Featured Visual Artist

Myles Hector Charles – Woodland Cree Artist

Elder Myles Charles was born in 1938 at Fox Point on the south side of Lac La Ronge Lake. He is a member of the Lac La Ronge Indian Band # 353.

Myles attended both La Ronge and Prince Albert Indian Residential Schools. In the mid-sixties he took a four-year Fine Arts course at the Albert College of Art.

His works were exhibited in several art shows and workshops and featured in a Native Art group show in Vancouver. One of his paintings of a mining camp was used on the company’s Christmas card and mailed worldwide. His murals can be found in both La Ronge Indian Band Schools. Myles’ triptych painting, showing a scene of pictographs being painted on a rock face, is on permanent display at Mistasinihk Place in La Ronge, where he was employed for twenty-two years as a graphic artist.

Myles gained much experience working as a commercial artist and mastered the exact lines and details needed for that form of art, but he finds it confining and rather explores his own fine art. Myles has painted many realistic landscapes of northern Saskatchewan scenery and northern activities reflecting his closeness to nature and his long association with the Pre-Cambrian Shield. Other inspiration comes from observing fellow artists’ amazing work of art and seeing their techniques as well as sharing the gift of painting by encouraging young and emerging artists. The late James Ratt, whose paintings hang at the Robertson’s Trading Store, and John Halkett, teacher and artist, are just two of the painters that learned to paint from Myles.

Myles – retired now – continues to paint in Acrylics and sculpts in stone, wood and bone.

ekosi, tiniki.