Iceland Journal

Sketch by David Collier.

Hamilton-based cartoonist David Collier is the creator of the acclaimed Collier’s series and Just the Facts, both published by Drawn & Quarterly. Collier is attending the NINE Comics Festival exhibition at the Reykjavik Art Museum in Reykjavik, Iceland. What follows are his written and sketched impressions of that trip.

Day 5

Last night I had a dream I was accepting an award at a comics festival ceremony. It was for the Artist Mostly Likely to See His Project to Completion. I woke up before I was able to deliver my speech thanking those who helped me, so instead I'll make one here.

The Canada Council for the Arts travel grant program paid for my ticket over here (but not for Jen and James’s). The west coast critic and pioneer Canadian antiquarian book dealer William Hoffer would drop like a hot turd anything with — as he put it — the Canada Council “bug” logo on it. I'm sorry if you, dear reader, are also opposed to funding for the arts.

A man who ran an electronics store gave me a good price on a part I needed in order to charge my laptop from a European outlet.

The publisher of Sweden’s Optimal Press, Ingemar Bengtsson, paid me a compliment this morning, saying that of all the Drawn & Quarterly artists, I'm the one his crowd feels the most affinity with. I never wanted to be part of a group that would have a guy like me as a member, but if the group is thousands of miles away, well… okay.

The artwork that goes with these diary entries was scanned by Thorbjorg Br. Gunnarsdottir, who works at the senior-most level of the Reykjavik Art Museum. With galleries in three separate buildings across the city, and responsibilities acquired during the course of almost 15 years with the institution, she had a million more important things to do than deal with me. But I immediately picked up on her competence and realized she could help me, as men who are awarded the Artist Mostly Likely to See His Project to Completion are wont to do. Maybe someday Agusta Kristofersdottir, in the office next door, will also be a great one at the art museum.

I once did some illustration work in a western Canadian town for an article written by W.P. Kinsella. It was a follow-up piece, a look at the same town he had once written about from the perspective of 20 years later. I set up camp in the town for the better part of a week. But no matter how polite I tried to be, I had no luck drawing some of the people Kinsella had written about in the draft article I carried around. That original 1980 article still provokes fury. But Agusta swears there will be no such outrage over what I write about Icelanders. “We choose to live here,” she says.

Bjarni Hinriksson, the festival curator, was the instigator of the whole thing. He was also busy enough supporting his family with a job at the national TV network that he had no need for the ton of work the show entailed. He, too, is a cartoonist. He deals with the stress of putting drawing after drawing on paper in a similar way to me. Only while I'm in a canoe, he's on a soccer pitch.

Jen, James and I carried our skis through airports in three countries so I could fulfill a dream of mine. We had just a few moments of pleasure, but we did it: we went cross-country skiing in a Scandinavian country. It means a lot to me, as for a long time I've wondered about the life of Herman Smith-Johannsen. He was a Norwegian who raced in the 1890s, came to Canada in the 1930s and was famous when I was a kid for still skiing until shortly before his death at age 111.

He had a lot of simple things to say about a wide range of subjects, like, “Just about the most important thing in life is finding one's mate. Or, “When slalom and downhill skiing became increasingly popular in the 1940s, both disciplines fell easy prey to big business. Enormous sums of money were spent on costly facilities, which included chair lifts, artificial snow and the usual complement of bars, restaurants and satellite industries. At the same time, individual equipment became highly specialized. Exaggerated boots, heavy skis and safety bindings made their appearance... the skier became a virtual slave of his equipment, and what had been a simple sport soon became an expensive racket.”

I thought all Norwegians must be like him and love cross-country skiing. But when I finally met someone from Norway this past summer, and talked enthusiastically like I’m doing now, and asked him if he skied a lot, too, he looked at me like I was crazy.

Tonight, I walked down to Solfar for one last look at the sky before bed. The Northern Lights were putting on a huge show.

Once, when I lived in Saskatchewan, I heard the Cree artist Alan Sapp talk at the opening of one of his exhibitions. He said to everyone there that it was the same sun, the same sun, he repeated, that shone down on all the different people on earth.

And tonight, I thought that these were the same lights that I saw on a regular basis when I was lucky enough to live in parts of Canada where I could see them.