OUT OF A RUT

OUT OF A RUT Sep 2000, Charles Pachter- Globe & Mail

 

The day after the sad news of Trudeau’s passing began bombarding the media, I boarded an Air Ontario Dash 8 and flew over Manitoulin Island and up to Sault Ste Marie. I needed to get to an undiscovered region of Canada to cheer me up.

Weary from the usual round of social obligations that crop up in the city in the fall, I was glad to have accepted an invitation from Gord and Lynn Dee Eason to come up to Wawa, Ontario (an ll-hour drive north of Toronto on the northeastern shore of Lake Superior) for a tour of their town and the surrounding wilderness areas.

This past summer I’d gotten a call out of the blue from Lynn Dee asking if she and her family could come visit the Moose Factory gallery in Chinatown where I keep my finished art works. She explained that being from Wawa, they’d had some difficulty locating me, but here they were, and could they drop by. She showed up with her husband Gord, a moose biologist with the Ministry of Natural Resources in the Algoma district, their two kids, an aunt and a nephew. Much to my surprise they fell in love with a painting I’d recently finished called “Moose Crossing-Gros Morne” that had resulted from a trip I’d made to Newfoundland a couple of years ago. After some intense whispered consultations between each other, Lynn Dee and Gord ended up buying the painting. I was delighted, as no one I could think of that far north of Toronto had ever sought me out, let alone sprung for a painting. I was touched by their warmth and enthusiasm. When could I come up to Wawa for a possible encounter with a real moose, they asked.

 

We agreed to the weekend of September 29 , 30 and October 1. This was the height of the moose rutting season which I was obviously curious to see after painting the animal for nearly thirty years. The day before , I’d heard about Trudeau’s death. All during the flight north I thought about the night I met Pierre Elliott Trudeau at a small dinner party in Montreal in October, 1988. The other guests were having a heated discussion about the Meech Lake Accord. As I slowly sipped a very good wine, I suddenly found myself asking Trudeau what had become of my flag painting that the Liberals had given him on his retirement in 1984. He looked straight at me, and said ” Would you like to see it?” “Sure”, I said glibly, not thinking anything of it. “Then come with me!”, he said, getting up from the table as the other guests looked at us, astonished. I followed him dutifully out the door into the street. We walked over to his famous Art Deco house on the hill just around the corner from the dinner party. We went in, descended a grand staircase, and there was my Painted Flag hanging over the entrance to his library. He told me how much it meant to him. He said, “You’re the artist, so you have a right to know where your painting is hanging. “ I was amazed at this kindness. He then gave me a personal tour of the
house. Overwhelmed, I thanked him sincerely. As we walked back to the party, I thought to myself, what a generous gesture, and what a class act. I never forgot it.

 

The plane’s steep descent shook me out of my reverie as it came down over a vast expanse of blue water and rocky shore. Gord was waiting for me at the tidy little Sault Ste Marie airport. Off we sped north on Highway 17, a spotless silver grey ribbon of Trans Canada asphalt hemmed on our right side by day-glo orange and fiery red maples, and cool deep green pines jabbing the bluest skies. On the left side, to the west stretching to infinity, the enormous wind-whipped “freshwater sea”, Lake Superior. Already my eyes were grateful.

Gord’s pride in this wild part of the country was evident at every turn. He stopped the car near Sand River, led me to a bridge where we looked down at hundreds of chinook salmon swimming upstream in clear amber water barely a foot deep.
Several kilometres ahead, inside Lake Superior Provincial Park, I followed him carefully down a forest path strewn with huge boulders, surrounded by high dark rock cliff walls. Suddenly we emerged into the blinding light and crashing waves at the lake’s edge. We crept along a slippery rock shelf beside the roiling water. Beneath a soaring wall of granite we came face to face with a panorama of red ochre Ojibwa pictographs of canoes, serpents, fish, horses and riders, and an assortment of
phantasmagorical creatures. I took several deep breaths as I tried to take in all these sensory stimuli at once. But there was more. Bone white sand dunes, lacy waterfalls, rumbling rapids. Each stop brought one natural high after another. Gord obviously knew where all the best stuff was. Back in the car we continued on up the road and soon passed the infamous Wawa Goose, a hokey giant sculpture plunked down at the town turnoff to commemorate the completion of this part of the Trans Canada highway in 1960. We arrived at the Easons’ comfortable house where Gord showed me an inky green splotch on their front lawn which he identified as bear
poo, and an Inukshuk-like pile of moose antlers he’d constructed in their backyard. Last year they had built a fence around the property in order to raise two orphaned female moose, Maggie & May, whose mother had been killed by a bear. Lynn Dee later told me one of them trotted right through their patio door screen to help herself to some cereal on the the kitchen counter.

