Meditations of the Paintings of Carle Hessay

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University. She is the author of several books, including The
Mountain Is Moving: Japanese Women’s Lives, Kurlek and Margaret
Laurence: The Long Journey Home.

Leonard Woods studied with Lemoine Fitzgerald, the only prairie
representative of the Group of Seven. Woods served with the Canadian Air
Force from 1940 to 1943, was wounded, and received rehabilitation
training at the Ontario College of Art. Meanwhile Woods had reopened the
Sculpture Department at the Vancouver School of Art, and Vancouver and
Langley, where he had grown up, would become his future homes. Woods’s
long friendship with Hessay has naturally deepened the insight he brings
to his “Meditations” on Hessay’s art.

Hessay’s artwork dates from the late 1950s, when romantic realism was
popular. His colours are typically dark yet vivid. He would mature
artistically in the late 1960s, when his full energies as a painter were
released in bold slashes to celebrate a world “in its primeval
perfection,” namely the mountainous world of British Columbia that he
knew so well. Curiously, his paintings manage to be both strange and
familiar.

Hessay occasionally painted urban scenes, shown here in a chapter
called “The Great City,” which celebrated man-made urban wilderness
scenes just before dawn. One that Woods called “The Number of Man”
reminds him of the revelation of St. John the Divine. It bears the
burden of prophecy and dates from the final decade of Hessay’s
activity as an aging artist. The painting’s colours—red and
black—along with heaps of human bones suggest a medieval vision like
those painted by Hieronymus Bosch. Woods notes that the skeletons move
toward the viewer, “trampling and crashing all in its unchallenged
way.” Hessay’s last painting suggests calm, peace, and
reconciliation.

The artist died from a heart attack that occurred while he was dancing
at a New Year’s party in 1978. Woods calls it his last will and
testament: “Before us lies the awakening of a new day, sweetened and
purged of all undesirable things.”

The book’s helpful format contributes substantially to the enjoyment
of readers. A full page of text is set opposite each full-page
illustration of a Hessay painting. The reader, with an open book on his
or her lap, can indeed “meditate” on the paintings.