Exanimo (From the Heart), 1954

Estate of the Artist
Mr. and Mrs. E.R.S. McLaughlin, Oshawa
Private Collection, 26 April 2004

75th Annual Exhibition, Royal Canadian Academy; travelling to Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 19 November-19 December 1954, no. 54 (loaned by Mr. and Mrs. E.R.S. McLaughlin)
Towards the Spiritual in Canadian Art, Varley Art Gallery, Markham, 9 March-31 July 2005

Michel Seuphor, Dictionary of Abstract Painting, New York, 1957, page 84
Towards the Spiritual in Canadian Art, "Markham News" (2005)

Exanimo (From the Heart) is one of the few works in Canadian art which concerns the spiritual life of the individual and one of the only works in which an artist indicates that women can be completely changed with the aid of an outside power. Over the woman's figure, to indicate her transformation, Alexandra Luke carved the outline of a phoenix. In front of the woman is the Goddess, who has helped her achieve her new being. 

Luke's unusual choice of medium, oil paint mixed with Swedish putty, which she applied to the rough side of a masonite board to achieve texture, was an inventive one for the time. She continued to experiment widely later in her work, adding sand to the medium, using birchbark, leather and string, and mixing crayon, watercolour, ink and collage on different papers, as well as trying different effects in her paintings.

In this work, Luke was likely thinking about the mythology, psychology and mysticism that permeated the work of artists in the New York abstract expressionist movement whom she regarded as models in her progress towards abstraction, such as Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko.

For Luke, as for many of these artists, making art was a way to live spiritually, a way of contemplating and finding pleasure in the self, welcoming what comes from without and rejoicing in what lies within, to paraphrase a passage she marked in her copy of Michel Seuphor's Dictionary of Abstract Painting. 

She would have been well aware of her situation as a woman within the male-dominated group of Painters Eleven, but being an outsider due to gender did not phase her. She recognized the transformative power inherent in creating an alter ego in which she was no longer Margaret McLaughlin, but "Alexandra Luke." In the struggle to create her artistic identity, she would have recognized the help she had received from a higher power which she visualized as "the Goddess." Possibly Luke thought here of System and Dialectics of Art (1937) by John Graham, one of the figures who dominated the New York abstract art scene in the late 1930s. In the book, Graham writes about artists having to invent themselves spiritually in creating a work of art. This aspect of painting was of great importance to Luke, and she made many notes on the idea in her notebooks, owned books on the subject and often titled her works in a way which indicated her interest. 

In the 1940s, Graham explored myth and primitivism in North American art, a subject Luke may have found sympathetic to her way of viewing abstraction as an essentially spiritual and philosophical activity, aligned with religion in its search for meaning. Exanimo has a subtitle on its verso, From the Heart, words Luke would have felt described her own feelings in making art. 

Although she could not strictly be called a feminist, Luke's use in this painting of the goddess figure indicates that she was well aware of women's issues and matriarchal terms of reference. The painting is of unique importance to her oeuvre and Canadian art. 

We extend our thanks to Joan Murray, Canadian art historian, for contributing the preceding essay.