The Underpainter

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

This subtle and complex novel ranges over much of the 20th century
through the experiences of its elderly protagonist, Austin Fraser.
Having lived through most of the early movements in abstract art, the
American minimalist painter is now moving “from realism towards the
concept of formal ambiguity.” The latter phrase could stand as a
description of the novel.

Fraser’s memories weave forward and back, from his childhood in
Rochester, New York, to teenage summers in the Ontario lakeside town of
Davenport, to the little settlement of Silver Islet Landing on the north
shore of Lake Superior.

Fraser’s mother, who dies young, is fascinated by the concept of
northernness. She loves the gothic ravines and cemeteries of Rochester
and the frothing Genesee River where she walks with her son. In youth,
Fraser is an accumulator, a hoarder thirsty for experience.

As a painter, he sees the world in terms of color, like the unstable
alizarin crimson he associates with his mother. This particular red is
one of the most beautiful, “dark, romantic, and fragile,” an
outburst of joy on the palette. A beautiful but unreliable color,
alizarin red disappears in 30 years, like the lives of the men and women
linked to Fraser: a young Canadian soldier whose passion is china
painting; a World War I nurse; a beautiful model who becomes his
mistress; the painter Rockwell Kent; and many others.

Like any novelist, Urquhart’s protagonist is a voyeur of life. From
his art teacher, Fraser learned to cherish sensations and feelings, to
allow the world to come in so that it might be communicated in his art
and thus moved back into the world. This is what Urquhart has
accomplished in The Underpainter, an epic canvas of human experience and
emotion expressed in a lyrical and reflective style.