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book review

Gerald Squires, seen with his metaphorical painting Uprooted, infused politics into his work

Stan Dragland's Gerald Squires explores the life and work of Newfoundland artist

Gerald Squires

By Stan Dragland,

Pedlar Press, 240 pages, $80

By way of honing his craft, the Newfoundland artist Gerald Squires wrote a note to himself on a scrap of paper in 2015, the year he died at the age of 77: "Think of Monet and his cathedrals or haystacks," he wrote, "when painting your rocks & roots." It works as a mission statement for an artist who salted his career partly fighting the mainland urge to see Newfoundland artists as parochial: wrapped up in their rocks and roots, ignorable.

Canadians who grew up soaked in the Group of Seven who missed the darker, wilder visions of Gerald Squires would do well to go back for another, or first, look.

As Stan Dragland writes in Gerald Squires, a coffee-table retrospective of Squires's life and work – less a biography than an exploration of the artist's metaphysics (wonderfully designed, with careful reproductions of the paintings and sculptures) – Squires was no more parochial "than Cézanne or van Gogh." A brazen brag on behalf of the artist, but then as Flannery O'Connor once wrote of her own work, for the hard of hearing one has to shout and, for the blind, draw the most startling pictures.

Many Newfoundland and Labrador artists over time have found the rest of Canada hard of hearing and just a bit short-sighted.

The Wanderer Series: Untitled.

In the 1970s, Squires was seen as part of a so-called Newfoundland Renaissance in art, literature and theatre (which included a young Codco and their show Cod On A Stick, the prog-roots music of Figgy Duff, Percy Janes's unsentimental fiction and the visual art of David Blackwood) and when the Newfoundland expat writer Sandra Gwyn went home in 1976 to profile him for Saturday Night magazine, he explained himself thus: "You see in 1949 [the year Newfoundland joined Confederation] Newfoundlanders were made to feel the most inferior people in North America," Squires told her. "As if there were some great monster out there telling us we were 200 years behind the times. But now we're starting to get our identity back. And our dignity."

The Shout.

The last word, the rimshot to his thesis, helps explain the best work, from the surreal Boatman series of paintings to the later landscapes, especially the hard-to-resist metaphor of Uprooted, a startling portrayal of tree roots pulled free from the earth against their will, not by man, but by nature, as if to say: this is the way things are. We deal with it.

There is a politics to Uprooted and to much of Gerald Squires work, but of a kind that comes from lived experience and from the heart: It is a politics properly informed by the love of place. That place, for Squires, was the Barrens of the Avalon Peninsula near St. John's, a flat scrubland delivered by glaciers of huge rocks that aren't going anywhere any time soon. It is the subject of his most striking late paintings.

There is a politics to Cabot Tower, Signal Hill, a view of the famous St. John's landmark known to tourists but made unfamiliar to postcard collectors: it's winter, grey, the famous Cabot Tower is practically a dot on the peak and the ocean below is pitch black. It's a view of a place strangers know but that in this case, rendered by Squires, only locals will recognize.

I Heard the Yellow Birch Whisper in the Night, 2015.

Dragland was a friend of Squires's, and the text of Gerald Squires is intimate and informed, if a bit academic in places. It's followed by three anecdotal scenes by the novelist and poet Michael Crummey. These are personal scenes: running into Squires at the hospital where he began taking treatment for cancer; Crummey's relationship with a particular painting, Caribou on the Barrens, which hangs at St. John's airport and greets returning Newfoundlanders waiting on their luggage at two o'clock in the morning; a kitchen party at which Squires squinted, pulled a blank page from his sketchbook and drew Crummey by candlelight. Where Dragland digs deep, Crummey brings the story of Gerald Squires up for air. This is an important book about what an artist leaves behind: the work (including but not limited to the exalted rocks and roots) and the stories people tell about the man who made it.

Tom Jokinen is a Toronto writer.