idea of death extremely present in fact—not an obsession, because there wasn’t the least bit of tragic in it.  But that first hula that she danced for me, as I told you before, was a hula dedicated to the dead.  And it was, it was a real dance.  It was a friendly dance in which she was on nearly equal terms with the dead because she was going to pass on that side very soon.  There was no bitterness.  There was no tragicness.  And that is rather Hawaiian, I think.  In this world, we live tending to take in account, just shall we call them, the spirits, so that if we move to that realm, we already at least are acquainted.  But nevertheless, the precariousness of human life as Westerners understand it, that life in our body and so on, gives a sense of humility and a sense of frailty to people.  And it can be Ka‘ahumanu, it can be anybody: the fellows who make the poi, for example, in the Leeward Theatre thing.1

I think there’s a difference though between, say, a Christianity which sees God as being outside of the world and Hawaiian religion, which sees the gods inside the world and, if you want, inside nature.  Do you see that Hawaiian religious view as very un-Christian, or do you kind of put it together with Christianity?

Well, that’s a wrong idea, Johnny.  You are a professor of comparative religion, and of course, you have to believe in your subject, and you have to find points of contrast, otherwise, you couldn’t talk about it.  But well, you take Mr. St. Francis, who’s, of course, a hackneyed point.  He has a rather marvelous way of introducing nature, introducing the world in his life and in his piety, shall we say.  I’m not speaking of the idea of the little birdies and so on, but in his Canticle of the Sun,2 for example.  People who would like to put labels on things would say that it is pantheism.  That is, he doesn’t disguise God, if you want, as an Apollo; and when he speaks of the different materials of the world, he doesn’t give them names like, let’s say, the Greeks or the Romans did, the names of the forests and so on.  But he has exactly the same feeling that not only religion, but God, perhaps in his minor manifestations, is everywhere.  I know that I can’t look at water or drink especially water without thinking of his own adjective on water.  He says in his Canticle that it’s incorruptable.  And it’s done with a great seriousness.  Now, maybe a doctor wouldn’t agree to that, but it shows a religion engrained.  And I think for myself, I’m terribly fond of the sacraments because the sacraments bring nature and small parts and everyday parts of nature in the most noble role in religion.  And of course, Christianity, it’s the bread and the wine, which were the two things that were easy to get and were not noble in the sense of being rare like the spices that the kings of the Orient bring to Christ in the stories.  Those have a role to play which is definitely religious and definitely noble.  Now, of course, my own, I certainly won’t say philosophy, but my own feel in all my work is the nobility of small things, of humble things, of humble material, we could say.  And so I feel very much at ease with Christianity that has never, that I know, despised nature.  There was a certain calling, of course, of the anachorites and so on that got away from the world and disappeared in caves.  But there are many other ways also of being religious.  And the church has never imposed the life in a cave and so on as anything that is an obligation.  It’s just the taste of certain people.  But I’m not into that.  I’m in something else, but that is also very alive in Christianity.  As much probably as in the other thing.  We were speaking of Hinduism.  Hinduism seems to pay more attention to the world because the everyday decor of Hinduism—when you are in India, you find that easily—is for us at least awfully picturesque.  And the elephants and the monkeys and so on, give an accent to the religion that our own little bread and wine doesn’t give.  But I think the two go rather deep into the appreciation of nature, animal, vegetal, and so on.  So I don’t think there’s a contrast between the two.  There is roots that come from cultures that were born in separate places in the world.

You said yesterday that Buddhism tends to be a little bit arrogant in art terms about form and stuff.  Do you see that as a religion that’s, if you want, not sufficiently material?

