Art: Muse in an Old Ford

Art, like crime, does not pay—although there are exceptions in both cases. Most artists must neglect their muses to earn their livelihoods, and most of them consider this a shame. Not so a tall, green-eyed Norwegian named Bjorn Sather. Sather, a brilliant painter and woodcut artist, was settling down this week to a day laborer’s job in a Montreal furniture factory, yet he thought that everything was just wonderful. He and his wife and two children were able to eat hamburgers again after existing for weeks on spaghetti and oak leaves (oak leaves are good raw, he says, with sugar). Soon he would be able to buy materials to take up art once more.

The son of an Oslo jeweler and an apprentice jeweler himself, Sather turned to art after he bought his young wife a paintbox for Christmas. “She never got it,” he says. “I started in painting myself and found I couldn’t stop.” Sather went to art school and learned all he could, then embarked for Canada with his family. His reasons: “A Canadian consul in Norway told me this was a wonderful country. Besides, I hadn’t been here before. If you walk on the same street too many times, you don’t see anything.”

He found work in a factory, painted when he could. Last year Sather had a show in Winnipeg which netted $800. With that, he bundled his family into a 1938 Ford station wagon and rattled off to Mexico. They lived in a shack in the jungle near Acapulco, and Sather came down with malaria. “But I have an attack only once a month,” he says. “I’m so healthy, I’m a dynamo. I need only four hours’ sleep a night.” On their way back to Canada, the Sathers visited U.S. museums by day, camped in the fields when darkness fell. The trip took all their remaining funds. Until Sather found his new job, the going was rough.

For a man who relishes rough going, Sather the artist is curiously gentle. He portrays the half-hidden things of nature—a fish in a clump of water weeds, a frog squatting in shadow. He draws clearly and delicately, in a style that seems more Chinese than European. His is not the sort of art to startle the world into acceptance, yet it may well grow to command great respect. He is only 37, and wholly dedicated.

“If you wish to do something.” says Sather matter-of-factly, “you can do it. My wife and I both had everything we wanted as children; now we’ve learned to appreciate what we can get. I believe my old station wagon is as good as a Rolls-Royce, if my car can make the trip.”