The Last Canadian
"You are a big country. You are the kindest country in the world. You are like a really nice apartment over a meth lab."
- Robin Williams, Comedian
As a comedian, Robin Williams was aware of the use of disparate elements in art, whether it was words or pictures - it was grist for his occupational mill. These disparate elements have been around a while, and were employed in the existentialist philosophy of Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, shaping a twentieth century world that became more absurd than understandable. Today, we are constantly confronted in life and art, by artists with characteristics in their work that are incomparable and indeed appear at first nonsensical - but the ritual is far from meaningless.
Well, it may go without saying, we are not the kindest country in the world anymore. Robin checked out, and our country continues to search for the social cohesion that once made us a kind country in his eyes - an oasis above Sartre's absurdity.
Way back when, we once concerned ourselves with one door; now, the acknowledgment of two doors echo our world of political divisiveness. Internationally, Williams' metaphor of Canada is past its due date, and our nice apartment is in need of renovations.
In 1975 my mother gave me a paperback book to read by William Heine - it was called The Last Canadian, and is a dystopian tale about survival after a deadly virus hits North America. The protagonist is the last person to receive Canadian citizenship prior to the onset of the virus' devastation. My mother, her uncanny intuition, and the story she passed on, has lingered in my mind for years. It was certainly rekindled during the politics of the recent pandemic.
In the 1950's she was a post war Canadian happily raising her family. Her husband was a pilot and outdoorsman, thus he liked to fish in northern Ontario and other provinces he flew into. She knit him a sweater with heavy duty yarn from Briggs and Little in New Brunswick, and oiled it to repel the rain and cold. After all, we are not just a big country, but also a cold country. Years later, I inherited the sweater, and while it kept me warm in Europe in the 1980's, it was also a conversation starter with other travelers that shared the opinion we were a kind and big country. The sweater has found its way into numerous paintings over the years with different narratives and iterations.
Simone, my wife, once again assisted me by playing the subject of The last Canadian in this painting. Over the years she has taken on so many roles in my work, I sometimes wonder who she really is. As she modelled, I originally had her head facing the red door. Eventually, I decided to have the figure instead, looking out to sea, beyond the two doors. In painting, space can represent time; the fore ground being the present - distance and the horizon representing the future.
Be that as it may, the woman leans on a neutral door. It is a door without colour - not unlike a Robert Ryman abstract painting. It is a door that lacks stories and any meaningful narrative - only the superficial aspects of the materials the door is composed of can be associated with it. It is in some respects a door without character or personality; a door devoid of disposition, let alone identity - a word that has come to hold little meaning in the digital revolution, as it is continuously dissected on a daily basis.
The red door is paneled and framed in white, referencing the colours of the Canadian flag. It is scarred and beginning to age, and is designated as much by narrative use as our weather conditions - by people, their experiences, as well as the elements of land and sea. It has concurrently developed an ethos, just as those people that have used it have. It is the kind of door that might have once opened up into a really nice apartment.
Steven Rhude, Wolfville, NS
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