Very few people encountered in the course of life endure to become permanent fixtures in one’s mind. Such a person, whom I met when I was a young lawyer starting out in 1975, was a man who became my client for the next seven years. He was Norval Morrisseau.

This reflection on his enormous accomplishments and remarkable career comes almost twenty years after his death and fifty years after the beginning of my collaboration with him. It consists of some little-known facts and personal impressions offered as a modest addition to the already extensive accounts of Morrisseau’s life.

There is a vast gap today between the portrait of Morrisseau as a quasi-mystical artistic giant—the unassailable repository of his people’s culture and beliefs—and the kind of recognition he received from the artistic establishment in the early 1970s, a period characterized by widespread ignorance of and indifference to Indigenous art. Though Morrisseau was used to being regarded with the wonderment that his art instilled, the larger-than-life qualities attributed to him were only a small part of his public persona, or of the news coverage he received. Far more attention was paid to his often troubled life.

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For the next seven years, and particularly between 1975 and 1978, Morrisseau’s interests often conflicted with those of the individuals, institutions, and businesses interested in acquiring or benefiting from his art. As I came to know Morrisseau more closely, I was better able to anticipate his attitudes and reactions to these stresses. We communicated primarily by letter and telephone, with some meetings in my office and several visits to cities outside Toronto, depending upon his whereabouts.

I was quickly taken up with the everyday practicalities of the work he generated. I did not pretend to “understand” his art, or its “meaning,” or his inspiration for it, but I always felt an element of genius present in his paintings, and I sensed in them a unique force that was rare in any art I had seen, at any time. I felt this from the beginning, when I was first shown some of his paintings while preparing for the Kenora trial.

Judge McLennan’s prediction about the trajectory of his career proved correct as Morrisseau became recognized and celebrated both in Canada and abroad. Unfortunately, at the peak of his artistic power and physical strength, he was also capable of devastating episodes of alcoholic excess, during which his painting would often stop and his life would devolve into chaos, making things extremely difficult for those close to him. In 1975, he became estranged from his wife, Harriet Kakegamic, and was separated from his many children, and in the years that followed, he generally kept to himself or lived with male companions or helpers. He and Harriet eventually divorced in January 1977.

A tall man, he had a commanding presence that drew all attention to him the moment he entered a room. He was inherently reserved, but also magnetic, brooding, able to extemporize with long lines of folklore or to philosophize as the mood, the audience, or the occasion demanded. Never one to take himself too seriously, he once wryly described indulging in flights of rhetoric for the benefit of the “blue rinse ladies” who lapped it up and bought his art. Socially he could be shy and reticent, and he was disinclined to make small talk. He was polite and had innate good manners, never giving offence in public situations unless drunk. He was articulate, with a gentle, deep voice, distinctly accented by what I assume to have been the intonations of his Ojibwe language. He was conversant with the Bible and biblical characters and much given to invoking and describing the myths and cosmology of his native culture. He accepted his artistic gift and was comfortable with the celebrity it had brought him.

He trusted few people but nonetheless gravitated in the later years of my watch to forming fleeting relationships with a number of young men whose companionship and professed business skills made them, from Morrisseau’s point of view, useful adjuncts in his relentless need for cash flow—often through spontaneous sales of his art in random and short-lived markets. When he was drunk, he was easily taken advantage of, encouraging those eager to acquire his paintings to value them more by their relation to the price of a bottle than their intrinsic worth. Northern Ontario was then, and remains, the repository of untold numbers of his paintings, most of which will likely never come to light.

With this new-found acclaim, it became possible for the first time to maintain a fixed address for him, which in turn made it easier for galleries and publishers to obtain permissions and copyright licences to reproduce his art in books, magazines, cards, posters, and other media. Requests from international art galleries and museums—for solo shows or the inclusion of single works in wider exhibitions—became more frequent.

Negotiating gallery contracts for shows or consignment sales in Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, and beyond was a major part of my responsibilities. For a while, I set the prices for his paintings, relying upon an acquired familiarity with his market. At the time, his works fetched prices ranging from the hundreds to several thousands of dollars. To eliminate the feast-or-famine nature of his finances, and to encourage him to live within his means, I opened a bank account for him. It became the repository of a large part of his income derived from galleries, royalties, institutions, and collectors.

