Mauve Undertones in the Great Grey North
Mauve Undertones
in the Great Grey North
Maya Venters
On the Atmospheric Elements of our Spiritual Season
This essay is featured in Ekstasis Issue 10 Print Edition
After an extended stay in the vibrant landscapes of Central America, I returned to Canada to find my country greyer than I recalled. The newly expanded Highway 401 stretched endlessly before me, lined on either side by bleak telephone poles and leafless trees. The muted tones of red-tailed hawks and white-tailed deer blended into their landscape, and the days seemed to slog away under a permanent overcast. Perhaps my mistake was flying home in February. Or perhaps this dreary palette was so ingrained in my aesthetic consciousness that I had not noticed how pale it was before.
I imagine the early Canadian impressionist painters had a similar experience upon returning home from France. Canadian painters arrived in Paris around 1880. The peak of the impressionist movement had already begun to wear off, but this did not stop them from painting alongside some of the movement’s greatest painters. Canadians were schooled at the École des Beaux-Arts, practiced painting en plein air throughout urban and rural France, and exhibited at the Paris Salon. Their palettes brightened as they captured sunsets over the Seine, the atmosphere of pear orchards in Barbizon, and the reflections of light and shadow in the gardens of Giverny.
They returned to Canada to teach impressionist techniques in the artistic centres of Toronto and Montréal, eager to paint en plein air in Beaupré or Algoma, only to confront nearly six months a year of sub-zero temperatures. While the French painted the delicate snow falling outside a Paris café, Canadians were back home in the wilderness, battling freezing rain, ice storms, and blizzards with their paint brushes.
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Since coming home, I have been struck not only by the changes in the natural environment but also by the shifting undertones of our cultural environment. There is a pervasive fog, which was identified by Charles Taylor years ago as the “malaise of modernity,” obscuring our vision of the future. As Canadians, especially young adults and their families, increasingly struggle to make ends meet, the fog of malaise seems to be thickening to the point of hopelessness. The stereotypically measured Canadian outlook is sliding toward one of melancholy.
It is no mere coincidence that an artistic lull has arisen simultaneously alongside this cultural lull. For several decades, Canadian arts have been in a winter wilderness, devoid of the rich, hopeful undertones that once defined a quintessentially Canadian aesthetic. Our artistic tradition, modest as it may be, is stuck in that mid-April ice storm where it seems like spring is a distant memory that may never come again. A Good Friday Groundhog Day, where there is death without resurrection.
It is beyond me to suggest how we might recover from our cultural malaise, though recovery from our aesthetic malaise is equally necessary. Recent popular interest in Canadian impressionism suggests that this historical artistic movement has something to offer our present moment. There is something about this period in Canadian artmaking that we are attracted to, a hopeful undercurrent in old artistic practices that are in great need of a revival.
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Winter—the greatest obstacle to the plein air painting of the past—became the central subject and defining feature of Canadian impressionism. With their impressionist-influenced senses attuned to the play of light and shadow, Canadian painters returned from France and became obsessed with the way, in Lawren Harris’s words, “snow borrows the colours of the sky and sun.” Harris explores this, for example, in a landscape painting depicting snow-covered trees, where very little white can be seen despite the subject. The piles of snow are painted with blues, purples, yellows, pinks, and even teals—but no white. Maurice Cullen, a Newfoundlander transplanted to Montréal who is best known for Canadian winter scenes, said of the snow: “It is blue, mauve, it is grey, even black, but never entirely white.” Reflecting on the distinctness of the northern palette, A. Y. Jackson, a member of both the Group of Seven and the Beaver Hall Group, described a “diffused and pinkish light that is nearly always present in our snow-bound skies,” adding that “one does not see it in the grayer atmospheres of northern or Central Europe.”
The attempt to paint this “diffused and pinkish light” can be seen throughout Canadian impressionist and postimpressionist art. Nearly ubiquitously, Canadian painters from coast to coast accomplished this through the use of the colour mauve.
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What is mauve? If you look up the colour, you will find everything from peach to magenta. The colour I am talking about falls somewhere between violet and grey. Think of the pale centres of lilacs or dried lavender collecting dust. It is more blue than red, and duller than it is bright. The colour can be attributed to few objects found in nature, and yet it permeates the underpainting of the Canadian landscape.
Of course, the use of mauve was not itself a novel development. Mauve has featured in the palettes of artists for centuries, including by European impressionists such as Monet, Pissarro, and Caillebotte. Nevertheless, in Canada mauve took on a distinct place. Mauve became a motif in the traditions of Canadian painting. It became a necessity, a colour without which painters could not do justice to the landscapes of the great white north. In the hands of Canadian impressionists, the colour became the defining feature of an idiosyncratic modern aesthetic that drew simultaneously from Canada’s indigenous and European heritage.
