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On the evening of April 17, 2009, Dr. Elizabeth McLuhan gave a public lecture at the aig+c which focused on the art of Norval Morrisseau and its roots in Anishinabe traditions. Dr. McLuhan, former curator at the Thunder Bay Art Gallery, was responsible for the acclaimed 1984 exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Norval Morrisseau and the Emergence of the Image Makers, and with Tom Hill, authored the book of the same title. The centerpiece of Dr. McLuhan’s talk was the monumental painting of 1983, Androgyny, an acrylic on canvas, which now graces Rideau Hall in Ottawa. This painting is 20 feet wide and 12 feet high, a major undertaking and an astonishing accomplishment by any measure. 

No doubt, when Morrisseau began this painting he recognized that it would encapsulate and summarize many of his beliefs and the accumulated wisdom of his artistic career and of his life to that date. So we see elements of the Ojibwe cosmology, of Norval’s dream theories, and of his faith in Eckankar. The viewer will be struck by the bold flat colour, backgrounded mostly by primaries, red, yellow, blue, with shapes outlined in black. The space of the painting is divided into three layers: sky (heaven), earth, and water (underworld). Straddling the line between Sky and Earth are the figures of Men. At the exact vertical centre of the painting is the figure of the Thunderbird, hovering over nine human shapes. Equidistant from the center are two trees, one on the left and one on the right, which help to subdivide the composition into four equal rectangular areas. The subdivisions both vertical and horizontal, and the displacement and number of the “actors” in the scene, both animal and human, are  designed to illustrate the cosmic principles underlying creation and to show the viewer mankind’s relationship to nature, to the spirits, and to each other.

The nine figures standing beneath the wings of the Thunderbird recall the nine personalities stipulated by Eckankar as constituting humankind. The nine fish swimming at the bottom center of the painting may also have a similar numerological function, but they surely point to one of Morrisseau’s dream revelations whose lesson is: “as above, so below” (1997: 17).2 Similarly, the division of the painted universe into three layers is congruent with both Ojibwe and Eckankar descriptions of the cosmos as tripartite and with its mirror image in the human psyche. The deployment of colour is determined in part by myth and story, both aboriginal and Christian – the earth being red by virtue of being made of beaver’s blood, the sky being yellow references the heavenly domes of the Byzantines – but it is also an expression of Morrisseau’s belief in the healing power of colour. The painting is a plan, a diagram, not unlike the sacred birch bark scrolls of the Midiwewin society, which transmits sacred and secret or occult information, but which also seeks to elicit, through its intense colour and figurative symbolism, an actual physical reaction – even a cure.