Fifth Business – 20”x 20” (51cm x 51cm) oil on gallery width panel (2025)
This painting is currently located at the Koyman Galleries
The title refers to Robertson Davies’ novel, the first of the Deptford trilogy, and is featured here, sandwiched between Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale and a potted spider plant. This painting is an exploration of directional lines of power: the stripes and striations in the variegated spider plant and the textured pot it inhabits, the cast shadows, the ripples of light from the wine bottle, the wood grain, the sedimentary rock, the pages of the books, the stem of the wineglass; they all point towards a geographical and spiritual base: Ontario.
It is rocks and birds and lush greenery (represented here by a healthy house plant), it is the rich earth to grow the grapes to produce the wine; much like the environment from which ideas, literature and art spring.
Margaret Laurence is included in my love note to Ontario because, in her work as a writer-in-residence at the University of Toronto and Chancellor of Trent University, she contributed to the “soil” of Ontarian creativity and scholarship.
The rock is also not native to Ontario, but was chosen for its warm colour palette (the orange/pink/cream to echo the red Handmaid’s Tale book jacket, the warm dark wood, standing in contrast to the chilled gold Riesling and the green wall and plant) and for its striations, reminiscent of the Canadian Shield – as seen through a car window while driving north on Highway 7.