 

This big-sky clean-air high was getting to me. I was feeling giddy with freedom. But
the best was yet to come. After a cosy family dinner, Lynn Dee drove me down to Michipicoten Harbour where she said the local nonconformists lived. We joined a group of artists and friends who were gathered in the spacious lounge of a former lodge of kayaker and provisioner David Wells on an isolated peninsula to look at each others’ new work and ooh and aah over slides of majestic wilderness bays some had taken around Pukaskwa National Park, which I learned was pronounced “puckasaw”. From outside the sound of driving wind and roaring waves invaded the darkened room. David, our genial host and former Torontonian led us all outside onto a promontory where the laser white spot from a distant lighthouse blinked intermittently. We all pranced around in the dark leaning into the wind and laughing.

The next day the Eason family with this more relaxed guest piled into the Chevy for a stomach churning ride through a pitted forest dirt road to Frater, a whistle stop on The Algoma Central Railroad. Here we were greeted by a friendly family who had renovated the one house remaining beside the rail line, and proudly showed off an enormous set of interlocked moose antlers and skulls they had laboriously cleaned and bleached. They explained how their dogs led them to the rotting carcasses in the woods. Apparently two bull moose had locked antlers and couldn’t extricate themselves. Their bodies were eventually devoured by wolves and bears, picked at by ospreys, and later finished off by maggots. Quelle histoire! The Easons rescued the antlers and had a beautiful sculpture to prove it.

Suddenly the blast of a train whistle shattered the stillness, and the familiar snout-nosed maroon and grey engine of the Algoma Central Railroad chugged into view. This was not the sleek train pictured on the cover of the Agawa Canyon tourism brochures, but a four-car “milk run” working train that still carries passengers and freight in scruffy boxcars up through the wilderness spine of midnorthern Ontario as far as Hearst. The train came to a halt, and we jumped on. The conductor, doubtless an uncle of TV’s Great White North characters Bob & Doug Mackenzie, greeted us with “Geez, this is some fine weather, eh? ” as we scrambled up the ladder.

We were on our way to the fabled Agawa Canyon. It was warm and clear and the forests were glowing red, orange and gold against the granite cliffs. The best of Canada was beckoning.

 

Gord said that the bigger tourist train from Sault Ste Marie was fully booked with over 1500 visitors, mostly Japanese and American. So he arranged to have us picked up on this “milk run” just like Group of Seven painters Lismer, Jackson and Macdonald did around here over 80 years ago. The train clicked along tracks cut into the sides of nearly vertical cliff walls, veering around the Agawa river canyon, around majestic Bridal Veil falls, and then in an exhilarating turnabout, let loose and careened down, coasting to a stop in the landscaped grounds beside the river. We got out, savouring the shimmering beauty all around us. Our train chugged north leaving just a handful of backpackers and us to revel in this stunning solitude for an hour before the southbound train would come to pick us up. At the tiny station house, the Canadian flag was at half mast. The station master explained that Trudeau had once come here with his young sons. I sat by the flowing river thinking about Trudeau, canoes, and the passage of time. The glory ended too soon as the southbound train arrived to take us back down the line.

The monarch of the north had yet to make an appaearance and Gord was still anxious to show me where he had called and seen moose. So off we trekked down another forest road for a few kilometres into the woods arriving at a moose pasture or swamp right out of a Tom Thomson painting. It was getting dark. We stood still, Lynn Dee, me and the kids trying not to chortle as Gord whined and whinnied in a muted moose call that sent shivers up my spine as it echoed across to the distant hills. No answer. He tried again. Nada. Rien. We shrugged,
walked some more. “There’s one!”, cried one of the kids, but it was just some fallen timber vaguely resembling an animal form. “Up here that’s called a Stick Moose”, said Lynn Dee. Gord noticed moose tracks beside the road, explaining that cows in heat were attracted to secretions left in the bull moose’s hoof imprints.
That little nugget of information gave me pause. (Pun alert?)

