Excerpt

…the hall where Karen and the crew were putting the finishing touches on
the exhibit. He was led to the Speaker’s office where Michael was sitting
on a desk, his feet dangling, telling stories to the staff of his adventures
in the Arctic.
John led Ken into his office and a photographer arrived to immortalize
the occasion. He posed Ken and John in front of the Karsh portrait of
Winston Churchill and for the next hour shot Ken with various members
of Parliament. Jean Chrétien, leader of the opposition, offered his congratulations,
as did Joe Clark, who was standing in for Brian Mulroney
who was otherwise engaged.
In the hall at the foot of the stairs people stood or sat shoulder to
shoulder. Not an inch of space remained.
I had the most amazing feeling. It was a feeling I have never had before
or since. It was a feeling that I was standing at a point in the universe where
for some minutes and seconds reality was different. This was the magical
moment I had been seeking my whole life. Usually, I had foreseen important
moments in great detail. But this one – this was different. This one had
somehow manufactured itself. It was not the vision I had had in my head.
John Fraser stood on the podium and spoke. “Almost fifty years ago
a young boy sat at the feet of his tutor – an old Portuguese fisherman –
and heard tales of whaling in the Canadian North. These tales were so
wonderful that the boy vowed some day to see Canada for himself and to
clarify his mental pictures of the land.”
“In his late teens, circumstance found the boy and his family living
on Canada’s West Coast and several years later he set out on his boyhood
dream to see the great Canadian North. For five years, he walked
from one end of this great land to the other, travelling with families of
Inuit as they pursued their nomadic lifestyle. Often he was alone, walking
endlessly – experiencing first-hand Canada’s Arctic North, all the while
sketching thousands of miniature drawings of what he saw.”
“Toward the end of his journey, like a great mirage in the desert, he saw
a giant of a man standing on the distant horizon. It was a stone Inukshuk,
an Inuit guide to hunting and fishing grounds. Try as he might for the
next twenty years, his efforts to portray the splendour of this vast and
spectacular landscape resulted in dissatisfaction and personal frustration.
Finally, he realized that only a painting which was larger than any ever
painted could properly depict the unseen spectacle which he felt compelled
to bring to the rest of the world.”
“The result of five years of trekking and twenty years of painting was
completed on June 21, 1991, the longest day of the year. It is the largest
original oil on canvas portrait in the world, measuring one hundred and
fifty-two feet long by twelve feet high.”

https://draft2digital.com/book/3562830

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0981073573

Excerpt

There is no such thing as old hat when it comes to this. It’s like it all happens
for the first time each time. It grew more and more intense. We lay
there on the ground and I don’t know how long we lay there. The shafts of
light rippled up in an arc all around us, and they came to a centre point
directly above us and that point was a black hole. All the rest was light, and
the colours were showering down – purple, gold, green, blue, red. The words
don’t work. It was as if we were laying on the floor of a cathedral the size of
the universe. The earth was no longer an issue – we weren’t even part of the
planet. I can see how religions began. It was stuff like this – it undoes one.
All the rational explanations we have for this are nonsense. They just don’t
work. You have to find a bigger answer. This is too big, too beautiful, and too
mysterious.
Something holy descended on their souls. Ken felt as though they had
had a direct experience of God and the magic of that night clung to them
during those ten days in the Thelon.
The Thelon was like no other place on earth. When the glaciers had
retreated they had left behind a vast amount of chirt, a very dense stone
that had formed into eskers or low humpbacked hills from forty to a
hundred and fifty feet high. The stone was so dense the permafrost could
not penetrate it and as a result the vegetation that grew there, born from
seeds carried by migrating birds, was that of a more southern landscape.
But because of the severe winters and punishing winds, it was a landscape
in miniature. Trees that might grow to a hundred feet in the south grew to
only a couple of feet here, but they were flawlessly formed. At the base of
each esker was a perfectly round small lake, so thick with Arctic grayling
you could almost reach your hand into the water and pull one out.
When they got back Ken promised himself that this time he wouldn’t
leave on another trip until he had finished the painting. He locked himself
in his studio and from October 1990 to May 1991. He emerged only
long enough to eat and sleep.
The epic project neared completion. Elaine suggested a decorous and
dignified gathering to commemorate the event. Ken and the word “decorous”
were obviously never meant to meet. He insisted on a “last brushstroke”
party that would be more extravagant than his “first brushstroke”
event ten years earlier. Decorum in his studio? A studio that had a sign at
the entrance identifying it as “The Zoo?” Karen had even presented him
with a road sign he had admired in Yellowknife: Ragged Ass Road and
Lois Lane.
Ken had actually tried to steal the sign more than once, but each time
he had attempted it, someone had gotten to it before him and taken off
with it. He guessed that the City of Yellowknife works department likely
had a full time employee doing nothing but erecting a new road sign at…

https://draft2digital.com/book/3562830

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0981073573