A Picasso In The North Country
The Wild Journey of Canadian Artist Norval Morrisseau - Copper Thunderbird
Hard Covered
Over 220 pages with 190 images.
An honest and revealing book about Noval Morrisseau written by James R. Stevens and authorized by the Artist, Norval Morrisseau.
The brilliant and wild painting journey of Canadian artist, Norval Morrisseau is an epic in the international world of art. Norval painted at least 10 000 images during a 45 year career marked by alcoholism and addiction. Norval was an intelligent complex man caught between an ancient forest world and a westernized industrial America. He was unschooled and born into poverty at a small hamlet on the shore of Lake Nipigon in Canada during the Great Depression of the 1930's. The odds that he would survive childhood were against him. He overcame huge obstacles in his path to command respect from all artist. His fascinating story as a painter of abandon will amuse and fluster readers as he rides his tsunami wave to fame.
Morrisseau’s genius for unifying or breaking space in his designs is astounding as is his sureness of line. It cannot be classified as primitive art because both the ideas and the expression evince cultivated thought. As this mysticism has never been recorded he is breaking new ground.
Pearl McCarthy Toronto Globe and Mail
Morrisseau is a native Canadian and his artistic career has been pursued almost entirely outside that bitchy little kingdom known as the Toronto art world—two facts that make it easy to categorize hin condesecendingly as a ‘folk’ or ‘native’ artist quite beyond the pale of serious artistic discourse. Nothing could be less true. Morrisseau’s richly symbolic, allegorical art is a direct criticism of the hedonistic, pointless New York abstract painting so popular with the Yorkville carriage trade.”
John Bentley Mays
Toronto Globe and Mail