Abigail Walthausen explores the life and work of Arthur
Heming, the Canadian painter who — having been diagnosed with
colourblindness as a child — worked for most of his life in a
distinctive pallete of black, yellow, and white.
Postmen of the Wilderness by Arthur Heming, first published in his Drama of the ForestsFor most of his
life, Arthur Heming, “painter of the great white north”, painted in a
monochrome scheme of black, white, and yellow tones, choosing this style
at least nominally because of an early diagnosis of color blindness.
These possibly self-imposed restrictions lasted inexplicably until the
age of sixty, when a full, nearly technicolor palette suddenly splashed
across his canvases. Thematically, he worked with scenes whose colors
were appropriately blanched: winter hunting and trapping expeditions
that he took for the Hudson Bay Company and alongside people of the
First Nations. His narrow focus in painting mirrored his work as a
traveler, novelist, and illustrator, and the commercial nature of his
output certainly influenced the mixed reception he received in the art
market. In Canada he existed as an outsider of both the trapping
communities he traveled with in the north and of his peers in the fine
art world. His best work is transcendent, calling to mind the rich
velvety grayscale of Gerhard Richter’s realistic paintings, while his
weakest work is the sort of mystic wolf lore that later became the
vernacular of furry bedspreads and black crewneck sweatshirts. Heming
was conflicted about both his place in his homeland and his status as an
artist. This is perhaps why he was so eager to find an adopted home for
many consecutive summers in a distinctively non-arctic landscape, a
farming community on the Long Island Sound, Old Lyme Connecticut.
While the Florence Griswold artist colony in Old Lyme Connecticut is
generally touted as the “birthplace of American Impressionism”, Heming
left a few distinctively Canadian marks on the communal dining room.
First, there is his contribution to the collection of panels painted by artists who resided there; his, which depicts a lone canoe flying over rapids
as seen from above, stands out from the rest because of its stark black
and white color scheme and the narrow focus of its detail. Rather than a
miniature painting of the pastoral Connecticut landscape, his seems
like a snapshot of a larger, wilder, uncontainable narrative.
Shooting Death’s Rapids (1906), Heming’s contribution to the dining room panels at the Old Lyme artists’ colony
