Fig. 1. Carol Wainio, Puss in Boots #10, 2008, Acrylic on Canvas, 182.9 X 304.8 Cm

Fig. 1. Carol Wainio, Puss in Boots #10, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 182.9 x 304.8 cm. http://ccca.concordia.ca/artists/work_detail.html?languagePref=en&mkey=75060&title=Puss+in +Boots+%2310&artist=Carol+Wainio&link_id=273. Walking in Her Boots: Analysis of Carol Wainio’s Puss in Boots #10 Melissa Allen Throughout her career Canadian painter Carol Wainio (b. 1955) has addressed history, narrative and contemporary socio-political issues in her typically large-scale canvases. Wainio, never having been interested in the pure formal exploration of outright abstraction,1 approaches her subjects with a unique style that integrates both abstract and representational methods. Her preferred use of acrylics is indicative of her painting process, which involves generating imagery on the canvas itself rather than relying on thoroughly planned preparatory drawings or underdrawings2—techniques traditionally associated with oil paint. The idea of addressing the fairy tale specifically—as can be seen in works such as Puss in Boots #10 (2008) (fig. 1)—came to Wainio after she became a mother and was confronted with the prospect of reading and re-reading the same stories to her children. Fig. 1. Carol Wainio, Puss in Boots #10, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 182.9 x 304.8 cm. http://ccca.concordia.ca/artists/work_detail.html?languagePref=en&mkey=75060&title=Puss+in +Boots+%2310&artist=Carol+Wainio&link_id=273. This constant repetition, returning to the same story multiple times a day, awakened Wainio’s interest in the historical development of fairy tales that we know today. Stories that began within the oral tradition were eventually recorded in written books, but few images accompanied them. Wainio became fascinated with how, due to the lack of imagery, one illustrated book would be carried from one place to another and then copied so that elements of previous illustrations were incorporated into new ones. It was at the very beginning of her research into the history of fairy tale illustration that the artist came across two different illustrated publications of Puss in Boots—one from an 1806 British publication (fig. 2) and one from an 1870’s American publication (fig. 3)—where the illustrations echo each other. These two illustrations are key elements in Puss in Boots #10. Fig. 2. Illustration from Laura Jewry Valentine, Aunt Louisa's Fairy Legends: Comprising: Puss in Boots, Jack and the Bean-Stalk, White Cat, Cinderella (New York: McLoughlin Bros., 1875), 2a. http://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00018561/00001/thumbs?search=puss+%3dboots. Fig. 3. Frontispiece from Charles Perrault, Puss in Boots, and Diamonds and Toads (London: Tabart and Co., 1806). http://hockliffe.dmu.ac.uk/items/0035pages.html?page=004. Puss and Boots #10 contains multiple layers of meaning and asks the viewer to consider several different points of reference. The first connection to be made is to the story Puss in Boots. While Wainio is very clear that this painting is not intended to tell the story,3 knowledge of the tale is helpful in order to fully consider the painting. Puss in Boots first became well known as a fairy tale thanks to Charles Perrault’s (1628–1703) Le Maitre chat, ou, le chat botté, published in Histoires ou contes du temps passé in 1697.4 However, the fable itself had existed for many years before that publication, always told in slightly different versions but with the same overarching theme of a young man who is elevated far beyond his social rank with the help of his conniving cat.5 The story goes that the youngest of three brothers inherits his father’s cat. At first he is discouraged by this bequest, but the cat promises to help his new master achieve wealth, asking only for a pair of boots and a sack which he uses to catch rabbits. The cat then presents these rabbits to the king in the name of his master, whom he gives the title of Marquis of Carabas, thereby gaining him favour with the king. Having established this relationship with the king the cat proceeds to make his master seem more wealthy and appealing to the king’s daughter, finally securing him land by tricking an ogre into turning itself into a mouse, eating the mouse and presenting what was the ogre’s land as his master’s.6 The addition of the ogre to the traditional tale in Perrault’s version is what makes it especially fairy tale-like.7 The original tale was not only a fantasy of upward social movement, but also a tale of ingratitude.8 In some versions, after the princess and the Marquis of Carabas are married the cat decides to test their devotion by playing dead. When the cat is thrown