Jim Robb has spent a lifetime drawing Yukon history in colourful characters and places
Legendary artist ‘took his love for Yukon history and expressed it in his own way’
Amid the drinking, smoking and animated conversations going on at the café in the White Pass Hotel on Whitehorse's Main Street during an afternoon in 1957, something unusual happened.
"Someone put a coin in the jukebox … and then, from the back of the café, a guy came up and started dancing around the jukebox!"
It was enough to ignite the imagination of Jim Robb, seated a few tables away. The 24-year-old was seeing what would become his life's work.
"I thought nobody was doing much about our colorful Yukon characters, and that made my life interesting," he said.
In his early days, Robb lugged his canvases and his sketching and painting paraphernalia across the Yukon, without anyone really knowing what he was doing. He sketched the characters and the faces that only the Yukon of the past could forge, the old buildings that leaned to the extreme and the rust that gnawed at them before time did its work and carried them away.
Robb, 88, still spends some of his nights drawing again and again, to keep this now-lost world alive.
Drawing History
Robb has always drawn, "but never anything really serious," he says.
"[He] didn't like school or authority," his younger brother David says about him, adding that he quickly swapped his school bag for an easel at the École des Beaux-arts de Montréal. And then one day, he left.
Robb, who was always interested in history and the people who make it, embarked on a road trip, eventually making his way to the Yukon in 1955.
Far from his native Quebec, Robb did odd jobs at first until that fateful afternoon at the White Pass Hotel. From that day on, he sought out faces that tell a story, sketched them, photographed them, even filmed them sometimes, and told their stories. He called them the "colorful five per cent."
He also developed his own style, which he dubs "the exaggerated truth."
"If a chimney leans, well, I make it lean even more."
A lot of these characters are dead today, but it was my job to keep them alive in my drawings and in my films.- Jim Robb
A man on a mission
In the 1970s, Robb spotted a man waiting for the bus. Big Salmon George was a First Nations man who cut wood for steamboats. Robb asked him if he could take his picture and Salmon George said yes, but the bus was arriving.
"He was going to miss his bus while I was doing his portrait, so I gave him a five dollar bill to take a taxi," says Robb with a smile. It was his last five dollars, he says, but he believed in his mission.
The mission, which he still pursues on a daily basis, is to keep alive the characters of the Yukon past whose paths he has crossed. All their little stories make it possible to preserve a bigger history, Yukon's history.
Collector of the past
Robb has long lived in one of Whitehorse's oldest homes. Behind the small gate with crumbling paint, the wooden cabin seems right out of one of his sketches.
In his workshop, relics of a bygone era are piled up. On the overloaded shelves, the various prints and original paintings are mixed in with old gold rush newspapers, frames and their aged sepia portraits, oil lamps and other trinkets.
It is here, in this small space, that he works, sometimes until late at night, next to the remains of an old cart wheel and under the gaze of a huge moose trophy.
"I like to recreate old buildings like Moccasin Flats, Whiskey Flats [old parts of Whitehorse now gone] or old Dawson. It almost automatically comes to me," he says.
"Age has not affected my art," he insists, while he connects the lines with his pen on the slice of wood which serves as his canvas.
"It's a cache," he says, indicating the drawing. "This is where the pioneers kept their food, provisions and ammunition."
This "Far North of the Far West" no longer exists except in literature, in territorial archives and in Robb's drawings.
'Expressed it in his own way'
"I often ran into him at the archives, and we always got into lively conversations, always about history," recalls Michael Gates, who has written six books about the history of the Yukon.
"Historians tend to focus on certain military subjects, colonial activities, explorations," says Gates. "In the Yukon, it's the Klondike Gold Rush and the construction of the Alaska Highway, but aside from these important events and people, there are many others, and those are the ones that Jim was able to capture. [...] It is his very personal way of recognizing these people and their roles in the emergence of the Yukon in the 20th century."
He raised ordinary people to their rightful place in history.- Michael Gates
For Gates, who is also the Yukon's first story laureate, Robb's passionate work has played a big part in "drawing attention to the Yukon's historical significance."
"He took his love for Yukon history and expressed it in his own way," said Gates.
Where the story might just be a source of inspiration for other artists, Robb adds another facet to it.
"In leaning old buildings, for example, he puts a bit of his personality into it while preserving the historic character of the building, and that's what is remarkable," says Gates.
His almost obsessive devotion even earned Robb an Order of Canada in 2003.
Witness to a changing world
It's not uncommon to cross paths with Robb on Whitehorse's Main Street. You can spot him by the number of people who greet him on the sidewalks. In this city, where the pace has accelerated, he walks quietly, as if observing the movement without getting carried away by it.
There aren't that many houses like his. The old sheet metal roofs are now being stared down by new condos.
"I don't really like change," Robb says. "I wasn't there during the gold rush, but what I saw was the changing Whitehorse and the changing Yukon."
He summarized that change in a painting, entitled From Outhouses To Condos.
"I found it interesting to draw the Whitehorse that I saw with Whiskey Flats and others, and to place it next to Condos City. We have more and more condos, it's crazy," he says.
Whitehorse's neighbourhoods and their hundreds of cabins gave way to parks. The people of the colourful world that provided Robb with the inspiration for a lifetime of work are gone too.
He won't say whether he considers himself one of the colourful five per cent that he has searched for and sketched, but most Yukoners would say he is, without hesitation.
"A lot of people tell me that," he says, then pauses. "Not as interesting as some."
Legacy
Even if he doesn't intend to put down his pen any time soon, he thinks about the future, about what will happen to his life's work. Robb doesn't have a wife or children, so the question of who will preserve those he kept alive with his sketches so that their stories are not forgotten, remains open.
"Preserving history through people and places; no one can do what he did anymore, and that will be his legacy," says his brother David.
Gates describes Robb's work as a tribute to the common man.
"He had the eye to perceive it and realized its value before it disappeared," said Gates.
It is often said that we realize the value of things once we have lost them. Robb didn't wait. The value of history, like that of cartooning, is no longer undervalued. Some of Robb's work sells for several thousand dollars. Some have been sold to individuals, others exhibited in art galleries in Whitehorse, or proudly sit in souvenir shops. Everything else is in his studio and archives.
Robb found himself in the right place, at the right time to grasp a vanishing world. A stroke of luck, because today the characters have died out, the old wooden shacks have collapsed or are about to do so, even the café where it all began disappeared in flames on Christmas Day 1961 .
Everyone, each in their own way, would have taken away their memories, their stories, if they hadn't met Robb's gaze and pencil.
This story was translated and condensed from its original French version, written by Vincent Bonnay.