Gerald Squires: Newfoundland Artist

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, Japan Foundation Fellow 1991-92, and the author of
Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home and As Though Life Mattered:
Leo Kennedy’s Story.

Gerald Squires is an exceptional, deeply spiritual book, filled with
powerful and moving images that flow from the bonding of an artist with
his roots. Squires’s roots are in the land and people of Newfoundland.


The brief but excellent text is written by family and colleagues. A
short essay by the artist’s wife, Gail, traces his life and career
since the early 1960s. The couple’s decision to return to the island
after a decade in Mexico and Toronto, and to live in an abandoned
lighthouse, made for lean years but fed the flowering of Squires’s
art.

Other contributors to the text include writers Al Pittman, Mary Dalton,
and Peter Bell, and educator Bonaventure Fagan. Editors Susan Jamieson
and Des Walsh (co-author of The Boys of St. Vincent) call the book a
celebration of Squires’s “commitment to art and place” over 40
years.

Squires’s paintings occupy some three-quarters of the book. Many of
these are emotionally moving; all are visually strong. In Uprooted
(1989), a giant root and part of its massive trunk lie exposed on a
barren field, mute testimony to the experience of Newfoundlanders in
this century as in earlier times. Squires paints land and people,
infusing both with spiritual significance and poignant beauty. As fellow
artist Christopher Pratt puts it, “his environment and his psyche
collide at every turn.” Gerald Squires: Newfoundland Artist should be
in libraries across the nation.