True Blue: “A Sublime Vernacular: The Landscape Paintings of Levine Flexhaug”
January 28th to March 12th, 2017, Rodman Hall Art Centre, St. Catharines, Ontario. Curated by Nancy Tousley and Peter White.
By John Haney
Levine Flexhaug, Mountain Lake with Deer. Image courtesy of Rodman Hall Art Centre.
The term outsider art has always rubbed me the wrong way. It refers to art made by people who do not have training in art-making or in art history. An “outsider” artist does not exist within the established boundaries of the art world. Depending on one’s perspective, the term is either pejorative or liberating. While I don’t entirely disagree with its usage, the term casts a wide net, acting as a sort of containment device for undesirables — artists whom American writer and illustrator Sarah Boxer lumps together as “visionary, schizophrenic, primitive, psychotic, obsessive, compulsive, untutored, vernacular, self-taught, naive, brut, rough, raw,” as if all non-outsider artists were normal. However, by my rudimentary arithmetic, the corollary of outsider is insider, implying a rarified world made both by and for those who occupy the centre and may freely designate labels. The phrase, for me, elicits a Groucho Marx-like distaste: the sort of distaste that one might harbour for any club that might have one as a member.
And then there is the eccentric example of the artist Levine Flexhaug (who could be described by the majority of Boxer’s designations), the subject of an exhibition now on display at Rodman Hall in St. Catharines. Flexhaug was a self-taught painter (though he showed “an aptitude for art” in grade school) born near the dubiously-named town of Climax, Saskatchewan, during the final year of the First World War. An “itinerant painter,” he travelled around the Canadian west during the Dust Bowl era of the Great Depression in a massive station wagon, schlepping his painting gear. Flexhaug painted — over, and over, and over again — seemingly endless variations on one theme, indeed image: an idealized vision of a Canadian Rocky Mountain scene. This was a world populated solely by animals, save the occasional canoeist. A quaint log cabin graces many of the paintings but there is no Goldilocks, rather a family of bears who seem more like the cabin’s residents than its marauders.
Full disclosure: on January 11th, I was called into Rodman Hall to spend the next two and a half weeks working as a gallery technician, labouring with a team to install an exhibition consisting of no less than 465 of Flexhaug’s paintings. We immersed ourselves in days spent unpacking the hundreds of paintings from their crates for the usual condition-reporting: making note of the condition of the works both to ensure that they have travelled safely, and to establish a baseline status should any damage occur during the run of the exhibition. But this was condition reporting like no other: the paintings were framed all higgledy-piggledy, from the minimal to the absurd, contemporary to kitsch. Many paintings had holes bored straight through them, stigmata where nails secured them above fireplaces, dining room tables, perhaps even legion dartboards. The murals that came from taverns and pubs were mystified with nicotine sfumato. Peter White, co-curator of the exhibition, remarked that the big ones even smelled of burnt tobacco. One frame was stained with blood.
Another crate: 50 more paintings. Another crate: 80 more paintings! On and on it went. I developed a five-stage response to Levine Flexhaug’s works. The first day I sneered at them; their hokeyness made my skin crawl. The second day I liked them, but I was suspicious. The third day I loved them, though I dared not say it out loud. The fourth day I declared (out loud) that I loved them, but in truth I was numb. The fifth day, objectivity began returning to me slowly, though when I closed my eyes, seared on my retina were (are) his innumerable repeating motifs: mountains, trees, lake, stags, moose, bears, birds, cabin, canoe, moon (always full, never fractioned). Then these animals began to show up everywhere: one moose on a QEW Ontario Tourism sign; another moose (its plastic head) covering the trailer hitch-ball on an old Lincoln Continental lumbering along Burlington Street; a silhouetted bear on a beer can. I’d been Flexhauged! Suddenly the totems of his de-peopled world became grafted on to my surroundings — the Golden Horseshoe, this most desecrated of Canadian landscapes.
Flexhaug’s work was a salve not so much for a desecrated landscape, but for desecrated souls. He whipped these paintings off, selling them at modest prices primarily to Prairie folk who were depressed by the Depression, and perhaps also by their own landscape’s relative topographic inadequacies. Flexhaug’s paintings are examples of undeniably democratic art, the kind you see piled against a wall at the Sally Ann. Indeed, many works still have thrift store price tags on their sides or backs: $2.99, $10.00, one auction-buster weighing in at $50. His was a simple, if heroic world; his Rückenfigur was not a brooding German existentialist, but a deer. Or a moose. In the depths of the mid-century Prairies, these little blocks of saturated colour must have been escape portals that ran at odds with the brown and the white and the horizontal. One is tempted to snatch one off the wall (would it be missed?) and sneak it into the AGO’s concurrent blockbuster show Mystical Landscapes. Would it be conspicuous, or would it hide in plain sight?
Levine Flexhaug, Mountain Lake with Deer and Three Birds. Image courtesy of Rodman Hall Art Centre.
Flexhaug has been dead for over forty years, and yet his seemingly endless typology of chimerical Canadian mountain landscapes has done its work on me. There is a quotation which I cannot find, that I learned of from my wife, who was paraphrasing her mother, who was paraphrasing possibly a New Yorker article from sometime within the last two decades: that if a man draws a line, it’s probably not that interesting. If he’s drawing the same line fifty years later, you’d better take notice. Flexhaug found a formula and cleaved to it, making paintings that abstain from the weight of history; they are flat fantasies that begin to make demands of you. They are like those people who are quiet and smiley, and thus make people like me blather confessionally in order to fill an awkward, if amicable silence. Flexhaug’s paintings changed little over the decades, save the date he inscribed on them; one has to look at these dates and wonder if the images provide any evidence of historical attestation: do those painted in 1939 show a preoccupation with the first shots fired in a new war? Do the peach-and-chartreuse skies of a 1945 painting express the existential burden of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Flexhaug was a commercial artist. He was an entrepreneur. Was he a scrappy hustler or a quiet, reflective soul? Did he find solace in painting these innumerable boards, or was it tedious work? Was he sincere, or did he wield his brush with a smirk? Faced by walls crowded with paintings, one contemplates these binaries. The pictorial subject becomes immaterial; the paintings deliquesce into a watery staccato barely contained by the key of “True Blue” paint applied to two of Rodman’s smaller walls. The curator’s function in this exhibition becomes less to order a selection of work than to take on the role of an installation artist, painting the walls with paintings. The works’ demands are not so much art-critical as they are anthropological.
After being trapped in the same room with Levine Flexhaug for nearly three weeks, I began to take the same refuge in his never-cloudy vistas as their first delighted owners might have. These are paintings whose jobs were, in essence, to bring relief, to give people a sense of escape or reassurance during trying or just plain regular times. Is a painting’s role — or art’s role — to be a window or a mirror? Does one’s gaze penetrate these simple, silly vistas into an imagined space, or does the eye stop on the surface of the paint? When I describe this work to friends, their common question is: were these paintings based on an actual view? I don’t know, and I don’t particularly care. As it turned out, the duration of time it took to hang this show was coincident with the dark, foggy, un-seasonably warm, drab doldrums of January. Evening commutes back to Hamilton brought the ever-worsening news of the Trump inauguration and new world order. Oh, how I longed to be back in that warmly-lit gallery with its hundreds upon hundreds of perfect, untroubled landscapes. Better yet, I could disappear from the city entirely and find the open door of one of those red cabins and, like many others who feel the same way these days, take up a new life as an outsider.
John Haney is an artist who lives in Hamilton.