We came back to town, our lungs full of fresh air, my head full of memories of colour and light one sees only in dreams. I got a tour of downtown Wawa, a pleasant little place on a picture perfect lake. I bought some smoked trout from a highway general store and some freshly baked Algoma butter tarts that beat anything I’d previously boasted about in southern Ontario.

 

The weekend rushed by. The next morning we visited more cascading cataracts, made a brief trip to the abandoned mine, and then it was time to go. My time in paradise was up. Lynn Dee was to drive me down to the Sault, as she was teaching computer classes there this week. Gord and the kids followed us down for a few kilometres until we got to one of those ubiquitous “Moose Crossing” yellow warning signs on the highway shoulder. Gord brought a ladder out of his car, and
supported it against the sign pole as I climbed up to write my signature in the lower right hand corner while Lynn Dee snapped photos of me signing. Why? Because the image of the prancing moose silhouette was mine. Several years ago I’d gotten a request from someone at the Ministry of Transport asking if they could lift the image off one of my “Mooseplunge” post cards to use on their sign. At the time I was so flattered, little realizing it would find its way to repeated use every 20 kilometres along the Trans Canada up in Northern Ontario. So now I had my own outdoor national gallery where the people could see my moose image every few minutes as they drove through the wilderness. Northern Exposure indeed.

Lynn Dee bade me farewell at the airport, waiting patiently for my plane to take off. I thanked her and Gord for our time together. I told her that if Canada was the precious raw material just waiting to be discovered, it was Canadians like them who made it happen. And I was grateful. I flew back down to the gritty city, cleansed.

`

Forbes 1974

Charles Pachter

Kenneth Forbes: Crackpot or Undiscovered Genius?

Proof Only, Vol. 1 #4, February 1974.
982 words ]

In the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Canadian collection, there is a striking painting of a woman looking into a mirror titled ‘The Yellow Scarf’ by Kenneth Forbes, painted in 1924. Contemplating a reproduction of this work, I was mesmerized by what seemed a superb mastery of the photo-realism technique. This painting invited involvement. I was surprised at not having noticed it before, or at least having no remembrance of the image. It gave off a powerful stillness, a psychological frozen-moment quality, the sort of thing we associate today with Colville and Danby, though the latter seems more glib by contrast.

The Figure of the Woman is imposing but casual. The simple masses of sweater and skirt anchor her securely in the foreground while the eerie glow from some unseen bare bulb lights up her classically coiffed blonde head in the Halo-Breck tradition. Perhaps a distant relative to Michael Snow’s Walking Woman, she pauses here before a mirror, seen by the spectator from behind in a spontaneous pose boldly blocking out a third of the painted surface. She is a strong, simple sculpture, defined by large colour masses and an outline of electric light. Just as commanding is the view we get through the mirror, the Renaissance mirror-illusion trick, with a bow to Van Eyck and Velasquez, Forbes uses the reflected image coyly to include himself in the picture and create a pleasing light contrast. The woman, I later learned, was his wife, a painter herself. The informality of the scarf-tying gesture and the half-seen white silhouette of Forbes give the painting a naturalness not usually seen in similar works of the period.

No doubt if this painting came out of the school of contemporary American Realism (Super, Magic, Sur) it would be found endlessly reproduced in the glossy art journals, museum catalogues, postcard collections, etc. and various reproductions of it would find their way into homes, offices, lobbies, and supermarkets. In short, it would have become Popular, (cf. Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World). But this painting is not known to most of us. Since it was painted by a Canadian in the 20s, it has fallen into relative obscurity. It has never been a Familiar Image or part of a repertoire of Recognizable Identity Objects. Group of Seven apart, this is the lamentable case with most Canadian Art of the past simply because it hasn’t been made easily accessible through books and reproductions, distribution, promotion, and marketing. And because these channels have not been utilized to familiarize ourselves with our own imagery, we have perpetuated the following mistaken belief: There is little familiar Canadian art. Therefore there is little esteemed Canadian art. Therefore there is little good Canadian art. Since we don’t know about it, it obviously doesn’t exist!