Mauve became the underpainting for nearly every scene of that quintessentially Canadian dreary winter, tinged with the hope of coming spring. For the artist, an underpainting is a base layer, a monochromatic foundation painted onto the canvas. It serves as a map, separating the lights from the darks, and ties a composition together from the outset. The Canadian impressionists saw mauve as the underpainting of the Canadian landscape, the colour that holds together the elements of this vast, northern expanse.
One of the most recognizable paintings that exemplifies this Canadian use of mauve is Ozias Leduc’s L’heure mauve (1921). This painting depicts the hour of mauve, usually associated with dawn and dusk—the time of twilight where forms are still decipherable yet become obscured in the low, indirect light. Leduc hones in on one small corner of a winter twilight scene, where broken sticks, bits of cedar fencing, and dead trees are all outlined in a blueish mauve. In a 1996 retrospective on Leduc for Montréal’s Musée des Beaux Arts, a critic noted that a closer look at this painting reveals a crown, part of a ladder, and the remains of an oak tree that will soon come to a rebirth in spring, but he shies away from making any conclusions despite Leduc’s well-known religious engagements. Viewers of Leduc’s strongly Catholic milieu would have recognized these purplish forms as alluding to the liturgical season of Lent. During Lent, the Church anticipates the death, entombment, and resurrection of Christ. It is a season that points to the twilight between death and resurrection. Leduc’s piece suggests that in northern climates, nature seems to join in this Lenten anticipation, and the snow begins to melt as Earth prepares to come back to life.
Another example of the Canadian use of mauve is in A. Y. Jackson’s Morning After Sleet (1913). Again, this piece is a winter scene, this time at dawn, depicting a moment of stillness after an overnight storm. The tree line in the background is painted entirely in shades of mauve, as are many of the tree branches and bits of brush sticking out of the snow in the foreground, the off-white slightly tinged with mauve where the sun shines through the trees to reflect off the snow and water. This painting calls to mind the opening scenes of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, in which the young Anne describes “the water [as] a glory of many shifting hues—the most spiritual shadings of crocus and rose and ethereal green, with other elusive tintings for which no name has ever been found.” Both Jackson and Montgomery, like Leduc, suggest that the presence of mauve in the Canadian landscape has a mystical or spiritual quality to it as it seems to tie the landscape together.
Mauve is not exclusive to landscapes, but also appears in portrait paintings, for example those of Prudence Heward and Yulia Biriukova. Both these painters employ mauve in the skin tones, clothing, and landscapes of their portraits. Heward’s The Bather (1930) is an excellent example of the way portraitists used mauve to weave the individual into their landscape. Each element of the painting is pulled together through the foundation of the underpainting, maintaining the distinction between the subject and their surroundings, yet suggesting a deep connection between the two. These portraitists show that mauve does not permeate just through the Canadian landscape, but also through the individual.
The preoccupation with mauve, and its mystical and unifying qualities, is ubiquitous. It can be seen in Canadian landscape paintings from Harris’s Toronto neighbourhoods and Cullen’s Montréal cityscapes; it features in the totem poles of Anne Savage, the prairie scenes of William Kurelek, the cloudy river valleys of Homer Watson, the domestic scenes of Helen McNicholl, the dream-like figures of Marion Dale Scott, the mountains and hills of Edwin Holgate, the winter wonderlands of Cornelius Krieghoff, and the maritime landscapes of Elizabeth Styring Nutt. Mauve lays the foundation for the religious paintings of Ozias Leduc, the small-town Québec memories of Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté, the portraiture of Prudence Heward, and the silver mines of Yvonne McKague Housser. The list goes on. From Cullen’s St. John’s to Carr’s Haida Gwaii to Harris’s Ellesmere Island, the use of mauve spans geographic, linguistic, cultural, and temporal divides.
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In the Canadian aesthetic consciousness, the things we see, hear, and smell resonate from the land and point toward something beyond what our senses can capture, something that cannot be contained. Mauve is a constant presence in many forms of Canadian artmaking from coast to coast. Canadian writers have for decades witnessed this colour’s presence in our landscapes. For example, P.K. Page’s poem “The Filled Pen” ends in the way Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables begins: with light, the land, and a constant presence she cannot quite identify:
Light of the swan-white moon.
The blazing light of trees.
And the rarely glimpsed bright face
behind the apparency of things.
Mauve—the colour that seems to lie under the surface of every dawn and dusk, of oceans, forests, prairies, and tundras in the vast region we have come to call Canada—seems to encompass, in both painting and poetry, a unifying presence. For example, in “Twilight,” Margaret Avison writes,
Three minutes ago it was almost dark.
Now all the darkness is in the
leaves (there are no more
low garage roofs, etc.).
But the sky itself has become mauve.
In the opening poem “Little Stories” from her 2004 Griffin Poetry Prize–winning collection, Anne Simpson writes,
It’s reached that point
when twilight softens,
gets into corners,
waits in the hush of branch and leaf, waits.
