Searching for the Nude in the Landscape

Beverly Rasporich is an associate professor in the Faculty of General
Studies at the University of Calgary and the author of Dance of the
Sexes: Art and Gender in the Fiction of Alice Munro.

Saskatchewan writer Byrna Barclay is the award-winning author of three
remarkable novels and two sophisticated collections of short stories. In
this latest work, Barclay chronicles the life of a painter, Estelle
Caron. In combining retrospective catalogue commentary on Estelle’s
paintings with the artist’s letters, poems, and journal entries, she
creates a dazzling but ultimately disappointing fictional collage. The
story itself is engaging, but the style is overly fragmentary. The
catalogue descriptions of the artist’s paintings demonstrate the
limitations of using words to convey her genius: the reader needs to see
the paintings themselves.