EDMONTON EXISTENTIAL

Two Paintings on a Wall

Our bedroom is at the rear of the Crooked 9, a corner room. The window on Ann’s side of the bed, in the far corner beside a vanity, overlooks our backyard. My window above my night table stacked with books is directly diagonal. My view is Mosquito Alley, a semi-neglected space between our home and that of our miserable solitary neighbour whose dog is some sort of large and expensive poodle cross bred without a brain. Mosquito Alley is where I upend the wheelbarrow for the winter and stack firewood that’s too risky to burn during spring, summer and autumn months; embers float and Edmonton’s been awfully arid these past years. Mosquito Alley has no sky, it’s umbrellaed by an overhanging branch of mountain ash. The red clusters of fermented berries are especially plump now. They weren’t plucked by a cartwheeling flock of waxwings on a bender this season. There’s been nothing to see. Instead, I’ve been looking to my left, studying the pair of paintings hung stacked perpendicular to my window.

Both of these oils are older than Ann and me. They’re modern in a way because the reputation of the artists supersedes the merit of their works. One was painted by Ann’s father Alec. He dated the signature on his canvas: 1935. He was twelve. The other was painted by my mother’s father, my grandfather Charles. It’s undated and he has abbreviated his given name (my middle name) to Cha’s, bottom right. Both paintings are landscapes.

If I were to see Alec’s painting in a museum, I would pause before it. It’s a rugged, wild, Alberta scene, mainly sombre colours. The sky above and behind the Rockies is white, cumulus clouds inflating and billowing, weather’s blowing in from further west. The closest peak to the viewer is purple-blue, one slope crusted with a glacier. The entire scene is divided unequally by a river, a ribbon in varying shades of blue, darkening toward the far bank, highlighted by delicate suggestions of whitewater. The river’s source must be the distant glacier. The balsam firs in the foreground on the near bank, evergreens, are half black. Their pine cone clusters are a ripened beige, almost glowing in the late September or early October morning sun behind the artist.

Books on art, the masters, comprise more than a few volumes in the inherited portion of our library. While I completely comprehend how economic depression in a remote Canadian prairie province quickly followed by a war overseas may impact a boy’s plans for his future, I am compelled to ponder, speculate about a road not taken.

Cha’s chose to paint a winter scene in rural Quebec, perhaps even just outside Montreal’s early to mid-twentieth century city limits. Even now the island is still not entirely urbanized. A sleigh-rutted road winds through a stand of patchy birch trees and past a farmhouse toward a wooden bridge. The cloudless sky is a hard pale blue. The snow shadows the same freezing shade. Charles’s perspective is hopelessly skewed, the road widens as it recedes. Maybe it’s a trick of the light the artist was working in at the time, but a rut becomes a snowbank on an S-turn or vice versa and sort of goes uphill from there. Charles did render his firs as Alec did, heavy with the black paint.

I was born in February 1960. Charles died in March. I don’t think it was my fault; most newborns are ugly or at least peculiar looking but I wasn’t exactly Rosemary’s baby either. The painting hung in my big brother’s Montreal bedroom while I was trying to grow up. It came to me when he moved to Edmonton in 1972. I wanted it because it was his. I wanted it because it was my only connection to a grandfather I never knew – a wit, I’ve been told, a charmer, something of a character; beloved. Charles’s landscape has hung everywhere I’ve ever lived since I left home in 1980. Its ornate frame, some type of plaster composite, is disintegrating – perfectly square chips decide to fall from time to time and lay where they may.  Prior to my moving out, his work wasn’t able to compete with the crucifix over my bed, a portrait of my guardian angel, Esso hockey posters, Spider-man and Mick Jagger.

I’ve seen all the things depicted in two paintings of disparate quality. Most of them I can see from the front porch of the Crooked 9 where I spend too much time smoking cigarettes and simply gazing at my surroundings. I’ve watched the puffy skies, thunderheads gathering, weather rolling in. I’ve seen skies so hard and blue I believe I could reach up and scratch them. I’ve studied the blue spruce towers along our street, black in most light yet ripe with brown cones or yellow with pollen; our front lawn birches’ papery white bark with artists’ sketchpad charcoal studies on it amid ochre stains left by running sap; blue and purple shadows cast on ice and snow.

I’ve seen all these things myself. These things or something like them are there for you too should you care to pause for moment and not take in the view so much as absorb it. The wonder of it all is I’ve also seen these things through the eyes of others, and I can’t help but see them differently. Alec and Charles taught me to look at things twice.          

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. My companion site www.megeoff.com is a little dusty, but up to date.