Friday, October 29, 1999 ~ North Shore News — 23

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Fram Page 22 :
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psychology. Her sister, Bella, ‘
Isa famous fashion designer ‘
and her cousins, Matthew and ‘
‘

Ema, are recognized media
faces in Britain.

“E did feel that [needed
to do something,” she
reflects, “I found some diary
entry that was like, ‘Oh my
God, ’'m 21 and I still
haven’t achieved anything!
It’s so terrible! But at that
age, Most people have some
sort of huge drama in their
tives,”

And, she adds, “I was an
actress, and thar makes vou
feel fairly hysterical anyway.”

Now it’s Freud's husband,
also an actor, who gets to be
the dramatic one in the fami-
ly.

Layne Christensen
News Reporter layne@nsnews.com

THE advent of the computer age had an inter-
esting role to play in the early artwork of
Arnold Shives.

The North Van painter and sculptor used a desktop
computer to produce an independently published book of
his drawings, The Valley of the Melting Sand, released Oct.
20 during a book launch. The title makes reference to
Calitornia’s Silicone Valley.

The four dozen drawings contained in the book were
produced when Shives, now 55, was a student in the grad-
uate program in painting and sculpture at Stanford
University. In the late 60s, Stanford was known to stu-
dents as The Farm, for its rural setting in Palo Alto,
California.

“It was an intense time of pursuing my painting,” recalls
Shives who, at the time, lived in a worker’s cottage on
vineyard acreage in Atherton — an area since transformed
into Silicon Valley.

In The Valley of Melting Sand, he writes: “In the fall, the
abandoned vineyard provided me with ample grapes, and in
the spring of 1968 the glorious wisteria climbed in a tower-
ing cascade of fragrance 40 feet up one of the oaks.” |

Publishing the book of drawings has allowed Shives to

reserve the results of this creative time in his career. The

ook was launched Oct. 20 at Vancouver’s Mojo Room on
East Hastings. Proceeds from the sale of the books and the
raffle of Shives’ silkscreen print Landscape Blink will sup-
port the North Vancouver-based Artists for Kids Trust.

‘ Shives has exhibited widely in Canada and abroad over
the past 20 years. He’s currently preparing for a show of -.,
mixed media works on paper to be held in Cologne, ;
~ al thing chat happened. to ° — Germany at the end of November. oo,
me. I suddenly realized I ~ ; . _ : NEWS pheto Mike Wexefield Closer to home, his works are now available at the Jan
actually had.a good story to ARTIST Arnaid Shives uesd a desktop publishing program to produce The Valley of _Ballard.Gallery in the Roots Lodge at Reef Point in
tell —~ but for 2 few years I Melting Sarid, a book of drawings created during the emergence of Silicone Valley. «© Ucluelet on Vancouver Island’s wild west coast.

“I must say { appreciate
writing so much,” she says,
“because being in a profes-
sion like (acting), it’s, ‘You
didn’t get the part as Anne
Frank, well that’s it, you’ve
missed it.” Whereas you can
wtite that novel without any
trouble next year.”

: Besides, she says, “I prob-
ably du.more performances as _
a writer than I ever did as an
actor an rt ,

Of Hideous Kinky —~ her
first book —- Frend says, “T
didn’t think I'd have anything
_. £0,Write about, arid then I

“thought, ‘Oh yealt, I could
write about that really unusu-

actual

O

much, ! just could never have had that
involvement with it.”

“They consulted me about everything,”
Freud says, “which is just a polite way of say-

MacKinnon. -: on ot ing they told me! But we seemed like really
. Freud says she was “really pleased with . like-minded people, which.is rare in the film
o-what he did. He said he’d only take the job if —_ industry, so I felt fike I crusted them.” ;
_ Sked him, so he came to have tea with me. The film itself is “probably. more real than

“and we talked about the book and the ideas,,. anything ever was,” she says. “The celours
which I really appreciated, and ] did like him.. _ were so vivid and I felt quite shaken when I
first saw it, by the intensity of it. But after I.
watched it for about the fifth time it was
rather a lovely film. A lot of those things did
happen, bur not in nwo hours!” .

-He was actually quite:nomadic — he went to
-. live in Morocco for about a year. He stayed in
, hotels and wandered around and ended up

learning Arabic. Heimmersed. himself so

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