Canadian Collage: The Fictional Art of Elaine Risley and the Canadian Artists Who Inspired It
Victoria Trudeau
Margaret Atwood is one of Canada’s most well-known literary figures, and in her novel Cat’s Eye she draws upon Canadian artists in other mediums to inspire the fictional artwork of the book’s protagonist, Elaine Risley. In the acknowledgements, Atwood cites several artists as having been particular influences, among them multimedia artist Joyce Wieland, social commentator and illustrator Gail Geltner, painter and collage artist Louis de Niverville, painter Heather Cooper, painter and illustrator William Kurelek, and painter Greg Curnoe. In examining the work of these artists it is possible to find direct correlations between some of their works and the fictional works of Elaine, including similar subjects, imagery, and mediums. There are also striking similarities between the biographies and beliefs of many of the artists and the life and opinions of Elaine, making it clear that Atwood found connections beyond the superficial level of simply being other Canadians to find artists who truly represented lifestyles and backgrounds similar to her main character's.
It is clear that mixed media artist Joyce Wieland had an enormous impact on Atwood's character. Wieland is known for being a feminist artist who experiments with many different mediums, including film. Like Elaine, Wieland is well known for her unique and powerful pictures, and many of her works contain either explicit or underlying sexuality. One commentary notes that "Many of Wieland's paintings are autobiographical in nature, showing that she was [an] extremely sex-oriented person and extremely passionate about issues of feminism and politics" (MacNevin). Elaine’s character paints things from her life as well, and as a woman from the gallery asserts while interviewing her, "'a lot of people call you a feminist painter'" (Atwood 97). While Elaine avoids the subject, many of her paintings can nonetheless be viewed through a feminist lens.
Another similarity is the inspiration behind much of both Elaine and Wieland's work, which is often dark in origin: "Wieland was also preoccupied with disasters, death and loss. These themes would recur in her work for some time. At first, she commented that her fascination stemmed from personal paranoia…Most of these are illustrated in a series of sequential images" (Belanger). Elaine’s fictional artwork also deals with disasters–those from her own past. An example of this from Cat’s Eye that directly relates to Wieland’s work is the fictional piece Falling Women, which portrays females falling to their deaths at the bottom of a ravine. The other important connection is to her piece entitled One Wing, a memorial to her dead brother. One of Wieland's pieces entitled Young Woman's Blues contains a small model airplane atop a shadow box containing a heart. Atwood also borrows from Wieland the idea of sequential panels; for example, Elaine’s piece entitled Pressure Cooker portrays her mother in two series of three sequential pictures. These significant similarities show careful research on Atwood’s part and add to the realism of the fictional Elaine as a female artist.
Gail Geltner's work is whimsical, dark, and dreamlike, and she is well known in Canada for her social commentaries as well. While there are few reference sources to view her artwork, Atwood obviously admires her, as she chose Geltner to design a cover for her novel The Handmaid’s Tale. Her work portrays people in a dreamy style, with bright colors and sharp contrasts. By featuring her work on the cover of one of her novels, and by mentioning her in the beginning of Cat’s Eye, it is apparent that Atwood considers her an important contemporary and influence.
A male artist whose work also clearly affects the fictional art in Cat’s Eye is Louis de Niverville. His paintings are vibrant portraits, which are often vaguely disturbing. He, like Elaine, grew up in Canada, and his childhood had a profound impact on much of his artwork: "De Niverville's brightly coloured works have plentiful origins in his childhood, when he was bedridden for four and a half years and concocted escapist tableaux from cut-outs he took from the comics" (Balzer). This could have influenced Pressure Cooker, in which the second picture in each series is "the same figure in collage, made from the illustrations from old Ladies' Home Journals and Chatelaines" (Atwood 167). Many of his portraits are disturbing, portraying vulnerable people in somewhat awkward poses. One picture in particular, entitled Gloria, shows a woman seated on a couch, looking both unattractive and vaguely sexual at the same time. I was reminded of Elaine's Rubber Plant series depicting the naked and sexualized Mrs. Smeath seated on her couch with the ugly living room in the background. This painting and many of his other works show domestic life from a dreamlike angle, somehow more sinister than expected, which can accurately describe Elaine's imaginary work just as easily.
The beautifully detailed and lifelike paintings of Heather Cooper are most often of mythological creatures or portraits in dreamlike surroundings. Even her most realistic portraits are somehow fantastic and abnormal. Several paintings of hers in particular are strikingly similar to some of Elaine's most important projects. The first is a portrait of a woman standing in profile, wrapped in strips of cloth with her breasts exposed. The description of Elaine's White Gift follows a similar idea:
In the first one, Mrs. Smeath is wrapped up in white tissue paper like a can of Spam or a mummy, with just her head sticking out, her face wearing its closed half-smile. In the next three she's progressively unwrapped. (Atwood 383-384)
She is wrapped like a morbid present that nobody would want; yet, in both the real and fictional pictures the women wear exactly the same expression. Some of Cooper's idealized pictures of handsome young men are reminiscent of Elaine's Life Drawing, which portrays Josef and Jon as ideal men, with their musculature more defined and "the skin luminous" (Atwood 400). Both artists paint men as they should be, not as they are. Also, several of Cooper's paintings portray trios in various poses, similar to Elaine's Three Muses. The strongest connection between the living artist and the literary Elaine, however, is the mask imagery. Many of Cooper's works include masks–theatrical, lifelike, foreign, and familiar. One painting could be a direct influence on both Atwood's imaginary Half a Face, which shows Cordelia's head with a white mask-like face hovering in the background, and also her painting Cat’s Eye, which plays with reflections in a mirror being different from what the viewer expects. This particular Cooper painting shows a woman looking in the mirror, with the image of a white theatrical mask eyeing her over her shoulder. Throughout Cooper's work the motifs of plants, butterflies, and lions also occur, all of which are mentioned as important details in the fictional artwork of Cat’s Eye. These direct links in imagery and similarity in details show just how strongly Atwood was influenced by the power of Cooper's work.
