Additional Images

Provenance:

The Pollock Gallery Ltd., Toronto, ON;
Private Collection, Toronto, ON

Note:

In this untitled painting, otherwise known as Mother and Young (1970), Morrisseau represents one of the most popular icons in the history of art: the mother and its child. The subject of motherhood has been explored by artists for millennia. Though they are often dissimilar in appearance, what often unites images of the mother and her young are concepts of nourishment, love, and responsibility. Morrisseau’s work undoubtedly falls into this narrative.

In the painting, we find a mother bird stooping above her small child, who arches its neck upwards toward the mother’s bill. It appears that the viewer has stumbled upon a moment when the mother is on the precipice of feeding her child. Though this may be true, it is also known that Morrisseau painted quivering black lines between humans, animals, and objects to articulate forms of communication such as verbal speech or spiritual kinship.

Morrisseau’s generous application of blues, greens, reds, and oranges establish intense visual contrasts, which not only catch the viewer’s attention but also trick the eye into seeing the birds in-motion. By doing so, he can seamlessly transform a flat, two-dimensional picture into something multidimensional and electric. Elsewhere, the quivering black lines and circuitous dark orange lines that travel between the mother, its young, and the floating orbs between them represent the Anishinaabe holistic belief that all living things in the universe are connected. The lines that bisect each orb may reference the binary systems that define the human condition; for instance, good and evil, awake and asleep, or life and death. Morrisseau also used the orb motif in his paintings to represent his continued fascination with the astral plane, a transcendent reality where one’s life force could access for harmony and balance. “There is a museum of the astral world,” he says, “that each individual goes by [their] own free choice… to pick up some energy.”

Matthew Ryan Smith, Ph.D., is a curator, writer, and editor of European descent. He is currently the Curator & Head of Collections of Glenhyrst Art Gallery, the literary editor of First American Art Magazine, and editorial board member of the Yearbook of Moving Image Studies at Kiel University, Germany.

References:
Devine, Bonnie. 2015. Professional Native Indian Artists Inc., or The Indian Group of Seven. The Canadian Encyclopedia. Web.