Additional Images

Provenance:

Private Collection, Toronto

Note:

Scott Symons was an iconoclastic voice in Canadiana, producing some of the first Canadian LGBT literature at a time when homosexuality was still criminalised. Place D’Armes, his first novel, is a deeply experimental, semi-autobiographical account of disaffection and sexual exploration. Told in a series of journal entries, the narrator is an alienated Toronto socialite holed up in Montreal, writing a novel and re-discovering an interior sense of self through encounters with other men. The more than a passing resemblance to Symons is hardly coincidental. Controversial on its release for its open depictions of gay eroticism and withering takedowns of Anglo Canadian cultural mores, the book would lead it to later win the Beta Sigma Phi First Canadian Novel Award.

The painter Eugenia Louis met the author at an artist’s retreat in Mexico, at a time when Symons was in a self-imposed exile from Canada and what he considered the limitations of its moralising values. The painting can be considered a tongue-in-cheek portrait of a figure known for his scathing lyricism and unapologetic opinions. Assertive and commanding, and rendered with a graphic neon boldness, a crowing cockerel stands in a blue desert plain, perched atop a copy of Place d’Armes. It wears a beaded necklace around its throat, while its call radiates outwards across the dark, cracked dust bowl. A vibrant parody of the dust jacket of Symon’s novel (and, likely, the fiery personality of Symons himself) this painting was given to the author by the painter as a gift.

Symons was a bold and potent personality, and a landmark voice in helping uncover the hidden narratives of a country trying to forge a new identity. Controversial in his time, Symons is now rightly considered to be a crucially important addition to Canadian literature.