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.

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. Whereas some of her earlier work, such as Ethnocenter (No. 1) (1992) (fig. 5), features a flying disk or cylinder as a metaphor for the speed with which we experience daily life,20 or as a reflection of technology and progress speeding forward, the book as a symbol may be interpreted as the corresponding antithesis.

Fig. 5. Carol Wainio, Ethnocenter (No. 1), 1992, acrylic on canvas, 111.8 x 447 cm. http://ccca.concordia.ca/artists/work_detail.html?languagePref=en&mkey=75060&title=Puss+in +Boots+%2310&artist=Carol+Wainio&link_id=273.

Despite the shift in subject matter, much of Wainio’s unique visual language of marks and colour choices has remained consistent. While she states that her earlier works are more conceptual than her more recent works, she also remarks that the progression of her work has been organic, with one idea always building on the last, never culminating in one radical shift.21

The vocabulary that I have been using to describe Wainio’s work—her artistic language, discussing how one might read her paintings—may initially appear to be connected with

literature. Paul Barolsky’s essay “There is No Such Thing as Narrative Art” addresses this matter. He argues that artists can never truly be narrators because they will always be more concerned with an image’s composition than the cohesion of its narrative.22 His thesis is possibly flawed in that he assumes that the narrator is a writer, and not an oral storyteller. When vocal narrators recall a story before telling it, they likely first remember the most pivotal scene and then fill out the details—but not necessarily in logical order. This is much more akin to the way an artist creates a painting composition and the way the eye travels over a painting. The eye will not move left to right as it does when reading a tale, but rather look here, then there, taking in everything at once as one would recall a tale before telling it. Moreover, Wainio does not identify herself as a traditional storyteller, stating that “the conditions for narrative in painting are essentially gone. I don’t think they really exist.”23 When she imagines a story such as Puss in

Boots, she is not looking for the viewer to recall that one story. Instead, her work relies on the presence of existing tales to comment on more than one narrative and tie them together.

Since the creation of Puss in Boots #10 eight years ago, Wainio’s work has continued to evolve, and while she has received significant recognition for it, including the 2014 Governor General’s

Award in Visual and Media Arts,24 she also says that she is not surprised there is not much public interest when it comes to the subject matter of fairy tales.25 Still, she has not let the potential stigma surrounding “childish” material stop her from expressing her vision. Her most recent works continue to respond to fairy tales but with the visual motif of the forest. One example is Wainio’s 2016 painting Flowers and Trees (fig. 6).

Fig. 6. Carol Wainio, Flowers and Trees, 2015, acrylic on canvas, 182.9 x 304.8 cm. http://www.carolwainio.com/index.php.

In this work we see a young boy sitting on a forest floor, accompanied by a deer. Most of the forest scene is painted in sepia tones but there are bright colours in the background along with highly abstract foliage. The landscape also includes some drawings that are more stencil-like and some that have the aesthetic of children’s drawings. Flowers and Trees and Wainio’s other recent works continue to draw connections to contemporary issues such as globalization, financial instability and environmental issues while integrating children’s drawings along with illustrations.26 By exploring these timeless tales in a new context Wainio asks us to stop and think—about childhood, about history, about the place we live in now and about what has brought us here.

NOTES

1 Robert Enright, “The Very Rich Hours of Carol Wainio,” Border Crossings 22, no. 1 (2003): n.p. 2 Carol Wainio, interview with Melissa Allen, October 2016.

3 Ibid. 4 Sarah Milroy, “Once upon a Time Before: The Art Of Carol Wainio," Border Crossings 32, no. 4 (2013): 70. 5 Ibid. 6 This summary is based on Charles Perrault, Puss in Boots, 1st ed., trans. Malcolm Arthur (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1990). 7 Nemiroff, Diana, Donald Beecher, and Randy Innes, Carol Wainio: The Book (Ottawa: Carleton University Art Gallery, 2010), 17. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Wainio, interview. 11 Carol Wainio and Jeet Heer, Carol Wainio: Dialogue (Toronto: Paul Petro Contemporary Art, 2014), 5. 12 Wainio, interview. 13 Carol Wainio, “Artist Statement,” Carol Wainio, last modified 2016, accessed November 8, 2016, http://www.carolwainio.com/artiststatement.php; Wainio, interview. 14 Doug Saunders, “Dream Farms Turning into Nightmares,” Globe and Mail, July 7, 2007, A12. 15 Ibid. 16 Wainio, interview. 17 Nemiroff, Beecher, and Innes, 53; Wainio, interview. 18 Wainio, interview. 19 Ibid. 20 Michèle Thériault, Carol Wainio: Contemporary Registers (Joliette: Musée d’art de Joliette, 2000); Wainio, interview. 21 Wainio, interview. 22 Barolsky, “There is No Such Thing as Narrative Art,” Arion 18, no. 2 (2010): 115. 23 Wainio, interview. 24 “Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts,” Canada Council for the Arts, last modified March 19, 2015, accessed November 8, 2016, http://ggavma.canadacouncil.ca/archive/2014/winners/carol-wainio. 25 Wainio, interview. 26 Wainio, “Info”; “Governor General’s Awards.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barolsky, Paul. “There is No Such Thing as Narrative Art.” Arion 18, no. 2 (2010): 111–23.

Canada Council for the Arts. “Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts.” Last modified March 19, 2015. Accessed November 8, 2016. http://ggavma.canadacouncil.ca/archive/2014/winners/carol-wainio.

Enright, Robert. "The Very Rich Hours of Carol Wainio." Border Crossings 22, no. 1 (2003): 18–28.

Milroy, Sarah. "Once upon a Time Before: The Art Of Carol Wainio." Border Crossings 32, no. 4 (2013): 68–74.

Nemiroff, Diana, Donald Beecher, and Randy Innes. Carol Wainio: The Book. Ottawa: Carleton University Art Gallery, 2010.

Perrault, Charles. Puss in Boots. 1st edition. Translated by Malcolm Arthur. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1990.

Saunders, Doug. “Dream Farms Turning into Nightmares.” Globe and Mail, July 7, 2007.

Thériault, Michèle. Carol Wainio: Contemporary Registers. Joliette: Musée d’art de Joliette, 2000.

Wainio, Carol. “Artist Statement.” Carol Wainio. Last modified 2016. Accessed November 8, 2016. http://www.carolwainio.com/artiststatement.php.

———. “Info.” Carol Wainio. Last modified 2016. Accessed November 8, 2016. http://www.carolwainio.com/info.php.

Wainio, Carol, and Jeet Heer. Carol Wainio: Dialogue. Toronto: Paul Petro Contemporary Art, 2014.