Cat's Cradle
"Cat's Cradle" by James D. Campbell, Spring 2007, pp. 50-54
It is a mild midsummer evening in Montreal. In his second-floor studio, Harold Klunder is deeply immersed in making art. Catching him off guard as he works on a new painting entitled The Unknowable Secrets of the World, 2006 (Self-Portrait) (2004–06) reminds me of something from childhood. As Klunder moves the paint around on the canvas with precision and fluid finesse, shapes beget shapes and ribbons of paint cross and cross again, circumscribing interior spaces filled to bursting with dollops of tube-squeezed pigment. Eloquent passages swoop, loop, feint and parry until a certain threshold of denseness is reached. Then, just when you think he is finished, Klunder starts over again.
It was like a new-physics version of cat’s cradle, the children’s string game that serves as a fitting metaphor for Klunder’s ritualistic fleshing-out of his paintings.
I had seen The Unknowable Secrets of the World, 2006 (Self-Portrait) in its earliest state. At that time, a large charcoal drawing of a head (a self-portrait) adorned the otherwise bare canvas. Ninety per cent of Klunder’s paintings begin with a figurative drawing that is more a conceptual amulet than a fixed image that he intends to follow through to completion. Klunder has spent years on certain paintings. On several occasions in his Flesherton, Ontario, studio I saw a large vertical painting, Sleep or Chaos (Self- Portrait 2006) (1988–2006), that looked as though it had a hundred pounds of paint encrusted on it. The painting just kept on growing, Harold said. It was sold last November at Klunder’s show at Clint Roenisch Gallery in Toronto; when I asked Stephen Smart, a Toronto lawyer and collector who is a long-time follower of Klunder’s work, about the Roenisch show, he was quick to describe Sleep or Chaos as a painting that had “spent years in an incubator.” Clint Roenisch added that, 18 years in the making, it was the anchor of the show.
The Song of the Harlequin and the Turtledove 2006 (2004–06), which looks like a palimpsest of layered string figures, was another work in the show—“harlequin” is a name given to a rare opal patterned with brightly coloured diamond shapes. Klunder builds his paintings more like a weaver or seamstress than a flinger or dripper of paint. He is methodical. Even when the paint licks become furious, a painting is not allowed to spin out of orbit and come undone. String games span histories, styles, ethnographies and even cosmologies. They are, as Kurt Vonnegut wrote in his novel Cat’s Cradle, “as free-form as an amoeba,” as amorphous as the human unconscious itself. Klunder’s paintings are comparable. They change in front of your eyes like shards of Albertan ammonite.
His work combines a childlike simplicity in its approach to colour with a fully adult iconographic complexity that is phantasmic, talismanic, even erotic. As I stand in front of Klunder’s Contour Map of the Human Soul (Self-Portrait, 2006) (2004–06), I recall not only the Isenheim Altarpiece and Pollock’s Blue Poles (1952) but, more tellingly perhaps, the Ojibwa artist Norval Morrisseau’s six-panel painting Man Changing into Thunderbird (1977). That painting, like Klunder’s, seems to expel ancestral spirits from its hectic insides like so much water from a trough. In other words, they are pure aura.
Klunder is a shamanic artist too. Although some would say that he works within a specific painting tradition (late modernist abstraction), he always manages to materialize outside it. When everyone was praising him for his abstracts, he told me, “I consider myself a figurative artist.” And he is. The truth is that Klunder cleaves to a far older tradition, the tradition of oil painting itself, which has survived all the tumultuous changes in the art world with full promise intact. But his transformation over the decades, from pure abstraction to something more autobiographical, has been nearly seamless and argues the case for the cohesive nature of his project.
