Depicting Canada’s Children

Paterson Ewen's Portrait of Vincent

Loving Song OH, come OH, come To see the beautiful Flower of heaven —Vincent Ewen (age eight)1 W earing kneepads, a face mask, and earplugs, Paterson Ewen crawls on his hands and knees on top of a huge, rough-hewn sheet of plywood that straddles two sawhorses. He gouges deep grooves into the wood, vigorously attacking the surface with an electric router. The year is 1974, and Ewen is embarked on a monumental portrait of his son Vincent.2 The direct and aggressive nature of his technique belies the sensitivity of the subject and the emotional engagement of the artist with this image of his first-born son. In 1968 Paterson Ewen’s life underwent a dramatic change following the breakup of his family, the abrupt cessation of his daytime managerial job, and a severe and prolonged depression, which eventually landed him in a hospital in London, Ontario, far from his native Montreal. Ewen’s sixteen-year marriage with dancer and sculptor Françoise Sullivan collapsed under the weight of mutual infidelity and distrust. The couple had four sons, the eldest of whom was Vincent—named after Vincent van Gogh. Vincent was eighteen when his father left and twenty-four when his portrait was done. In the huge, over eight-foot-high portrait,Vincent stands alone and faces the spectator . In a strange parody of the relaxed standing pose of a classical statue,Vincent rests his weight on one leg—his awkward and self-conscious stance the antithesis of the balanced contrapposto of antiquity (fig. 19.1). He is dressed formally in a dark-green, double -breasted jacket with gold buttons, grey trousers, and a white shirt and a tie. He seems to draw his brows together, lending him a somewhat quizzical air. There is a PATERSON EWEN’S PORTRAIT OF VINCENT MONIQUE WESTRA 415 416 monique westra FIGURE 19.1 Paterson Ewen, Portrait of Vincent, 1974, canvas, acrylic, metal on plywood, 243.5 × 122 cm. Vancouver Art Gallery, Gallery Shop Funds, vag 75.14. (Photo: Teresa Healy; copyright: Mary Alison Handford) muted solemnity to his expression, his large, down-turned eyes set in an unfocused outward gaze. He stands against a colour field of saturated yellow that recalls his namesake . On his left is a squat bush with pink flowers. Two blossoms dangle from his left hand.As in other contemporary works by Paterson Ewen, collaged elements were affixed to the surface:“I used real cloth for the jacket and trousers, and part of the creases in the trousers are actually the cloth folded over, others are painted on very roughly. The buttons are pieces of galvanized iron sprayed with gold spray paint and a few squiggles of black to suggest the indentations.”3 The jacket worn by Vincent in the portrait was one of Ewen’s own. The image is based on a slide, a picture that Ewen had taken of his son at his grandmother ’s funeral. Ewen explains that “I took a number of photos and this one happened to be the last frame on the roll and consequently it cut him off at about the knees and it cut off a bit of the top of his head.”4 This literal slice across the forehead struck Ewen as a sign for his son’s lifelong emotional problems:“I thought this was a true portrait of him and I had to tread a line somewhere between being cruel or sentimental .”5 It is significant that, with the crop above the knees, the stability of a firm foothold is denied, reinforcing the sense of disequilibrium. In the original source photograph,Vincent was holding an umbrella. Ewen put pink flowers in its place to symbolize his son’s sensitivity. In an interview with Doris Shadbolt in 1977, Paterson Ewen described Vincent as“an emotionally disturbed young man”who did not talk until he was five years old.6 But the child was also a prodigy, writing a series of thirty poems between the ages of six and nine. The poems express with admirable economy and clarity the wonders of nature and the joy of life: Winter at Saturday morning I hear the chickadee sing And the sun was shining My heart is beating In “Groing [sic] Bigger,” the young poet imagines a fanciful, delicious place: Once there was a little Old hollow family And they built Their house in the Forest until Some people discovered...