Born in Toronto in 1892, Forbes had a successful career as a champion lightweight boxer ‘who packed a knockout punch.’ In a recently published book titled Great Art to the Grotesque, Kenneth Forbes, artist, boxer, and author has compiled a fascinating and disturbing collection of short essays, reactionary, often hysterical tirades against what Forbes calls ‘modernistic’ art. One shudders at his paranoia about 20th century art. He resolutely debunks classical realism which is today seen as high or medium camp. With stoic praise for a few carefully chosen inconsequential 19th century salon painters, he laments the decadence of art ‘today’, cries out to an indifferent world in pitiable self-defense, with delusions of persecution and suffering at the hands of his critics, a self-appointed martyr to the courageous struggle for what he calls ‘sane, traditional art.’ Blasting the ‘New Art’ (anything not strictly photo or life-imitating) via crude and unforgivable comparisons between Titian and Picasso (‘the former the work of a genius, the latter of a diseased mind’), he unleashes a woefully narrow and unsympathetic view of the function and nature of art which surely must be to enhance and confirm human experience.

Genius or crackpot? I wondered if his silly pontificating would alter my appreciation of his painting which I had certainly found pleasurable. The work of art must be a thing apart from its creator, and yet the tortured indignation and the naiveté in Forbes’s writing aroused my curiosity. Despite his injustice collecting, many of his arguments contain grains of insight when viewed in the context of Artists vs. The Rest-Of-The-World. He writes of ‘The Swindle of Modernistic Art’, the ‘Cult of the Ugly’, ‘How They (dealers) Put It Over’, ‘Deceiving The Experts’, etc. His aesthetics are not to be taken seriously, yet he makes a valid point: that cheats are cheats and honest men are honest men, whether they deal in art or vacuum cleaners. And the art world has more than its share of both. Only they are much less obvious, protected by convention and snobbery. Forbes’s anguished cry falls painfully on deaf ears. In his chapter on ‘The Atrophy of the Sense of Beauty’ he cruelly abuses Cézanne as a stupid, clumsy imitator of Rembrandt, or in ‘The Crime Against Sanity’ he repeats the old cliché about critics continually ‘falling’ for paintings by donkeys, monkeys and six-year olds, concluding self-righteously that ‘It is time to end the conquest of fine art by saboteurs who have manoeuvred the most reprehensible fraud of all time.’

The venomous griping begins to pall quickly. My dismay soon turned to a somewhat bemused recognition of an old Canadian malady. Wasn’t this just another symptom of the wail-and-moan syndrome, the addled plea for Recognition. Read between the lines and Forbes’s Complaint isn’t so surprising. Much of what he says is pathetic, but some of what he says is true. Right on, Kenneth Forbes, you don’t deserve oblivion. We should see more of your paintings. How about it, curators?

P.S. Kenneth Forbes, at age 82, is alive and living in Scarborough, Ont.

Proof Only, Vol. 1 #4, February 1974.
Text: © Charles Pachter. All rights reserved.

The Centre for Contemporary Canadian Art
The Canadian Art Database: Canadian Writers Files
Copyright ©1997, 2015. The CCCA Canadian Art Database. All rights reserved.

