Pain and Painting: William Kurelek and Autobiography as Mourning

William Kurelek remains one of Canada's best-known painters of prairie farm scenes. This essay considers Kurelek's allegorical paintings and his autobiography, Someone with Me, as acts that chart his movement from a discourse of melancholia to mourning, from art that re-enacts psychic pain to art that records social losses. ********** Above all, because I love memory.--Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning William Kurelek is best known as a Ukranian-Canadian painter who, before his death in 1982, produced landscapes and allegorical scenes of Canadian prairie life. In particular, he focussed on Ukrainian experiences in Canada, depicting what he saw as the Canadian immigrant farming experience in a unique folk-art style that he developed. Born in 1927 on a Saskatchewan farm to Ukrainian immigrant parents, largely self-taught as an artist, Kurelek used his early childhood experiences on the farm and as a young lumberjack to create his most popular work. He remains one of Canada's most popular artists; his work sells for prices almost as high as those produced by the Group of Seven. But this was not what Kurelek considered to be his true life's work. Kurelek had been a patient in two mental hospitals. While in one of them, he converted to Roman Catholicism. In hospital, Kurelek produced many paintings about how he perceived his illness. After his conversion, in a period of only ten years, he painted more than a thousand works warning of the dangers of godlessness and materialism. The allegorical scenes for what he called his sermons were often those of his own life, painted on barn boards he brought back from his childhood home in Saskatchewan. He also published two versions of his autobiography, Someone with Me: one in 1973, as a lengthy version that was a psychological case study for James Maas, a psychology professor at Cornell; the other in 1980, a shorter version for the general public. Kurelek's life, art, and texts were part of what Sidonie Smith has called the autobiographical act of the performative subject (17). For Kurelek, the autobiographical act consists of artistic and phenomenological constructions and repetitions that mutually reinforce each other as they constitute Kurelek's identity. Kurelek's version of his identity includes these elements: a sensitive Ukrainian Canadian boy who is beaten into depression by his father and who is saved by a combination of psychiatry and theology. Now he can live out (and depict) the Canadian immigrant dream of material success. At the same time, he has a spiritual mission: he is a Roman Catholic artist, called by God to warn the world of impending disaster. What is the nature of Kurelek's autobiographical acts, which involve the narration and re-narration, and sometimes literally the painting and the painting-over, of his psychic pain? How do these acts, which combine aspects of the psychological case study with elements of religious confession and Bildungsroman, become part of the narratives of official Canadian multiculturalism? What can the multifaceted nature of Kurelek's need to make autobiography and extend his story into what became a key part of the Canadian national story tell us? To discuss these issues, I extend Michel Foucault's notion of confession as a kind of social pathology to a consideration of Kurelek's autobiographical acts as instances of a melancholia that has been converted to a discourse of mourning. For Kurelek, autobiography as an act of mourning also involves a surmounting of loss that can never be complete, since what is remembered must be made to fit a success discourse that forgets the continuing existence of xenophobia and racism in Canada. Kurelek's position within multiculturalism as an ethnic artist who is a reactionary, whose own work at times mourns the loss of traditional Roman Catholic values, also shows how multiculturalism itself is based on highly selective readings of identity that leave out what might not fit its own discourse of immigrant success. …

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