In this expansive work, Morrisseau offers viewers no direct narrative, yet motifs familiar from across his career emerge with renewed intensity. The composition may evoke a migratory passage, a collective journey that unfolds across a stretch of a turquoise acrylic wash. Protective beings appear to guide the travellers, whose vessel is the massive form of the Medicine Serpent, a form Morrisseau identified as the emblem of the medicine man [1]. Among the group, one figure is distinguished by horns or antennae that rise from his head, marking him as a shamanic figure.

The image also resonates with certain accounts of the Midewiwin (Grand Medicine Society). In these accounts, when European diseases devastated communities, the Anishinaabe were said to receive a vision foretelling the arrival of the Medicine Serpent. From this being came knowledge of healing rituals, ceremonial practices, and the use of herbs – teachings that shaped the foundation of Midewiwin practice.

Whether the canvas depicts a literal journey, a transmission of knowledge, or a fusion of both, its intensity rests in Morrisseau’s mastery of form and vision.

Rather than a continuous surface, the image is divided into two panels, directing the viewer’s eye to linger at the point where they meet. This pause becomes meaningful. It underscores the serpent’s role as vessel, a form that carries the figures while also spanning the space between one panel and the next. The division does not break the image but instead heightens its sense of continuity, as if the serpent were bridging a distance that exists both within the canvas and beyond.

Characteristic of the artist, colour aids to drive rhythm, with purples, reds, greens, and yellows flashing against the turquoise wash. Each figure is ringed in concentric bands that reappear within the serpent’s segmented body, so that what first seems improvised gradually reads as a deliberate colour scheme. The same hues pulse through both figures and serpent, binding travellers to the vessel that bears them until body and presence feel inseparable. This repetition is most compelling at the centre, where the panels meet. The serpent’s segmented band transmits these colours across the divide, linking the two halves into a single whole.

Closer looking reveals unexpected details. At the lower right of the right panel, the outline of an object emerges. It resists clear identification, though it appears to have a footed base and a three-holed edge that attaches to a long rectangular element. Above, near the upper centre, a footprint is plainly visible, almost certainly the artist’s own. In a climate where debates about Morrisseau’s authorship and legacy generate constant noise, such traces remind us that the works were made not in some abstract vacuum but through a lived, bodily process. These chance inclusions collapse the distance between painter and painting, anchoring the image to Morrisseau’s studio, his movement, and his presence.

1. Norval Morrisseau and Selwyn Dewdney, ed., Legends of My People: The Great Ojibway, (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson Limited, 1965), p. 47.

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