The Icelandic Canadian - 01.03.2003, Blaðsíða 22

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THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Vol. 57 #4
the material remainder of an original expe-
rience, something physical a person can
touch and gaze upon to recall what was felt
to be desirable, authentic, and true. It
works as a talisman against forgetting,
embodying a refusal to allow a brief
encounter to slip silently away.
The paintings of Island Souvenir can in
this way be looked upon as mementos for
recollecting, reworking, and transmitting
personal, cultural, and visual pasts. The
objects portrayed - things like rope, nets,
wool and knitting, stone, wood planks, a
stirrup, a manuscript, fish - share a down-
to-earth materiality and give to the paint-
ings an aura of deceptive simplicity, as if
they illustrated a book of fables or legends.
The lack of contemporary technology and
the referral to historic ways of meeting
practical needs evoke a peasant clumsiness
that speaks to the real labour of existence.
It comes as no surprise to learn that one
of Jonasson’s earliest encounters with art
came at an exhibition of paintings by
Vincent van Gogh that opened in Winnipeg
in December 1960. Van Gogh’s and
Jonasson’s art share a deliberate primitive-
ness, as well as an intense, sumptuous
palette as luminous as stained glass. In
addition, both artists have created paintings
to be experienced by their tactility as well
as visually. Neither is it surprising that her
child’s hand surreptitiously reached up to
touch those paintings’ thick surfaces.
Fanciful though it is, I imagine her fingers
as the conduit for transmitting a desire to
touch the world by means of a skin of
paint.
Rev. Stefan Jonasson
ARBORG UNITARIAN CHURCH
GIMLI UNITARIAN CHURCH
9 Rowand Avenue
Winnipeg, Manitoba R3J 2N4
Telephone: (204) 889-4746
E-mail: sjonasson@uua.org
Van Gogh and other artists such as
Matisse and Cezanne of early 20th century
modernism are not the only visual points of
reference. Jonasson’s visual sources multi-
ply: like her reading habit, her visual habit
is omnivorous. Pre-Renaissance art;
medieval manuscripts; Brueghel’s genre
depictions of peasant life; textiles; Persian
miniatures; artefacts and imagery from
early history such as from ancient Egypt
and the culture of the Scythians and
Sarmatians who once inhabited what is
now the Ukraine: these all influence the
organization of the pictorial space, the
working of surfaces, colours, and icons. In
a sense, one can think of those original
objects and images, whether tens or hun-
dreds or thousands of years old, as sou-
venirs from elsewhere, fragments which
Jonasson has collected and reworked, mak-
ing them communicate other realities by
mutating them into poetic metaphors and
metaphysical proposals. The past thus
remains alive - “nothing can take the past
away: the past grows gradually around one,
like a placenta for dying.”8
In everyday speech, the term “souvenir”
implies kitsch—a cheap, sentimental sub-
stitute for the real thing. Yet the word’s
etymology suggests that this is a recent
denigration linked to the commodification
of the desire to call to mind that afflicts us
all. Jonasson’s use of the term redeems it
and suggests a broader sense in which an
object or image can act as a material vector
for transmitting the remains of other times
and places. These vectors demonstrate, I
would argue, the workings of an external,
collective cognitive process—an intimation
of how cultures remember. Her references
to codes and languages such as DNA,
hieroglyphs, runes, and American weather
icons, as well as to the book and the ship,
indicate a curiosity about the material
forms that communication takes. That
some of these codes have fallen into disuse
or may do so in the future (what will hap-
pen to the book?) or their meanings are the
esoteric knowledge of a few, suggests the
fragility, mutability, and incompleteness of
any act of communication or transmission.
Returning to Stewart’s definition of the
souvenir as feeding the appetites of nostal-