Soaring artist

Billy Merasty, who plays The Old Man in the world premiere production of Marie Clements' Copper Thunderbird, stands in front of Norval Morrisseau's Observations of the Astral World. (National Arts Centre English Theatre)

He’s a major painter who created a new genre of First Nations art. He’s a Grand Shaman of the Anishinabe (Ojibwa) people and a member of the Order of Canada. He has fought a lifelong battle with the bottle, spent time in jail, lived on the street and once asked to be paid for his paintings with cocaine.

Norval Morrisseau, now in his 70s, is a colossus among Canadian artists whose biography demands a canvas as broad and colour-drenched as one of his own works. The National Arts Centre is aiming to provide just that with Copper Thunderbird, a big new play about Morrisseau premiering in Ottawa this month.

The production, directed by NAC English Theatre artistic director Peter Hinton from a script by Vancouver Métis playwright Marie Clements, uses a cast of nine performers — three of them playing Morrisseau — to tell the painter’s roller-coaster life story. Employing large doses of the surreal and the absurd, Clements has set out to capture some of the many facets of the artist once christened (by the French press, no less) “the Picasso of the North.”

“I could probably write 10 more plays about Norval Morrisseau,” the gentle-voiced writer admits in a telephone interview from Ottawa, where she has been watching rehearsals. “His life as an artist and a human being is extraordinary in its scale and its passion.”

In her years of researching and writing the play, Clements has come across countless anecdotes about the artist. “It’s like he’s been everywhere,” she says. “You say that you’re doing a piece on Norval Morrisseau and everybody has a story about him, whether it was in Thunder Bay or Winnipeg, or Paris or L.A. or Vancouver. And he was very different things to different people.”

Befitting his elusive nature, details of Morrisseau’s birth date and place are uncertain, but most sources have settled on 1932, at or near the Sand Point Reserve north of Thunder Bay, Ont. A self-taught artist, he quit school after Grade 4 and worked as a miner, until a meeting with young Toronto art dealer Jack Pollock led to his breakthrough solo exhibition at Pollock’s gallery in 1962. Morrisseau’s unique style, adapted from traditional Anishinabe pictographs and designs, came to be dubbed the Woodland School of painting and inspired scores of other First Nations artists.

However, at the same time that his reputation and influence were growing, Morrisseau’s personal life spiralled downward. The artist, who had prophetically named one of his early pictures Self Portrait Devoured by Demons, left the Pollock gallery in the early 1980s and began painting exclusively for a Toronto mobster in exchange for drugs and booze. Eventually, he ditched his unsavory patron and drifted across Canada and the U.S., ending up on the street in Vancouver. His descent finally ended when he met a street kid, Gabor Vadas, and took him under his wing. The pair helped each other, Vadas becoming the artist’s adopted son and business manager, while Morrisseau overcame his vices and went on to enjoy a creative rejuvenation in the '90s.

Playwright Marie Clements. (Laird Mackintosh/National Arts Centre)

Clements’s play takes its title from the Anishinabe name given to Morrisseau as a young man by a medicine woman, which became his nom de plume. Clements feels the “copper thunderbird” is also an appropriate symbol for Morrisseau’s soaring achievement in the face of many obstacles, from racism and abuse (he was one of the many victims of the residential school system) to the colour barrier in Canadian professional art and his destructive addictions.

“Copper Thunderbird is a very powerful animal to take on,” says Clements. “I don’t know of any other artist that has risen despite all odds to become what he is. There were many things in his life that threatened to bring him down, but he was able to keep getting up and rise higher from those experiences.”

In Anishinabe mythology, the thunderbird is also a go-between, which is reflected in Morrisseau’s art and beliefs. As a painter, he introduced First Nations traditions to contemporary art. Spiritually, he combined his Anishinabe and Christian upbringing with the “soul travel” concepts of the Eckankar religious philosophy. Recognized as a Grand Shaman, or spiritual leader, in 1986, he has described himself as a “shaman-artist” whose works seek to unite the physical and spiritual world.

Clements, who says her Morrisseau play is “definitely not a Biography Channel representation of his life,” dives into the interior existence of the artist — quite literally, at times, as some of the scenes are symbolically set underwater. The three Morrisseaus, who appear together and interact, are a variation on the Holy Trinity and they also embody three stages in his life: The Boy (Herbie Barnes), The Young Man (Kevin Loring) and The Old Man (Billy Merasty). They are joined by six other actors playing a wide and wild cast of characters, including the artist’s Cree wife, Harriet, Pablo Picasso, a Greek chorus of Toronto gallery patrons, a bevy of California bimbos (from Morrisseau’s L.A. sojourn) and a trio of tough-talking garbage-dump bears.

The play also uses images and colours characteristic of Morrisseau’s work, and Hinton’s production promises to look like a live version of one of the artist’s paintings.

“We have a huge white set” designed by Mary Kerr, says the director, to suggest the white walls of Pollock’s gallery. “And also, it’s the white of the blank canvas, a world of possibilities that the painter creates upon.” Against that canvas, Kerr’s costumes and John Webber’s lighting will splash vivid hues à la Morrisseau. Meanwhile, video segments designed by Tim Matheson will convey the artist’s drawing technique — in particular, the thick black “power lines” of Morrisseau’s paintings, which can either separate or unite characters and objects.

Hinton, who has worked with Clements previously on Burning Vision — an award-winning play about a First Nations connection to the bombing of Hiroshima — says he was thrilled when she approached him with Copper Thunderbird. The play had initially been commissioned by Montreal’s Les Ondinnok Theatre several years ago, but the company didn’t have the resources to mount a full production.

Hinton, meanwhile, had taken over as head of the National Arts Centre’s English theatre branch and was seeking a new aboriginal play for his all-Canadian first season. “I think [Clements is] one of our most important writers working in English Canada,” says the veteran director, who has a track record of premiering new plays.

Hinton hopes Morrisseau will be able to attend Copper Thunderbird’s May 25 opening. The elderly artist suffers from Parkinson’s disease and lives in a seniors’ residence in Nanaimo, B.C., but Hinton says he’s “incredibly strong” and was able to attend the National Gallery of Canada’s major exhibition of his work last year.

Whether or not he makes the journey to Ottawa again, Morrisseau has already had a preview of the play courtesy of Clements, who visited him earlier this spring and read him the script. She found him “a gentle soul” at peace with his brilliant but stormy career.

“We tend to want to place older people in an idealized light, and take away some of the colour of their lives,” she says, “but what’s quite remarkable about him is that he’s not apologetic for his life. There’s such a feeling that he did do what he was supposed to do here.”

Copper Thunderbird runs May 22 to June 9 at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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