Looking at Norval Morrisseau
by Bonnie Devine
Three decades ago, I enrolled as a mature student at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto (now the OCAD University). Though my maternal family comes from the Serpent River Anishinaabe First Nation in Central Ontario, and my childhood on the river influenced everything I was and would become as an artist, it was only at art school that I learned about Norval Morrisseau and his significance to Canada’s cultural history.
Until then, I knew very little about Indigenous art or contemporary Indigenous artists. In fact, my knowledge of art was almost entirely limited to European oil painting, classical Mediterranean sculpture in marble, and the Group of Seven. Because I was a rather callow student, it took me some time to realize that easel painting was a European tradition imported here along with firearms and woven blankets. Over six years of study, I learned with surprise and delight that art is a much broader practice than the straightforward replication of reality, and an artist’s ability to meticulously render the world using colour and form on a flat piece of canvas is only one measure of merit. But back in my early days at the college, I thought representational painting was amazing—almost magical—and I enrolled in the drawing and painting program, hoping to learn the techniques and methods that would allow me to paint in a similar way.
Norval Morrisseau’s pictures, to which I was introduced in a second-year Indigenous studies class, rattled those perceptions and revealed a world of stories and meaning I had heard in early childhood but forgotten or set aside. His technique, paint application, colour sense, and drawing style were impossible to categorize or evaluate using Western standards. He didn’t bother to mix colours or measure values. His flat blocks of vivid acrylic paint refused to imitate perspectival drawing, light effects, or atmospheric conditions. Instead, his pictures were assertive, musical, and boldly confrontational. Emerging after generations of colonial acculturation, his was a distinctly non-European approach to depicting the world that was both challenging and mysteriously instructive to me as an Anishinaabe artist.
Soon after, I bought a Morrisseau print and hung it in the hallway of our house, where it greeted me every time I went up or down the stairs. It was a presence, a reminder, a kind of relative. But one day my mother, who was living with us at the time, asked me to take it down. “It scares me,” she said in a little girl’s voice. From the age of six, she had attended St. Anne’s Indian Residential School for girls in Spanish, Ontario—a place she rarely talked about. But that day we sat in the kitchen, and she told me she’d been taught at school that images and colours such as Morrisseau’s were evil. “They’re devilish,” she whispered.
My mother was not a particularly pious woman, but the nuns’ rejection of every aspect of Anishinaabe culture had been so strictly impressed on her that she felt a sense of menace emanating from Morrisseau’s picture each time she passed it on the stairs.
Of course I took the picture down, even as I wondered at its strength and emotional energy, and how it seemed to address her directly. My mother didn’t know who Norval Morrisseau was. If she recognized the manitous and legends he painted, she certainly hadn’t learned about them from the Jesuits at St. Anne’s residential school. But wherever in her memory the songs and stories of Ojibwe knowledge slept, they stirred before Norval’s pictures. Their voices and power reawakened and struck her to her core.
As an art student, I was attracted to Morrisseau’s colours, the calligraphy of his lines, and the apparent innate design sense with which he placed his figures on the picture plane. But it was my mother’s reaction to the stories within and behind his images that compelled me to study and reflect on the content of his work. His paintings and my mother’s physical and spiritual reverberation to them opened a crack to expose the living tissue of Anishinaabe culture, and I understood in his art an inspiration for my own.
Norval Morrisseau, Thunderbird with Inner Spirit, c.1979, acrylic on canvas, 208.3 x 127 cm, McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg.
The Morrisseau picture my mother was afraid of is no longer in my possession. It was a portrait of a thunderbird, a being of mystical, transformative force that the artist often used to represent himself, and a central motif in his library of images and essences. In my memory, the print was quite similar to Thunderbird with Inner Spirit, c.1978, in which the manitou rises in a womb-like channel, a many-layered capsule that is bordered on one side by water and on the other by land: Nibi and Aki, the two great givers of life. The bird is resplendent with colour and contained power, his massive chest and wings poised as if waiting to be spread, as if waiting to be born. Here indeed is the unfolding spirit of the great Anishinaabe.
I never had a chance to talk with Norval Morrisseau about his paintings. But in 2003, I met Daphne Odjig (1919–2016) when she was living in Penticton, British Columbia. Always a prolific artist, by then an elderly lady, she had set up a small table by the sofa in her living room, where she drew every day in graphite and coloured pencil. Though she had spent her whole life creating pictures, she told me that only as a mature woman had she realized the roots of her art. It was born in the rocks and rivers of Northern Ontario and emerged from the ancient Algonkian pictorial traditions of the Canadian Shield.
Besides her work, and because I asked, she talked about her relationship with Norval Morrisseau. In the 1970s, she, Morrisseau, and five other artists—Alex Janvier (1935–2024), Jackson Beardy (1944–1984), Eddy Cobiness (1933–1996), Carl Ray (1943–1978), and Joseph Sánchez (b.1948)—established the first collective of Indigenous painters in Canada. They called themselves Professional Native Indian Artists Inc. but quickly became known as the Indian Group of Seven. Though she told me many stories of those days, what resonated most was what she didn’t say: that her gender came to be an underlying dynamic in the group.
As the only woman among the seven, Daphne did a lot of what we might call women’s labour—organizing, coordinating, and archiving the achievements and aspirations of the individual painters and the collective. This work was unsung. But it helped bring the Indian Group of Seven to public attention and, in the years that followed, opened a professional path for many other young Indigenous artists. It was unpaid work, and it went mostly unnoticed by Morrisseau in particular, who was already a celebrated name in the Canadian art world when the group formed. He had no interest in organizing or hosting their meetings, or in managing the public relations outreach that had begun to attract curators and collectors to Daphne’s Winnipeg studio/gallery, where the group met. But she took on these tasks with vigour and determination. And in the meantime, she painted. And painted. And created a remarkable visual history of our people. Her eyes shone when she spoke of those years.
Odjig and Morrisseau were two great pillars in Anishinaabe visual art. Like Nibi and Aki, they were there when, in the latter half of the twentieth century, it emerged from a long period of repression. Today, fifty years after the peak of their influence and celebrity, we find ourselves in a new period of explosive Indigenous cultural production. Yet the legacies of Odjig and Morrisseau continue to define and sustain our enduring attachment to our narratives, our art history, and our place in contemporary art. Their paintings and stories established the Anishinaabek as a foundational North American culture. Their individual artistic journeys intertwined to trace a trajectory that stands apart from, yet alongside, the story of Canada, challenging forever our maturity, self-knowledge, and spiritual vision of the world.