Distance, culture and community in Labrador
Terra Magna Labrador JC Roy, edited by Christina Roy Breakwater Books $59.95 208 pages
This is not meant as a guidebook, as in an instructive travel text that will get you around Labrador, but in essence that’s exactly what is. It brings you deeply within the landscape of Labrador, consistently resonating with its title — “Terra Magna” means “the great.” It’s Jean Claude Roy’s companion to “Fluctuat Nec Mergitur” (2012) which contain a painting from every community on the island of Newfoundland. That road trip ended with a painting of Roy en route to the St. Barbe ferry terminal.
This volume includes writing from Boyd Chubbs (poetry, in this case), Gary Baikie, and Tshaukuech (Elizabeth) Penshue. All are translated into Français, Innu-aimun, and Inuttitut, including Chubbs’ poems. The text and imagery is ordered geographically, from The Southeast, to The Interior, to The North Coast, and then Battle Harbour. There are annotated maps on the interior covers, and some journalistic sketches, such as “Arctic Char Drying,” as a kind of illustrative footnote.
In the introduction, which is also translated into four languages, Roy gives some insight into the process of bringing these books together. The first challenge was, what was a community? For his travels on the island, he used his governmentissued road map as a starting point but also “found abandoned communities, resettled-but-with-summer-resident communities, and some communities such as Rooms which had simply dropped off the map.”
Once in Labrador he faced challenges of distance, culture, and again the concept of community. This governmentissued map officially listed 29 places. “But the real story was elsewhere.” Labradorians are often migratory, because their food sources are. Historically, their needs shifted seasonally (fish in the summer, firewood in the winter) and with the trade routes set by European posts. Newfoundland families fished regularly from coves they held as a second home. (The book closes with an index of 62 communities. Many are spelled differently by language, or officialdom; Roy simply went with the ones he learned first.)
“The whole country was crisscrossed with an invisible and constantly changing network … As the framework of formal settlement faded away, I felt a greater freedom. I often sensed people who had passed before me. Sometimes, one of their descendants stopped to chat, to bring me a glass of cold water on a blazing hot day in Shetshatshiu, or tell to me the name of every peak and valley in my painting of an arm of the sea near Torngat National Park.”
Roy frequently encounters a multi-layered, multi-generational relationship between people and their environment. “My body feels overjoyed when I am on the land because the beauty is unbelievable,” writes Penashue. “I want to look around everywhere that I cannot get enough of it. I see the water and trees. I see all the animals … This is where they live … This is where I was born and raised. The land was the first thing my body touched when I was born.”
Roy describes Labrador as “dramatic, stunning, hugely varied, and a gift to a painter like me.” He always wanted to paint big, but couldn’t always cart a large canvas with him, especially when the transport was a small plane. Roy also didn’t work much in the winter, pleading age against working en plein air under those circumstances.
Along with the full section on Battle Harbour, some places like Sheshatshiu, Eagle River, Port Hope Simpson and Red Bay are painted more than once. Other works are pure scenic iconography: “Labrador Iceberg.”
“L’anse-au-clair” shows a circling clustering line of white, yellow and green one- or two-storey houses studded by a church, with thick scuds of dun and pink under a cream icing sky. In “First Frost, Eagle River” the boulder-pocked water pours quick and placid beneath a fluming grey sky. At the centre of “Postville” a coastal boat docks against a curl of beach and hunched dark mountains. “Rose Island,” beside Gary Baikie’s explanation why “Sallikuluk is a sacred place for Inuit,” unfolds in incredible blues. The Battle Harbour pieces include some loose airy watercolours. Other pages show stages and cemeteries, tent encampments, snack shops and ATVS., the chickens at Birch Lake Farm.
And arcing over it all — even the land of the Big Skies has never seen such skies. They have a push, a flow, a counter-intuitive solidity.
The oversize book isn’t a 4 x 8 canvas, but it still gives a sense of scale. Most compositions are a wedge of foreground, a heft of sky, and energy everywhere, applied and embedded. The paint is in tendrils and cascades, patterned, hieroglyphic. “Writing about other cultures brings with it the risk of making errors of interpretation,” Roy writes. “Paintings are also a form of interpretation.” And these are also stunning, as we have come to expect from this artist. Labrador may well be a gift to a painter like Roy. But he is a gift to us.