William Kurelek: The Art of the White Rabbit
Volume 26 Issue 7, 8 & 9 | Posted: September 17, 2012
Often in the summer a song will start bouncing around in my head, usually an archetypal one and I will almost incessantly study the lyrics and wonder what this ‘experience’ will lead to in the way of meaning.
This year it was the Jefferson Airplane song from 1967 White Rabbit with its intriguing juxtaposition of lyrics from the experience of the then new pharmaceutical revolution with Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland images which almost presciently fit together. (see lyrics, page 12)
Then came the William Kurelek art show The Messenger and its accompanying biographical documentary film The Maze, the title of which arose out of his earliest paintings done in the middle 1950s in an effort for the young art student to work out his mental health issues at an English hospital.
Often in the summer a song will start bouncing around in my head, usually an archetypal one and I will almost incessantly study the lyrics and wonder what this ‘experience’ will lead to in the way of meaning.
This year it was the Jefferson Airplane song from 1967 White Rabbit with its intriguing juxtaposition of lyrics from the experience of the then new pharmaceutical revolution with Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland images which almost presciently fit together. (see lyrics, page 12)
Then came the William Kurelek art show The Messenger and its accompanying biographical documentary film The Maze, the title of which arose out of his earliest paintings done in the middle 1950s in an effort for the young art student to work out his mental health issues at an English hospital.
The die was cast. I could look at the Kurelek art through the lens of the song lyrics. Do what they call a mytho-poetic analysis of my experience of the two.
MADONNA HOUSE
I spent the summer of 1972 as a twenty-five year old in search of something at Madonna House in Combermere, Ontario. MH, as we called it, was the big mother of Christian intentional communities at the time. It was celebrating its twenty fifth anniversary that year. I was also twenty-five and was at the start of my permanent sophomore complex where I thought I knew something.
My great hero then was the Director of Men at MH, Louis Stoekle who, in my view, should be the one they make a saint rather than his boss at that institution Baroness Catherine De Huek Doherty or ‘The B.’ The Queen Bee in another context. Louis was rendered a saint by putting up with her for 25 years according to my audit.
Don’t get me wrong, I admired The B, even respected her, certainly for what she had accomplished at Madonna House. She was a legend and in her Russian way had little time for intellectuals, even serious ones. I would sit at her table and argue with her at meals. She called me her ‘little’ intellectual and constantly admonished me to fold the wings of my intellect and “let God enfold me in the Wings of His Love.” It was that kind of a summer.
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Louis’s great friend though was the painter William Kurelek who I already knew about as the great Canadian ‘Catholic artist’ although he saw himself more as a craftsman which I could see was more accurate, especially as artists understood themselves in those days.
But there was great talk of Bill Kurelek all that summer and he was given a special evening to give a talk on his work and there was a new film that was being made about him, etcetera. For some reason I missed his evening. It may have been pure sophomoric pique or I may have been in Ottawa for a few days relief from the intensity of the place.
Louis may have been more than Kurelek’s best friend, he may have been his salvation. Especially with his mental health issues, the likes of which I had seen in other artist friends of similar temperament. Louis was easily the most even tempered, happy-minded, healthy individual of my Catholic acquaintance. Our family had known him in Whitehorse in the 1950s where Madonna House had a community house.
Now forty years later, that film they were making on Kurelek from 1969 has come out – or maybe it is a different one – but if you wish to make deeper sense of William Kurelek and his life and work, this film, The Maze holds the key.
Of course, there is this major retrospective show of his work, currently at the Greater Victoria Art Gallery until September 3, that everyone is talking about and has great persistent popularity. The Messenger is the well-curated experience of his work but without The Maze it is easy to miss the meaning of what you are seeing.
Catholic journalist Steve Weatherbe has written a review of sorts of the show but it is too plain he has not seen the film.
CATHOLICISM
As a Catholic journalist myself, I would say that Kurelek’s conversion to Catholicism seems almost incidental, a natural perhaps necessary development for the fulfilment of his talent. Too much has been made of it. The Maze focuses on the emergence of his deeper vision out of the mental health hell that drove him into the hospital in England and deeper into his art as his salvation.
It wasn’t his Catholicism that Kurelek clung to so much as his art and craft that saw him through. Catholicism should be seen almost as a handy framework, as a system that a burgeoning consciousness requires to move beyond the individualistic stage of development.
Catholicism has provided a communal framework for many artists, including Kurelek’s earliest hero, James Joyce, the Irish writer and so-called apostate.
Even this earlier mental health period was part of his breaking free to have the artist’s freedom for self-realization. The vine needs such support to get off the ground and break free and become what it must be and must yield.
The significant aspect of Kurelek’s mental health struggles, which he never fully moved beyond, was that his treatment was pre-pharmaceutical. Nowadays they might have given him a supply of happy pills and he might not have painted at all.
Very little of his subject matter is ultimately religious. It is more plainly apocalyptic which was written early into his family history, cultural conditioning and temperamental nature and as such a necessary aspect of his emergent journey. He borrowed from Christianity easily recognized apocalyptic imagery for his own artistic purposes, all the purer for remaining all but unconscious to himself.
He took it all literally rather than bother to go near the humanistic tradition of understanding which he openly eschewed as pretty well futile. Catholicism provided a convenient alter ego for his work. In those days especially, it was over and against the world and the haven of all sorts of right-wing cranks.
Besides, Kurelek’s ‘religion’ is much too primitive and naive to be convincing and deliberately so. It is a prop that suited his early rejection of the folly of the world. After all he came out of a Ukrainian Orthodoxy in every sense of the word, which is not very far removed in its own oppressive communalism from the Catholicism of his time of conversion in 1957.
