Brenda Draney

In Julie, an early painting by Brenda Draney from 2011, a girl in a bathing suit puts a bloody hand to her mouth. There is a red streak on the ground in front of her that reads “blood.” She appears to have only one arm, but Draney often leaves limbs unfinished. Clearly something bad has happened. It’s just that what it is, is unclear: accident, assault, something entirely different? The vulnerable figure isolated in the top half of an unpainted expanse of linen is distanced, too far away to make out. The reference to Julie is specific, but the figure is almost completely without context. Painted with urgency in one go, the unsettling image implies there is a story behind her distress, but the painting has the kind of ambiguity that some photographs have. It invites you to parse the meaning of the scene. It makes you want to know more.

When Draney first appeared on the scene, her figurative painting didn’t look like anybody else’s, and in “Drink from the river,” her first public art gallery solo—touring in 2023 and 2024 to the Arts Club of Chicago, the Power Plant in Toronto and the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton—the observation holds. Draney made her mark by isolating fragmentary images on unprimed linen or canvas grounds, a decision that was radically reductive visually but productive conceptually. It said that the space of painting could be literal and material. It gave a painted figure on a flat open field the presence of an object made of paint. It emphasized the fact that images are constructed with gestures and marks. It showed that image fragments could perform as metaphors: for memories, traces of people, places, experiences and feelings. The roughed-in, sometimes raw nature of her images made them seem unfinished but deliberate, as if Draney were leaving an opening for the spectator.

Seeing her paintings now as a body of work suggests that the origin of Draney’s painting strategy might lie in narrative literary theory. It’s not only that images can be seen as metaphors, but also that there is a conceptual space in which Draney’s images can be thought of in relation to text and a pictorial space where a word or phrase and an image or a continuous brush stroke outlining a shape (as in the hieroglyphical Rest, 2021) can connect as language. The first of Draney’s three university degrees was in English literature so the idea is not so far-fetched. She turned from studying literature to painting because she discovered that the latter was her long suit, as was locating the fragmentary image that pointed provocatively to the possibility of story.

The Edmonton artist, a member of the Sawridge First Nation, Treaty 8, who grew up in Slave Lake, a small town 255 kilometres to the northwest, is no stranger to storytelling. The stories that engage her and give up subjects for paintings are those she knows intimately, like the ones that circulate in families and within communities, especially those of the survivors of residential schools, natural disasters like the devastating flooding and wildfires in Slave Lake (in 1988 and 2011, respectively), colonialism and systemic socio-economic injustice. She sees how to tell a story and whose stories can be told as important issues. She finds a model in Annie Pootoogook and the late Inuit artist’s straight-ahead depictions of contemporary Inuit life. For her part, Draney says, “I am living the experience of a Cree person,” and her work is intimate and personal, able to go to “hard places, tender places.” For her, the personal is political. She looks squarely at the community and socio-economic conditions that have shaped her but shies away from categorizations of her work as direct autobiography. She claims to be an unreliable narrator. Perhaps this is where the dark poetry of her work seeps in.

Draney paints selected moments, bits of stories, details of scenes. There is tension between what she paints and what she leaves out, what is given and what is withheld, what a spectator sees and what a spectator feels. When Roland Barthes, in Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, 1981, observed the sensation emanating from a photograph as “the pressure of the unspeakable which wants to be spoken,” he might be thinking about one of Draney’s paintings. When she says she is “looking for the punctum” or “delivering a punctum,” which she often does, she is referencing Barthes. The French semiotician and theorist identified the “punctum” as “this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me.” This is what Draney looks for when she makes a painting, the detail or fragment that wounds, bruises, stings, or is poignant. A “detonator.” The punctum is subjective, as Barthes explained. And the painter concurs, “As viewer you might not understand everything I was thinking and trying to communicate … but you will understand something. Something will resonate.”

Draney is not interested in story as a linear sequence of events but rather as the more complex and flexible narrative; events can be rearranged or singled out and the ways to shape them chosen from diverse forms. In applying Barthes’s terms Draney’s paintings are “writerly” rather than “readerly.” They are “ourselves writing,” filling in the empty spaces of unpainted canvas and imagining a context. Thus her paintings are open to multiple meanings and multiple ways of entering them.

If what Draney paints is unspeakable and her images are what she calls “bits of stories,” the array that unfolds in “Drink from the river” suggests that what Barthes calls “contiguous fragments” accrue in her body of work to form a larger writerly text. This, then, is a complex narrative about memory and what happens in life that illuminates how the past lives on in the present and retains its power to shape and wound. The punctum, which pricks and bruises, also has the power to expand the spectatorial view by provoking the desire that Draney cultivates. This is the desire to know more, which makes it a necessity to think. This is what makes her painting powerful and subversive in the way that it steadily and without polemics creates a world that addresses racism and class. ❚

“Drink from the river” was organized by The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, and was on exhibition from February 3, 2023, to May 14, 2023. It then toured to the Arts Club of Chicago, Chicago, from June 14, 2023, to August 15, 2023, and later to the Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton, from January 20, 2024, to May 5, 2024.

Nancy Tousley, recipient of the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts, is an art critic, writer and independent curator based in Calgary.