CHEE CHEE BENJAMIN

Born on Temagami Reserve in Ontario in 1944, Benjamin Chee Chee (born Kenneth Thomas Benjamin Chee Chee) largely taught himself to paint and draw. After an unstable youth, moved to Montréal in 1965 and was encouraged to develop his love of drawing.
He was a prominent member of the second generation of Woodland Indian painters, a Native art movement that began in the early nineteen-sixties and has since become one of the important art schools in Canada. He worked mainly in acrylics, using bold flowing lines to create strong yet intensely poetic canvasses which brought him fame.
His first exhibition, held after his move to Ottawa in 1973, featured colourful abstract compositions of block-stamped geometric motifs. By 1976 his work had dramatically changed to spare, linear representations of birds and animals of great clarity and elegance, animated by a lively sense of humour and movement.
Unlike many of his contemporaries, he painted in a style influenced by modern abstraction. While most of the young Woodland Indian artists were content to follow the style of the movement’s founder, Norval Morrisseau, in depicting myths and legends by direct and “primitive” narrative means, Chee Chee pursued a more economical graphic style, a reduction of line and image more in keeping with the mainstream of international modern art.
Aside from the earlier introduction of the Woodland Aboriginal art style of Norval Morrisseau and Daphne Odjig in the 1960s, one of the most dramatic turn of events must be sudden emergence of Benjamin Chee Chee in the mid-1970s that ended with his tragic death in 1977. Because of the short span his iconic art form was created, there are a very limited number of his originals. Very few have appeared on the resale market in recent years. When one does, it is a noteworthy event. Chee Chee’s minimal linear style had a profound impact on such artists as Hugh MacKenzie, Clemence Wescoupe, Isaac Bignell and Sweetpea.
Chee Chee lived through an era of rising political action from Indigenous groups around the world. As such, he insisted that he was "an Ojibway artist", not "just an Indian artist,” claiming his Indigenous nationhood and calling for people to recognise this aspect of his identity. At the height of his success, after a renewal of a long-term struggle with alcoholism, he died by suicide in an Ottawa jail.