Now the fork on the plate is shadowed
mauve.
In Simpson’s poem, like Heward’s portraiture, the mauve of our exterior surroundings has also marked our interior lives. In “Le Mauve [Le crepuscule monte…]” by Marc André Brouillette, the speaker is witness to, and yet defiant of, the decay and death that come at the retreat of the hour of mauve:
Je vis dans le retrait du mauve et compose un nouvel ordre aux événements du corps. J’empoigne le passé et lui modèle de nouveaux volumes : ici, plus saillant, là, moins petit, moins droit, là, plus arrondi. Dans ce lieu où les chemins ne peuvent être parcourus deux fois, la nuit ne succède pas au jour, la mort, à l’enfance.
Brouillette’s prose is illustrative of how Canadian writers, like its painters, have found themselves on the edge of the wilderness, standing face to face with chaos, the sublime, the infinite. Of course, the origin stories of our first peoples—who are also our first artists—bear witness to the same encounter. For many of them, this encounter is with the original presence of the Creator on these vast, mysterious lands. From their first depictions of the land right up to those of the Group of Seven and beyond, the art that this land has inspired pulls us beyond ourselves and into our own encounter with awe-inspiring, spirit-saturated landscape.
Susanna Moodie arrived in Upper Canada in the 1830s and wrote extensively about her initial impressions of the land. In “Roughing It in the Bush,” Moodie describes an early encounter with the Canadian landscape as a meeting with God,
“My soul at that moment was alone with God. The shadow of His glory rested visibly on the stupendous objects that composed that magnificent scene; words are perfectly inadequate to describe the impression it made upon my mind—the emotions it produced… I never before felt so overpoweringly. . . the boundless might and majesty of the Eternal.”
This sublime encounter drew her further into her love of God, but also her love of the land, her writing practice, and her new home.
Faced with the overwhelming beauty of the Canadian landscape, Moodie names the presence that she senses over the vast land that she encountered in “the bush,” but which she finds no words to properly express: the “shadow of His glory.” This phrase evokes a myriad of biblical images where the presence of God is sensed but not fully concretized or realized, which St. Paul described as seeing “through a glass darkly.” Even if they did not share a common confession, this sense of the immediate yet elusive presence of the divine on this land was shared by the majority of the painters and writers that have come to define modern Canadian art.
These writers and painters continually call us back to the land, and further, into the uncapturable depths beneath the surfaces of our landscape. Their work intricately intertwines their art, spirituality, and environment, bearing witness to the beauty and chaos of a land beyond our control. From a fork’s slim shadow on the table to the expanse of the snowy wilderness, these artists beckon us to take a posture of gratitude and hope for this land, and its unique ability to draw us into the immeasurable, the infinite.
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Mauve in Canadian art, both painting and otherwise, is the underpainting that points beyond the uncapturable depth of things, bearing witness to a unique fullness present within the Canadian landscape. This fullness reaches from coast to coast, and spans the cycle of the seasons, which mark not only our external lives but also often mark the rhythms of our internal lives. The movements of the northern wilderness, perhaps more than other places, urge us toward congruity with nature. Those who allow themselves to plumb the depths of the seasons, such as the many artists we have explored, seem to discover a wisdom reminiscent of the Teacher’s reflection in Ecclesiastes:
“There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens:
a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build.”
Mauve is present at the intersection of order and chaos where old patterns and new possibilities emerge. Mauve underpaintings draw us to see the budding life under bleak winter skies and the brooding storms in bright summer scenes. Yet this mystical presence in Canadian art pulls us beyond merely considering the seasons of the year to contemplate the seasons of our lives.
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In the Divine Comedy, when Dante first encounters Virgil’s shade in the “vast wilderness,” Virgil identifies himself as a man from “the season of the false and lying gods.”
If we, like Virgil, had to describe the entire span of our existence as fitting into a single season in history, what would our season be? What is now the time for? What does our current cultural moment call us to? How do we tend the garden of the future without falling into fatalistic and fantastical tendencies?
To borrow the French Nouvelle théologie phrase, now is the time for a ressourcement, for drawing anew from old motifs. Now is the time for mauve. It is the time to dig deep into history, to find our roots, to recover the underpainting of traditions which came before, and to boldly paint a future informed by the past.
Now is the time to turn back to our land which has inspired generations of Canadian artists: turn to the jack pine or the hayfields, to icebergs or to the Rockies, to Pacific salmon or Atlantic cod, or to the many birds that fly in-between. And in each of these things, to look for the flicker of mauve, for the undercurrent of Christ in all things, shining through the fullness of reality. Seek beauty in the mundane, hope in the dead of winter. Start with the underpainting, in muted purple-greys, and let the histories you come from lay the foundation of your work.
Maya Venters
Poet & Artist
Maya is a poet & artist published in Rattle, Modern Age, & The Literary Review of Canada
Painting by Maurice Cullen
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