INTRODUCTION TO THE JOURNALS OF SUSANNA MOODIE

WE met as teenage instructors at summer camp in 1961 and became instant friends.
I asked the questions. She invariably came up with the thoughtful answers.
From the first time she observed me with that quizzical gaze of hers, I relished watching her crack
up at my tasteless jokes, after which she would gently scold me while advising me on proper
conduct. Fat chance. We took delight in each others’ idiosyncrasies. Our families’ backgrounds
seemed exotic to each other.
Our friendship grew. During her last year at the University of Toronto, and my first, she gave me
some silkscreen equipment which she had used to make posters. I took a night course in
silkscreening at the Ontario College of Art and began to make posters for Hart House and for UC
Follies. Her parents bought one of my first silkscreen prints.
She left to do graduate studies at Harvard. I continued in Art History at U of T, and in Paris. We
corresponded, far more frequently than people do now. She often pitched my latest prints to her
friends, and unfailingly gave me encouragement.
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When she gave me a copy of Double Persephone, her first book of hand-set poems, I was
thrilled. Her words were like triggers, setting off a buzz of associations in my head, feeding a.
visual subconscious that I had only just begun to identify.
I arrived at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in the fall of 1964 and began graduate studies in
lithography, papermaking, and typographic design.
Not long afterward, Margaret Atwood sent me a typed manuscript of her longer poem, The Circle
Game. I read it once, and was overwhelmed. My mind raced.
From the first line, “The children on the lawn joined hand to hand go round and round “ to the last,
“I want the Circle broken”, I was hooked. I felt instinctively that the medium of lithography whose
psychological nuances I was just discovering, was tailor-made for the poems. I completed the
suite in three months, and for the next two years steeped myself in Atwood poetry, which she
continued to send to me from Vancouver, and Edmonton, where she was teaching. The more
poems she sent, the more I wanted to create handmade books as handsome frameworks for
them.
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The Cranbrook Academy library had a fine collection of William Morris handmade books, gems
from Britain’s Kelmscott Press. Other European and American private presses were also well
represented. These works were tremendous inspirations. To us young artists working on the
primitive antique printing presses and setting type by hand, the end result of the kiss of ink on
handmade paper was a fetishistic delight. The 1930s romantic atelier atmosphere of the wooded

Cranbrook campus was conducive to introspection. The probing literary material sent to me by
Atwood fit like a glove. I decided to do my master’s thesis on the methodology of illustrating
poetry.
After the Circle Game came Kaleidoscopes:Baroque, a tiny book with colour woodcuts and
engravings accompanying the poems on handmade paper containing bits of my rapidly depleting
hair, some plant material, some chopped up linen table napkins cadged from restaurants. Next
came Expeditions and Talismans for Children, with large format lithographs. Talismans integrated
the printed text with the images for the first time. Our last and most complex Cranbrook folio was
Speeches for Doctor Frankenstein, in which 14 poems were illustrated with combinations of
linoleum cuts, silkscreens and inked found objects pressed into the handmade paper, folded into
a quarto format. This required very careful printing. (If I accidently overprinted one colour on one
image inaccurately, the other three completed images on the attached quarto page became
unusable).
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I completed five Atood folios during my two years at Cranbrook. Back in Toronto in 1966, I set up
a print atelier in an old bicycle repair shop on Shaw Street, and printed two more folios of the
poety of prairie writer John Newlove and maritimer Alden Nowlan, both introduced to me by
Atwood.
By 1968, after moving to a new house and studio further up Shaw street, I acquired several fonts
of antique foundry type. While I was experimenting with composing lines of the new typefaces
and printing them out on an old Vandercook proof press I had just acquired, Margaret Atwood
sent me a typed manuscript of The Journals of Susanna Moodie. It was a fateful moment. I read it
and was so stunned by its beauty and power that I realized everything I had done up until now
must be a rehearsal for this.
I couldn’t wait to get started. I began to work immediately on a maquette or prototype, setting
typefaces for the poems in different styles and sizes, cutting up and collaging proofs of earlier
lithographs and silkscreens, then drawing on top of them to amplify the thematic imagery of the
poems. By early 1969, I had completed the typesetting and draft images for the entire suite of 27
poems, with a frontispiece and 2 introductory images. I showed it to Margaret. She enthused,
suggesting I show it to Dave Godfrey and Dennis Lee who had recently founded House of Anansi
Press in Toronto, and for whom I later illustrated Dennis Lee’s book of children’s poems, “Wiggle
to the Laundromat”. They were both eager to publish The Journals of Susanna Moodie and
submitted a project proposal to the Canada Council, but it was turned down.
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Margaret forged ahead and signed with Oxford University Press who, in 1971, published a
standard version of The Journals of Susanna Moodie with some of Atwood’s own unusual
watercolour illustrations. A clause was included in her contract giving me the right to produce my
heftier version at any time. A signed copy of the Oxford Susanna soon arrived in the mail for me.
Margaret’s inscription read: “To Charlie, with Regret, but Hope for the Future, Love, Peggy”.
A few years later, the University of Toronto Library expressed interest in purchasing the maquette
and subsequent printing rights for The Journals of Susanna Moodie. I wrote to Atwood in London,
asking what she thought. She wrote back promptly, suggesting I hold on to it until the time was
right for me to do it my way.
Nearly a decade passed before that right time arrived. At the start of my Ten Loft Years in 1973, I
bought, fixed up and moved into an old factory just north of Queen Street at 24 Ryerson Avenue,
re-named it the Artists Alliance Building, and welcomed fellow artists, writers, architects, and
filmmakers as tenants. Queen Street West was in the throes of a renaissance. I soon bought and
fixed up some neighbouring warehouses, rented them out and borrowed against their newly
appraised value for further projects.
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By chance, in 1979, I heard that 2 Spanish master printers named Abel and Manuel Bello
Sanchez were living and working in a neighbouring loft building on Niagara Street. I called and
arranged to meet them at their studio. They were experts in silkscreen, having printed editions in
Europe for Dali and the Delaunays. With the strong odour of French cigarettes and Spanish
liqueurs wafting around us, we pored over the maquette, discussing various transferring and
printing techniques. They cautiously agreed to sign on, providing their considerable demands