out the window or stuffed in a ditch as opposed to being honoured, she (the cat is female in most versions except for Perrault’s9) retaliates by clawing her master to death. This more gruesome ending, which one might expect from old fairytales, is predictably left out of not only Perrault’s version but many that followed, including Disney’s. While the adjustments made to fairy tales throughout time and the effect of industries like Disney held interest for Wainio, it is not what made the story of Puss in Boots most appealing to her. Wainio’s primary interest in this story is that it fit in with her ideas regarding the way early illustrations were modelled after each other.10 There are clear indications that the illustrator of the 1875 edition of Puss in Boots published by McLoughlin Bros. in New York had looked at the 1805 copper plate illustration published by Tabart and Co. in London. This aspect of hand copying reproductions, in contrast to the mass mechanical reproductions common today, spoke to Wainio and was a reflection of a bigger issue she was looking to address in her painting: that of the development from scarcity to excess. During the period in which the Puss in Boots tale was first told, goods such as boots were rare and consequently well cared for, while today in our Western, materialistic society, boots are not only mass produced, but also discarded en masse. The character of the clever cat who skyrocketed his master’s social standing has transformed into the modern-day salesman, appearing in advertisements for everything from shoe polish to matches.11 Through copying the illustrations the way she has, Wainio places herself alongside those illustrators of the past whose ideas were torn out, travelled and re-shaped, just as the pages of the Puss in Boots illustrations appear to be torn in Puss in Boots #10.12 Apart from the illustrations, the painting consists of a horizon of continuous fields, a large book- like structure and many individual shoes strewn about the dirt in the foreground. The fields and the sky almost appear to mirror each other, as they share the same colour palette of pastels such as yellows, blues, greens and pinks, combined together in somewhat unconventional ways. Wainio spoke of how she felt it was important for the fields to have depth (in contrast to some of her earlier works which utilize a more “flat,” painterly space) so that she could create the feeling of emptiness she was aiming to achieve with the landscape. The book-like structure is intended to be read as a ruin of sorts, to be contemplated as one might an architectural ruin, as a window into the past.13 According to the artist, during the summer of 2007, as she was preparing research for this work and dwelling on these concepts of the pre-modern experience of scarcity, reproduction and consumption she came across an article in the Globe and Mail addressing an agricultural crisis taking place in India at the time. Farmers who had been promised miracle growth from hybrid cotton seeds bought not many years before were now facing fields with depleted soil.14 Their crops could no longer create their own seed and so farmers were forced to buy it annually or starve. Money and food were scarce and suicides were on the rise.15 Wainio was struck by the parallels between the fairy tales she was reading to her children and these real world events.16 The promise of magic beans that perhaps bring more trouble than they are worth sounded familiar. The fallout of the use of genetically engineered seeds caused conditions in contemporary India to resemble those in pre-industrial Europe, the original setting of Puss in Boots.17 Moreover, the conflict between making something of your own and becoming a consumer of it, and between the value of scarcity and the potential dangers of excess further raises questions around the issue of reproduction. The Canadian mass media was flooded with images of devastated fields, looking not so different from the fields that Puss walks through on his way to the ogre’s castle.18 Wainio saw one image in particular in the Globe and Mail of a man plowing his field in the distance while a cheap shoe buried in the soil lay in the foreground (fig. 4). This image was the inspiration for the piles of lone shoes that litter the foreground of Puss in Boots #10.19 Fig. 4. “Girija Bandharkawda, 40, whose husband, Ishwar, committed suicide in this field a few days before, contemplates her future in fields that have failed to support the family.” Photo: Skumar Sharma. Reproduced from Doug Saunders, “India’s Growing Crisis: Agriculture,” Globe and Mail, July 7, 2007, A12. Wainio was also interested in addressing the book as a concept.

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