Given the value of his paintings and their market appeal, there inevitably arose disputes and even some litigation as people tried to acquire his works for inadequate compensation. Like all artists, then and now, he got into more conflicts over prices and payment than any other issue.

In those years, Morrisseau had a propensity to move around from place to place. When not in Toronto for exhibitions, he spent most of his time in Beardmore, Thunder Bay, and Winnipeg. When he was living in Winnipeg for some years, my law office became a small collection and distribution centre for his paintings. This led to a more efficient method of dealing with galleries that wished to hold exhibitions, and it lessened the risk of works being unavailable at the crucial time. Some of his finest paintings passed through the office, to the surprise and great curiosity of those who caught a glimpse of the odd masterpiece leaning against a wall or sticking out of a closet.

We met quite frequently, especially in the first three years, which afforded me opportunities to observe Norval at work. The process was pure, unrehearsed, instinctive creation: from mind and eye to paint and brush, and then directly to paper or canvas, without the slightest hesitation or reworking of form or imagery. In retrospect, it reminds me of the film Amadeus (1984), where the anguished Salieri describes Mozart’s ability to set down his music on paper, without amendment, as if it came straight from God to the page.

On one occasion in 1975, while staying in my apartment, Morrisseau started to draw in the evening, with a pen and black ink on a white board, sitting on the couch. He was still there when I woke up the next morning, but by that time, he had a fully completed drawing, known today as Obsessions. He gave it to me as a gift, and it hangs on the wall beside me to this day. His pen never hesitated, and he never spilled a drop of ink. It was just, simply, done.

The later 1970s was also the period when his finest ​​serigraphs and limited-edition prints were produced. They seem to have had a short production lifespan, however, as few, if any, prints were made after the 1980s. Morrisseau signed these professional serigraphs in pencil with his longhand signature in English and no Cree syllabics appearing at all. The number of each print was indicated as numerator and the size of the edition as denominator: for example, 3/56 meant it was the third print of fifty-six. In my personal view, the most professional and striking prints of that time came from Winnipeg’s Great Grasslands Graphics, owned and operated by Robert Checkwitch. These usually were impressed with a company seal and sometimes displayed a small green butterfly mark in the margin. There were other high-quality prints as well from the Triple K Cooperative, in Red Lake, Ontario, a venture of the Kakegamic family, to which Morrisseau was related by marriage.

At least Time Canada had the generosity to return the painting to Morrisseau, pay his commission fee, and run, in the very issue in question, a two-page spread on his art and burgeoning fame. The Great Flood was later completed by Norval at full size (9 x 2.4 metres) and acquired by a private collector, and both works later appeared in books and other publications.

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In August 1977, the Pollock Gallery held an exhibition that, for the first time, displayed one of Morrisseau’s greatest achievements: six large canvas panels depicting a transformation that gave the work its title, Man Changing into Thunderbird. Four of the panels had been painted in Winnipeg and were shipped directly to the gallery in finished form. The last two were painted by Morrisseau in his room at Toronto’s Sheraton Hotel on Queen Street, a day or two before the opening. I was at the gallery when the paintings arrived and can clearly picture Morrisseau crouched beneath the last two panels, signing off on them with his Cree syllabics signature. What struck me as utterly remarkable was that in executing a work of six large canvases—requiring a subtle, fluid progression of image, theme, and complexity—he was able to complete the last two panels without visual reference to the preceding four. He finished this masterpiece, under severe time constraint, relying entirely on the strength of his imagination and memory.

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Somewhere, for me, in the entirety of the memories to which this reminiscence has given rise lies Morrisseau’s character and personality. He was unlike any man I have ever known, then or since. He was invariably the focus of attention, always at centre stage; the artistic genius; the prolific and spontaneous creator of wondrous imagery; the acknowledged founder of the Woodland School of Art; the darling of a fawning art world; the easily duped and sometimes indifferent target of covetous gallerists and collectors; the conflicted husband and father; the generous spendthrift; the troubled soul who so often sought release from his demons through drink—but he was always, even in his darkest moments, the towering and enduring inspiration for countless artists and followers among his people. Through it all he persisted and successfully integrated these disparate aspects of his personality into a largely functional whole—one that acknowledged not only his fundamental gifts, nature, and character, but also the roles with which he clearly identified, with pride: a shaman, a spiritual being, a teacher of the Ojibwe.