were met. Soon the contract for cost of materials, edition number, printing and payment
schedules was drawn up and signed. I secured the necessary financing by borrowing against the
equity in my loft buildings. We were ready to go.
Printing of the edition of 120 copies began in February 1980, and continued non-stop until
October. The schedule was gruelling but exciting. The professional standards of the Bello-
Sanchez brothers were impeccable. In the end, they printed over 13000 separate impressions by
hand.
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As part of the team, I was required to be one step ahead of them, preparing sketches for
transferring to screens for printing. At first I worked hesitantly, but I quickly went into Automatic
Pilot. The ardour was contagious. While they dragged ink across the screens with a squeegee,
printing the words and the images, separately or together, I drew directly on the silk screens with
grease crayons and tusche, a suspension of greasy liquid which dried on the silk and was later
surrounded by glue blockout, then dissolved with mineral spirits so ink could pass through where I
had drawn. The rhythm of watching them print layer after layer, colour over colour, washing the
screens, preparing new ones for me to draw on, stacking up the finished print runs, was
intoxicating. We had an adrenalin rush each time a completed print was added to the growing
ensemble. Gradually the book took shape. Words and images began to compliment each other
sequentially. The poetry, set in handsome fonts of different sizes and styles, and printed in a
variety of colours, seemed to jump off the page, acquiring a dimension only hinted at in the
original typed manuscript.
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As the number of completed sets of pages grew, they were moved over to my loft for sorting,
proofing, and folding. Several images were bleed-printed, that is, they were printed beyond the
edges of the paper onto a taped larger under-sheet of paper, then carefully pried free. The edges
of some pages were required to be hand ripped to size (by an obliging assistant named Pam the
Ripper). All pages required hand folding and scoring before being collated together in their proper
sequence and encased in handmade calfskin suede boxes lovingly created by binder Marion
Mertens. The Journals of Susanna Moodie was launched in November of 1980, and I think it fair
to say that it set a new standard for the hand printed livre de luxe in Canada.In 1984, to celebrate
the bicentennial of the arrival of Loyalist immigrants in what is now Ontario, The Journals of
Susanna Moodie was exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario. The exhibition later travelled
throughout the province, and to Halifax and Calgary. As a poetic recounting of the travails
experienced by a 19th century genteel English immigrant in her new Canadian homeland, it is a
landmark work. In 1991 Paul Hassoun, French cultural attaché in Toronto, produced a briilliant
French translation which is soon to be published in Quebec by Victor Lévy – Beaulieu.
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Sarah Borins was just a year old in 1969 when I completed the first maquette for The Journals of
Susanna Moodie. In 1994 while working at Macfarlane Walter & Ross, Sarah called to ask me if I
realized that it was Susanna’s “25th anniversary” and suggested I consider doing a facsimile
version of the original limited edition. I was dubious. I had turned down earlier offers. But she
persisted, promising that it would be done to my satisfaction. And the result is this accessible,
artist-supervised version now available to a much wider readership than could be reached
through the original “élite” edition of 120 copies.
Comic book adventure in its highest form or synchronous marriage of the creative efforts of two
fellow travellers, The Journals of Susanna Moodie is nothing if not my homage to the writer, poet
and friend whose genius has been a sustained source of inspiration for my imagination. And so I
dedicate this:
To Peggy, to whom I will always remain profoundly grateful.

 

Charles Pachter