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After completing some work for Ducks Unlimited at the
University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, I took the opportunity to visit
the St. Thomas More College Chapel and view the remarkable William Kurelek
mural that graces its north interior wall. Now, regular listeners to my
contributions may not consider me a particularly reverent man, but I challenge
any one of you, if you are a plainsperson, to stand before this humble
and grand work and not be moved.
“Humble,” I say, because although Kurelek is acclaimed as a
prairie regional and Canadian national treasure, he was a modest man working
in humble ways. He was a memory artist, often depicting scenes from his
Ukrainian farm boyhood in Manitoba, and a naive primitivist in style.
(I read his books, A Prairie Boy’s Summer and A Prairie Boy’s
Winter, to my grandson.) “Grand,” I say, because the work is
large in both its size and its themes.
The mural, painted in 1976, is based on the story of the Loaves &
Fishes as recorded in Matthew XIV. (So Kurelek himself said; I think he
relied also on other Gospel accounts of the incident, because Matthew
does not mention the boy who provided the food, but I think I see the
boy in the painting.) There are lots of loaves, but no fishes; this is
a work for wheat country. Christ stands central to the field, his arms
raised in what seems to me an ambiguous blessing. Around him the disciples—here
depicted as black-robed Basilian Fathers, who recruited Kurelek to paint
in the chapel—gathering and distributing loaves.
Christ’s upraised arms, and the birds spiraling toward the sun directly
above, divide the painting into left and right halves. The left half is
devoted to the peoples of the prairies before mass settlement arrived.
Natives, Métis, Mounties, surveyors, and Chinese railroad construction
workers stream in loose procession toward the field behind Christ where
the multitude is being seated. They proceed across prairie foregrounded
by a Red River cart and a family of flickertail gophers. In the distant
background a thunderstorm approaches, with a herd of bison running before
it.
Across the right half of the mural stream the immigrants—English,
Dutch, Ukrainian, the whole works—also moving to join the seated
multitude. They are crossing a wheat field that is half harvested. Neat
rows of sheaves dropped from the the binder stretch into the distance,
and grain elevators spike the horizon. Closer by, stokers—two of
whom represent Kurelek’s immigrant parents—are at work. Still
closer, across a three-wire fence, is summer fallow, with gulls picking
through the clods.
On each side, certain individuals are leaving the procession, deliberately
turning their backs on God. One of these on the right side is Kurelek
as a boy, his face screwed up in rebellious torment.
I should not neglect to note that at the base of the mural, Saint Thomas
More and Cardinal Henry Newman point out the path to Christ. They do not
seem to be of the prairies, however; they provide something like a celebrity
endorsement of the proceedings depicted.
I was joined in the chapel by Margaret Sanche, college archivist, a woman
whose knowledge and generosity model the ideals of the college. We talked
for quite a while about the story of the mural, about its themes and details,
about Kurelek the man. Then I sat by myself for a while.
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