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TI: So Henry, at this point, I want to, something else that you're, you're known for are your paintings. And I wanted to ask you how you got started with painting.

HS: Well, I've been, I've been always interested in art, ever since I... and when we were, ever since I was in, in my residency program in, early on at the University of Alberta, I... as a matter of fact, when we were in, in Pittsburgh doing our residency in plastic surgery, one of the things that our chief developed was a little program where we were allowed so much money to go into some program at the university there. And one of the things they wanted us to do was take art at Carnegie Institute. Well, he thought that all plastic surgeons should have some facility in sketching and stuff like that. So he, so I did take that course in Pittsburgh, and that sort of started me on the idea of maybe, I kept thinking about that, and when I came, we came back to Edmonton after I got pretty-well established in plastic surgery at the university hospital. I started taking some extension courses at night, and that would be in the '70s. And I took a course in, what do you call... silk-, that would be in the area of printmaking, so I did printmaking one year, and the next year I did general painting. And then I did those two courses, and when we got to, here to, started coming here to Victoria, I went out to a place called MISSA, which is the Metchosin International (Summer School of the Arts), International School of Summer Art workshops, and I did a couple of courses with them. And these things sort of got me to doing more painting, I was painting in oils and watercolors. And I'd already done, a number of prints that I'd done when I was in printmaking, I still have those prints today. And some of them were accepted as good prints, but I never did sell anything, I wasn't in the process of becoming a real artist, of selling paintings or anything like that. I was just doing it mainly because I enjoyed doing it. And the other thing I did was a few years ago, in 1999, as a matter of fact, I was thinking about that it was gonna be sixty years from the time that I was incarcerated in New Denver as an "enemy alien." And my background being that I was involved in all these things, the foundation, the NAJC, and the Alberta Heath Cultural Heritage and Council, all that sort of thing. I thought, I can't write, but I could paint. And I thought, "I wonder if I could paint something of that period." And so I did, initially I did a thing called "Cool Cats," and that was these four guys that was a photograph that I had, of these four young fifteen-year-olds, fourteen-, fifteen-year-olds that thought they were really cool. They had, you know, their pork pie hats and drape pants, during that period, keychain, zoot suit, sort of. That would be 1943, '44. And they were standing on the bridge that connected the orchard to the main part of town in New Denver.

TI: So this is in New Denver?

HS: In New Denver, yeah. And they were sitting, standing there, so I remember seeing that picture, and I thought, those guys think that they're on top of the world. And it was, I thought it was a great picture for, to start painting. So I started by doing that one, so I did "Cool," the "Cool Cats," and then I put a little blurb about them and thought about that. And then I did one of the actual town of, the orchard as it looked in 1946, 'cause I saw a picture of that. So I used that as a background. When I got those two done, and I was thinking about that, and I thought, you know, there must be, I know there were hundreds of pictures of the New Denver period. I had a few, and they were snapshots, and I'd seen others, friends of mine had others, so I thought I could do something about the lifestyle of that internment camp, and what it was, and what it really was like. So I thought, well, I think I could make a series of this, and so I started painting this series. And so finally I painted, to begin with, twenty-two of them with all kinds of scenes in all different areas. Things, activities that we did sports-wise, social-wise, as well as how the, how the camp looked like, and what people did when they were in the camp, what was the major things that stuck in my mind, the vegetable gardens, the sanitarium, all of this sort of thing. And when I, and I painted them, I thought I'll paint them in oil, because if you're gonna do any painting, I'd seen some watercolors, and to me, watercolors are fine as a medium, it's difficult to preserve. I thought, well, if I preserve them I can preserve 'em with oil paintings, so that's why I did them in oils.

And after I got twenty-two, that made it up, by the time I got started... to begin with, I had it, I went to, happened to be in Toronto. We had a little company that made me go, having to go to Toronto. When I was in Toronto, I got my sister to gather some of the people that had been in New Denver that I knew, and we would have a dinner. And at the same time, I put a little tape recorder there and we, I asked each of them what is it that they remember about the internment camp. And all of them had very positive, they all had positive recollections of the time that they were in New Denver, and now they were, this is, this is some forty, fifty years after. And they all had thought that this was a community to them that they really cherished, and it was sad to leave. We, when we left, we felt badly about leaving, and anyhow, this, then, started me off thinking about the paintings. I had this sort of recording that I did, and one of the things, for instance, like my sister said, you know, "When I was in the internment camp, I really felt safe." There was, it was like, they were out of the area of any prejudice or any slurs that were directed towards him if it was like they were on the West Coast. They felt that they were, you might say, they were the majority, of course. When we were in the camp, we were the majority. The white people in the, in the city, in the little village of Victoria -- in the little village of New Denver, really were the minority. So everything that went on in that whole area, in terms of social things, the dances, the movies, the baseball, the hockey, they were all done by the Japanese group, and the white people joined in. It wasn't the other way around. And it was like, it was a, it was a different scenario, and we thought, you never thought about it at that time, but you actually were conducting your life as if you, this was the way things go. You decided what was going on. We were the ones that put the teenage dances on, and the New Year's dance, and the white people came to our dances; we didn't go to the other ones.

TI: And so you had these paintings, and you think that conveyed that kind of feeling?

HS: Yes, it does. There's a, everybody who has seen these paintings say the paintings are rather happy. And I said, "Yes, they were," because the general mood of the type of people that were there, and we're talking about teenagers and people who, not the Isseis but Niseis, were generally happy by being, being there. And when they left, many of them were really sorry to leave the camp to go to Toronto or these other places, because it was, they had spent three or four years in an area where they just had no concern about whether they were Japanese or whether they were Canadian. It never occurred to them.

TI: And you think those twenty-two paintings kind of captured some of that.

HS: Captures that effect of it, yeah.

TI: So how have you displayed or exhibited these...

HS: They've been going around. They've, I've got them all in, of course, they're framed, and we got, they pack up into three boxes, and we have big panels which explains the camps and where they were. And we have a discussion of what this is all about, and this goes around. We have about six panels of discussion. Each painting has a little caption that goes with it explaining each painting. So each, and I have one on hockey, for instance, baseball. We all listened to the World Series and played baseball as we, as we listened to the World Series. We all played hockey and listened to Hockey Night in Canada, which was a Saturday night tradition in Canada. And we all took part in, in dances, "teen town" was a thing at that time.

TI: Right, so those, those paintings captured that. I'm curious, since it's been on display, have there been any memorable sort of comments that...

HS: Yeah. The best place where it showed was at the university, when I used it, had it at the university gallery, the comments were very interesting. Because here's people, a group of people who were completely outside of our community. And none of them were, of course, Japanese, were of any Japanese ancestry, but they were, ancestry, but a lot of them were interested in... to begin with, they had no idea that this had occurred. Of course, it had never been publicized, it's not in the history books to any degree, so nobody knew that this episode ever occurred. And the second thing, of course, was that they could see in this a kind of a bittersweet remembrance of a time or an episode, something that also probably affected all of our lives, and even today, your life, from your parents. And things that, everything has, this one episode had occurred, and if it has occurred, you can't take it away, and it becomes a part of your persona.

TI: Actually, that's kind of a good way to end that portion.

<End Segment 65> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.