Migrating, 1978 by Norval Morrisseau

Provenance:
The Pollock Gallery, Toronto
Private Collection, Toronto

Literature:
Lister Sinclair and Jack Pollock, “The Art of Norval Morrisseau”, Toronto, 1979, pages 116, 133, reproduced page 152
Armand Garnet Ruffo, “Norval Morrisseau, Man Changing into Thunderbird”, British Columbia, 2014, pages 196 and 198

In 1976 Norval Morrisseau was introduced by his assistant, Eva Quan, to Eckankar, a belief system that welcomes past lives, dreams and the ability of the soul to travel. As Lister Sinclair states, “Morrisseau has been devoted to Eckankar, a body of teaching which centers around soul travel. Once again he has found a way of systematically using personal visions to liberate his artistic imagination. Once again, for all his uniqueness as an artist and as a human being, he shows himself securely placed in the Indian tradition of a vision–generating shaman.”

As Jack Pollock reflected, “As soon as Morrisseau joined the Eckankar movement in 1976, he gave up drinking altogether. Not an easy task.” The artist’s use of colour became bolder and brighter in his later paintings of the 1970s. As Armand Garnet Ruffo writes of Morrisseau, “a light goes on that illuminates the world and confirms everything taught to him by his grandfather Potan all those years ago. He connects Eckankar’s emphasis on soul travel through the astral planes to his traditional Ojibway teachings.” Morrisseau began to deeply explore myths and legends, reinventing them from the various worlds of the Great Ojibway.

Throughout his career, Morrisseau repeatedly used the same classic, balanced compositional forms. The subjects are often depicted in a pyramid, with a central, symmetrical arrangement of figures or groupings balanced on the ground of the work, as exemplified in “Migrating” of 1978. Painted two years after his exposure to this new belief system, “Migrating” pays homage to the Anishinaabe oral account of the journey of the Ojibwe in the historic 500 year migration from the northeastern shores of North America to the Great Lakes region, as recorded in the prophecies, “The Seven Fires”. Migrating is a delightfully rich composition, complete with important historical and spiritual references and executed in Morrisseau’s quintessentially bright palette of this seminal period.