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Here's an article that ran (with edits) in the F-Press on June 28, 2007.


So maybe it's because I'm listening to sad music and it's raining while I write this. Or, maybe it's because someone I've always admired at a distance, through some of my closest friends, passed away this week at 27 years old, after a long struggle with lukemia.

But whatever the reasons, this week I'm wondering about whether art really has any meaning at all.

It's a rhetorical question, of course, because if art had no meaning, we humans wouldn't have been making it since the beginning of time.

No--we make art, and think about it, and hang it on walls, because it moves us somehow. It teaches us something, makes us feel like things will be okay, or like things are every bit as awful (and beautiful) as they really seem to be.

So all of these thoughts were with me in different ways when I biked over to the Winnipeg Art Gallery this week, to look at a show of works from their vast historical collection.

The oldest paintings, European works from six hundred years ago, are almost entirely paintings from Christian history--works showing Jesus and the saints.

Behind that, though, as the keen observer will realize, artists of every age manage to convey pathos, anger, debauchery, sexiness, and deep spiritual doubt into works that, on the surface at least, were only about religion.

In works by 15th century Dutch artist Cranach the Elder, or an unknown German artist's painting The Martyrdom of St. Catherine, tiny details hint at larger narratives. The positioning of a hand, the direction of the eye, or a recognized art symbol like a flower, or a peach, helps tell a story that's about more than just Jesus and the saints.

Move forward four hundred years in time, to when the Impressionists cast a long shadow over art.

Almost every work in the exhibit from this era bears their stamp to some degree, from Dorothea Sharpe's 1902 work In the Orchard, celebrating the nobility of daily labour, or Bernard de Hoog's charming, romantic scene The Proposal.

Again, as with the earlier religious paintings, these artists work within what at first seem to be narrow borders, but still manage to depict the whole range of human emotions.

Shortly after this time, in the 1920's, a Winnipeg artist named L.L. Fitzgerald spent some time in New York City, and was influenced by the Post-Impressionist art of the day.

Back home in Winnipeg, shortly before joining the legendary Group of Seven, Fitzgerald created Potato Patch, Snowflake, a painted scene from his grandparents' farm in southwestern Manitoba.

Like others, Fitzgerald shows the nobility of daily work, but with a whole scheme of colours, ideas and designs that artists before his time would never have thought of.

He, too, though, was a product of his time--better than many artists, perhaps, but still influenced by trends, ideas, and demands of his day.

And just like artists since the beginning of time, he was using the art forms of his day to work through these same ideas that we've all wrestled with.

For Fitzgerald, it meant that he stopped painting these types of landscapes not long after this work was created. Instead, he embarked on a two-decade experiment with abstract art, trying to find the divine through nature and paint, trying to answer these same questions.

He once said: "The idea is not to simply reproduce things (in paintings), but to start with their centre, their spiritual core, and to build the image outward from there."

Where the spiritual core of paintings might be, or the spiritual core of life, for that matter, can sometimes be a bit of mystery. And yet my late friend understood it better than most: "I' m begging you--think about your funeral every day," he once said in an email. "In some ways, it's all that really matters."

His funeral, however he may have imagined it, is tonight.

And so that, of course, has something to do with all of these musings about centuries of art, and why they might possibly matter. But that's me--you might see this show completely differently, depending on where you're at right now.

So maybe that's why art always has and always will matter to us--it speaks to us across these perceived differences of time and culture, tells the same basic stories, asks the same basic questions.

Good art (and bad art, too) provides us with some kind of record, something that says we were here once, and that we lived and tried to understand some things about the workings of the world. And for reasons that we still don't really get, all of that seems to matter a great deal.