Robert Houle is one of the most celebrated painters working in Canada today. His powerful, sensuous, and socially consequential work has led to many honours in Canada. With Paris/Ojibwa in Paris in 2010-11 and the touring retrospective exhibit Red is Beautiful – seen across Canada and at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. (May 2023 – June 2024) – Houle’s unique admixture of Western abstraction and indigenous motifs and themes is also widely praised internationally.

The quality of his painting and thinking is readily seen in Untitled (Abstract with Thunderbird on Blue), 1998. A depthless and intimately worked mid-blue surface is inflected with the drips and rivulets of diluted pigment. This aspect of the painting is delicate in the extreme. Houle also animates his surface with bold markings and uses porcupine quills to subtly roughen the canvas. Three gestural lines in yellow track diagonally above a horizontal grid in blue and red. Presiding over the space Houle has created is a quickly drawn, blood red Thunderbird (Animkii), one of the most powerful protective forces in the Anishinaabeg universe. In this strikingly tactile and symbolic work, Houle shows us the force of this usually invisible mythical bird.

Mark A. Cheetham