William Kurelek is known primarily for his pen and ink drawings, but his subjects are similar to several of Elaine's early drawings and paintings. Like Elaine's parents, Kurelek's mother and father discouraged him from becoming an artist, but he pursued it as a career, anyway. His work consists of landscapes, but also scenes from Canadian country life. Many of his works, however, deal with smaller things as well: "careful examination of his drawings reveals images full of realism with minute details of things like cots, clothes, and even insects" (Mayberry 1). This brings to mind Elaine's paintings of household objects, which she describes herself as having painted with perfect detail, specifically her still lifes Toaster and Wringer. His detailed drawings of insects are something he shares with Elaine as a young artist just starting out, when she practiced drawing pictures of insect anatomy for her biology class.
This practical attention to small details of living things manifests itself in Elaine's later work as well. In Three Muses she describes one of the figures as holding a disc, and "on its surface are arranged, seemingly at random, several bright pink objects not unlike those to be found in abstract paintings. They are in fact spruce budworm eggs, in section" (Atwood 444). There are connections between Kurelek's country scenes in the wilderness of Canada and some of Elaine's other images as well, which Elaine depicts in several of her paintings, including one of her parents cooking outside with the Canadian outdoors and their sturdy old car in the background, titled Picoseconds. The final subjects that Elaine's work shares with Kurelek's are portraits of religious figures. Kurelek has an entire series depicting the Stations of the Cross, and Elaine’s work features many different versions of the Virgin Mary, including one of the Virgin as a lioness, another titled Our Lady of Perpetual Help, and her final piece, Unified Field Theory. Canadian wilderness had a profound effect on Kurelek, and Atwood's character Elaine shares that connection.
With fewer apparent similarities to Elaine's work, Greg Curnoe's paintings are possible to overlook when searching for their influence on Atwood and her character. However, careful examination shows an artist who shares not only some forms of creative expression with Elaine, but also a sense of confusion over his identity as a painter and his place in society. He received backlash from feminists for his nudes and, according to Sarah Milroy, he reacted with surprise: "He found it natural to depict women erotically, and he was startled when feminists challenged him. He explained that he painted women as objects of desire because 'I don't think there is anything wrong with seeing a woman I am attracted to as an object'" (Fulford). Some of Elaine's art objectifies women as well; almost every portrait of Mrs. Smeath is lewd and unsympathetic to the subject. In addition to his nudes, Curnoe is known to use collage and also stencils. His work with stencils most shows his influence on Elaine's work. In his painting Sunday Morning January #2, a woman reclines on a couch, and stenciled words are imprinted on the upper right corner. It resembles the first piece described in Cat’s Eye, Rubber Plant: The Ascension, which shows Mrs. Smeath "wearing nothing but her flowered one-breast bib apron…reclining on her maroon velvet sofa….The word Heaven is stenciled at the top of the painting with a child's school stencil set" (Atwood 93). Greg Curnoe's work, like Elaine's, is richly colored and at times bitterly sarcastic, which makes both of them so controversial.
After studying these artists in the context of Cat’s Eye, it becomes clear that Atwood did detailed research into each artist's work and was directly inspired by all of them. Elements from their work made it into Elaine’s fictional work, which makes Elaine and her art a collage of ideas, styles, images, and mediums from Canada's best artists. They are all Canadian, but their personal differences come together to create one character. They are men and women, living and dead, feminists and those who do not care about or understand feminism, and they shape images from childhood, dreams, mythology, and the present. But each painter contributes to Atwood's image of the Canadian artist. By combining them all into one character and featuring elements of their work in her novel, Atwood is not simply creating an interesting fictional repertoire of art; she is paying homage to Canada and all its artists have to offer.
Art Works Mentioned
(Heather Cooper's work can be seen at HeatherCooper.com)
Joyce Wieland: Young Woman's Blues
Louis de Niverville: Gloria
William Kurelek: Whistle Making Time in Manitoba
Greg Curnoe: Sunday Morning January #2
Works Cited
Atwood, Margaret. Cat’s Eye. New York: Anchor Books. 1998.
Artword. Artword. 10 November 2007. <http://www.artword.net/website/Theatre/PastProd/Youare1.htm>
Balzer, David. “Louis de Niverville”. Toronto Life. November 2007. Toronto Life. 15 November 2007.
<http://www.torontolife.com/guide/arts-and-entertainment/art/louis-de-niverville/>
Fulford, Robert. “Robert Fulford's column about Greg Curnoe” 6 March 2001. Robert Fulford. 15 November 2007.
<http://www.robertfulford.com/GregCurnoe.html>
Heather Cooper Online. Heather Cooper. 15 November 2007. <http://www.heathercooper.com/>
MacNevin, Susan. Art History Archive. The Art History Archive. 15 November 2007.
<http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/canadian/Joyce-Wieland-Canadian-Artist.html>
Mayberry Fine Art. Mayberry Fine Art. 15 November 2007. <http://www.mayberryfineart.com/artist/william_kurelek.html>
Thielsen Gallery. 2005. Thielsen Gallery. 15 November 2007.
< http://www.thielsengallery.com/searchResults.cfm?a_lname=Curnoe&a_fname=Greg>