There is a remarkable affinity between Klunder’s work and Norval Morrisseau’s “Woodland” or “Legend” painting, now known as Anishinabe painting. Klunder’s stick-like underdrawing reminds us of the sacred birchbark scroll markings and pictographic spirit renderings that inspired Morrisseau. More telling still is the way Klunder alternately conceals and reveals his subject matter, a strategy that relates to Morrisseau’s so-called “x-ray vision.” Morrisseau painted what he saw inside animals and human beings, outlining their inner transformative power in markings that bring to mind a magnified Adolph Gottlieb pictographic sequence. So too does Klunder. The “x-ray” technique effectively eviscerates the figure, disclosing its extravagant insides, invisible entrails, “spirit-guts.” Klunder often delineates his forms with sinuously painted long black brush strokes that serve to both divide and unite his iconographic markings into sets and subsets. The vertebrae in a given painting slowly unveil themselves as we read it, forming an elastic spine that both stabilizes and animates the work.
Klunder was born in the Netherlands in 1943. Hitler had moved against Holland in the blitzkrieg of 1940 and the Dutch had suffered enormous casualties. Twello, the nearest town to the family farm where Klunder grew up, was hard hit; the artist remembers his mother talking about people foraging for vegetables for the supper table. He immigrated to Canada with his parents and nine siblings in February, 1952, arriving in Halifax Harbour aboard the S.S. Zuiderkruis. Moving first to Cape Breton, then to Montreal, the family eventually found employment in market gardening. For eight-year-old Harold, Montreal was forbidding. He remembers narrow streets and blowing snow and uniform grey buildings with small windows, and speaks eloquently of the melancholy and complete anonymity he experienced there.
The artist returned to Montreal six years ago from Flesherton, a small town two and a half hours northwest of Toronto where he maintains a studio. During his many years there with his family (his partner, the artist Catherine Carmichael, their two daughters, Elizabeth and Saskia, and Willem, Klunder’s son from his first marriage), he made a mark on the Toronto art scene. But Klunder has come to see Montreal as an artistic seedbed, a mecca for late modernists like himself. He reveres Borduas, Riopelle and the Automatistes for the “heroism and poignancy” of their project. His return has meant a newfound vitality for his work as well as the companionship of artists like John Heward, Michael Smith and Michael Merrill.
Klunder exhibits his art across the country and interest in his work among Canadian collectors is high at the moment. While he has always been admired by fellow painters, a wider audience has now caught up with the work. Klunder is one of Canada’s few genuine artistic gypsies. Happiest in his Montreal studio with imagination unfettered and brush in flight, he is nonetheless never averse to travelling to head up workshops in Lethbridge, Orangeville, Newfoundland or in Montreal itself, where he teaches at the Visual Arts Centre and will exhibit new work at the McClure Gallery this spring. No painter in Canada is more itinerant—in the older and prouder sense of that word. In this way, he is connected to earlier traditions in Canadian painting; indeed, the Group of Seven could be said to prefigure Klunder’s rambling ways. The Group refused to stay put and famously travelled in pursuit of their own promised land—as does Klunder, even though he paints the furthest thing from conventional landscapes.
Klunder’s work has from an early point referenced a specifically Dutch painting tradition, yet he has always gone his own way. The Unknowable Secrets of the World, 2006 (Self- Portrait) simultaneously invokes de Kooning, Morrisseau, the Cobra group—and Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, whom Klunder once thought of as his favourite artist. Look long and hard at this painting and you will see the matted fur of dead hares and a string of black pearls, à la Chardin, slowly emerge from the backdrop. Klunder is an adept at interrelationship, harmony and counterpoint. Using a primitive line-image of his own face as a sort of psychological rabbit’s foot or fishing lure, he has brought the painting to completion with unbridled joy. I’ve tried to follow the spiral pathways leading back to its genesis—that spare line drawing of Klunder’s own head, the first player’s loop of string, as it were—but failed. The game is too complex to trace back to the moment of its big bang.
Darkness moves fluidly across the surface of all of Harold Klunder’s paintings. It whispers and weaves. But the artist, master alchemist that he is, has successfully translated this restless darkness—his restless darkness—into something that is like a paradigm of light.
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