Kurelek’s model for rejection of the world in that time would be the monk Thomas Merton who also took the Madonna House pilgrim path – it was called Friendship House then and it was ‘The B’ who made him accept his vocation to the priesthood. A great artist must find the mode to fulfil his talent and this recent public recognition accepts Kurelek’s fulfilment of that gift and promise.
From his interviews in The Maze and its revelation of his careful consideration of his concepts and language, Kurelek emerges as a complex seeker rather than an intellectual teacher such as Merton was.
THE TRUE ARTIST TEMPERAMENT
You don’t have to be a religious personality to recognize the psychological truth of the imminent spectre that hangs over every bright blue canvas of William Kurelek. In his naive manner, Kurelek manifests a fierce opposition to the mendacious capriciousness of the commercial false paradise presented even then by corporate Canada. It seems the duty of every true artist to reject all that outright and right from the start.
I have had too many artist roommates at university to miss that proposition. Painters are the strongest propagandists, musicians just float away in their own little never-quite-maturing bubble, assuming the above and somehow hoping it will turn out all right in the end. Painters like to take it straight on. Their very alternative lifestyle is an oblique commentary and critique of conventional capitalist values.
One can easily imagine how in the 1990s Kurelek would have turned on the professional hockey industry with its captivation of youth and indicting a generation to logo identification with the force of its mendacious oppression.
There are any number of paths one can imagine him following, having died so young.
WHITE RABBIT ART
To me the significance of Kurelek’s mental health journey was its pre-pharmeceutical nature. His vision was 19th Century out of Lewis Carroll’s White Rabbit tales. Like Alice, he went chasing rabbits and knew he was bound to fall.
He was trapped down the rabbit hole of the maze of his mind. That first painting The Maze contains all his themes and life-long obsessions (as well as history) in one frame. He went from being very small, a cog in the wheel, a dead rat in the centre of his trapped imagination, to being ten feet tall in the epicentre of the Fall-Redemption Paradigm of Salvation trumpeted by pre-Vatican II Catholicism. He embraced it and it enveloped him.
He died in 1977 of liver cancer probably caused by his constant ingestion of toxic painting substances he used in a non-ventilated bunker he used as a studio for his work.
When he died he was just 50 years old. His oldest child was 12. His son Stephen accompanied the art exhibition to speak in Victoria and also answered questions at The Eric Martin Pavilion theatre on Friday August 17 at the viewing of The Maze. His puzzlement at his father is still apparent, although he is probably the best expert in the sort of understanding the Exhibition requires as background, or foreground. Such is the Mystery of William Kurelek.
If Kurelek had lived the usual average eighty Canadian years, his life could have gone in two directions. Liberation theology was one option given his questioning nature. He died after the first full decade of Vatican II when everyone was finding their feet. Paul VI was still pope and the apocalyptic papacy of John Paul II (and I) was still to come.
More likely he would have slipped down the Rabbit Hole of traditional Catholicism as Madonna House itself has. Never a real intellectual or concerned with actual theology, Kurelek rode the wave of popular Catholicism in its middle brow concepts and practices. An instinctual thinker, he would have clung to an orthodoxy that was safe.
His vision was so intense he burned himself out in its pursuit. His darkness of tone prefigured the coming decades that followed his death. He could have instinctively recognized that the fall of the Iron Curtain of 11/9 (November 1989) was only the first act of the Three Act Play with act two occurring only twelve years later with the incipient collapse of western capitalism at the hands of previously unsuspected perpetrators, Radical Islam of 9/11.
Now we are twelve years further on with the prediction of the Mayan apocalypse capturing the public contemporary marginal imagination. These sorts of instinctive insights was the zone where William Kurelek chose to dwell in his bunker mentality as an artistic antennae to the future.
SUBTERRANEAN YET UNCONSCIOUS
William Kurelek held dear to his bunker mentality in his art and real life. He buried everything. His earliest imagery of what was plaguing his mind was composed of subterranean imagery and he never moved very far from that.
His studio where he worked was an airless, lightless bunker which approximated the incubation process of his imagination. Catholicism of the Roman variety may have aided him survive with its existential salvation effect but it left him stuck at Good Friday, never daring to break out of the tomb into Full Resurrection. A fresh paradigm would be required for that.
His art was conceived in the Rabbit Hole. Like the White Rabbit of Alice in Wonderland he pursued an even more Elusive Figure. In his disturbed and disturbing universe of warnings and messages, the men on the chessboard got up and told you where to go. The mushrooms which dwell in the dark make your mind move very low.
In the created universe of William Kurelek, The White Knight is talking backwards and the Red Queen is on her head. The spectre is present in the double talk of the bureaucrats and the political rhetoric of the leaders – both church and state – neither of which did he completely trust.
He may not have created the greatest art but he adhered to the revolutionary consciousness which is the duty of the true artists to manifest in his work. The great artists are completely successful in making the ‘unconscious’ conscious so as to wrest control from the fates.
The Messenger has drawn across the wide sweep of Canadian society. It is the greatest response ever to Kurelek’s work. It is amazing and puzzling how a confused conservative Canadian public has somehow been attracted to his art. It’s odd juxtaposition of pre-Vatican II Catholicism, social conservative fear, captivating landscape imagery plus a naive message of warning is appealing, intriguing, gripping in its prophetic posture.
Perhaps misunderstood in the past, now he has captured the Canadian art world. Congratulations, William Kurelek.