Well, I must say that the idea of a nirvana as an ideal isn’t mine at all.  I was reading Frank Sheed.3  He has a little book on death.  And it’s a book, of course, that has the imprimatur, that is wonderful, that is, of course, good theology, Catholic theology.  He’s seven times a doctor in theology.  But it interested me that the one thing that excites me about the faith is the resurrection of the bodies.  And that did the same thing with Michelangelo, for example; his whole business in the Sistine Chapel is the resurrection of the body.  I suppose the souls are inside by then, but nevertheless, it’s the bodies he represents.  And Sheed as a good—I shouldn’t say Englishman because he’s an Australian—is perhaps without knowing it himself slightly repelled.  He accepts, of course, the dogma of the resurrection of the bodies, but is not enthusiastic about it the way I am.  And it’s interesting that though he mentions it, it’s in a chapter before the time of the universal resurrection, that he says: “and then man—and man by then is represented only by his soul, the body is underground—man is truly human.”  So that he can imagine man truly human without a body.  He, however, has used my own little angle, if you want to call it that, or ax to grind in his big book on The Church and I.4  I was very pleased because obviously he couldn’t find himself words or he didn’t want to put his signature on words on the subject.  But he puts in a little ditty that I have in my Born Catholics book,5 in my own chapter there.  And it says, Ayant délaisser l’oripeau/Le costume des saints sera la peau.6  Something like that, speaking of Paradise.  And he had to use my own words.  It interested me to work out that thing which, as I said, perhaps as a cultured Englishman is difficult for him to, well, to take pleasure in.  And my own idea is that if I can use senses, that is, specially the sense of sight, because I’m a painter, there’ll be something in eternity that I can understand.  But of course, that is a very low degree of mysticism, and there are lots of other people are happy to do without senses.

Well, you see that there is sort of a tension in Christianity between the side that wants to move towards pure spirit and sees the end in a heaven, in a beatific vision, and the other side that sees a resurrection and, you know, a new heaven and a new earth.  And you know, there’s a real difference there, it seems to me.  And you kind of opt for the new heaven and the new earth side, which brings you nearer to Hawaiian religion.

No again.  I’m sorry.  I don’t see that.  I see, well, staying within the orthodoxy of the Catholic church, the vocations that we have chosen on earth—and there is certainly a great quantity of those different vocations, from the guy who rushes to a cave and lives on grass, to men who live in the world just like I do—those vocations will be, will go on being figured—not in a figurative way, but in a way, of course, that isn’t the same as this earth—in eternal life.  That is, there will be a choice.  There will be the lesser guys—maybe I’m one of them—and if they need the senses to understand things, they will have the senses.  The pure mystics may escape into something where St. Paul said he went.  He didn’t know if it was in the flesh or out of the flesh, but he says, “I can’t tell you what it is because words don’t work.”  It’s not the words, of course, that I would miss.  I wouldn’t miss words, but I would miss forms.  And so my own eternity, if it follows, as I think, the vocation, will be forms, and forms are seen.  The interest there, I mean the point that I have a hard time arranging, is what kind of light, what kind of apprehension of form, modelings and whatnot.  For me, of course, Paradise, will be a painter’s Paradise, because the only one I can make out.  And that takes in a nice resurrection of the body with its senses and especially with that sense of sight which is the center, you could say, of my religion.  Now, the Hawaiians, [interrupted] you are right in a way, because the Hawaiians are terribly rich in that relation of all their senses to nature.  There is the sense of smell, for example, is marvelously expressed in the… [interrupted]

Hawaiians.

Yeah…are much richer than I am.  Of course, a Western man can be very different from one place to another, but it seems to me that Hawaiians use their senses with the richness and a variety that we don’t have.  It would be easy to prove that by the vocabulary in the language, and where I really can speak more or less only of the sense of sight, they have a great richness of expressions which show they have the great richness of emotions, we could say, about smells, about textures.  The whole world of sex, for example, with them, which remains something quite devoid of that slight underhand quality that the Western culture has given it, is also a very rich, of course, expression of nature, though there is perhaps no vocabulary in our language for the richness of it.  And well, for example, I’m quite allergic to sounds, to music.  In fact, I’m allergic to words too.  And the Hawaiians, with the richness of the language, with the richness of the music, had also purely sensuous, we could say, expressions.  So I don’t see why those who really made a nice real effort to meet in their language, I would say, the gods perhaps or I think they had also the idea of a one god, wouldn’t have a Paradise if and when they go to heaven that would answer, that would fulfill their own particular requirements for happiness.  It’s a little bit, of course, the same thing with some oriental religion that go a little far perhaps in that sense, because then there’s a conflict between the spiritual and the physical.  But personally, my own painter’s Paradise needs a resurrection, needs the sense of sight, as I said, and if possible, light, type of light, by which the forms will be, will be visible and will be described.  It’s a very innocent perhaps thing, but I was not outraged, but I was scandalized by the fact that in his book on death, Frank Sheed leaves, I think in the last chapter, a single mention of resurrection of the body and says that that will be settled when the time comes.  He doesn’t try to anticipate.

OK, Papa, thank you very much.