Liberation and Modernity in the Wake of the War - Literature and Painting in Quebec: From Imagery to Identity - page 217

and the spectator), every bit as suggestive of creation and creativity,
and every bit as linked to literature. Pellan acknowledges the role of
poetry in his own work, while paying homage to his friend the poet
and painter Roland Giguère: 'La poésie n'est pas exclue de mes préoc-
cupations. Loin de là, je l'ai toujours considérée comme un élément im-
portant de la peinture. Pour ma part, j'ai tenté de créer un monde
poétique par le truchement des moyens dont je disposais, c'est-à-dire, le
dessin, la couleur, l'imagination. Giguère est doublement poète: il est
poète de l'expression verbale, il est également poète de l'expression pic-
turale.' (137; Poetry is not excluded from my preoccupations. Far from
that, I have always considered it as an important element of my paint-
ing. As for myself, I've tried to create a poetic world through the inter-
mediary of the means at my disposal, that is, line, colour, imagination.
Giguère is doubly poetic: he's a poet with verbal expression; he's
equally a poet with pictorial expression.) 19
Pellan's statement provides not only confirmation of the main premise
of this topic - the intimate relationship between literature and painting in
Quebec - but also a ready transition into the poetry of Roland Giguère,
who founded the forward-looking Éditions Erta in 1949, through which
he published most of his work in the fifties,20 20 a period he describes with
vivid fondness and in familiar terms of darkness and light: 'Je me sou-
viens des années '50 comme d'un moment d'effervescence extraordinaire,
il y avait quelque chose de clandestin dans ces activités que menaient alors
quelques poètes isolés. C'était, on le sait, la Grande Noirceur. Nous étions
un peu comme des taupes qui creusaient un tunnel vers la lumière.' ('À
propos,' 164-5; I remember the fifties as a moment of extraordinary effer-
vescence; there was something clandestine in the activities undertaken
then by several isolated poets. It was, we know, the time of Great Darkness.
We were a bit like moles digging a tunnel towards the light.) For Giguère,
like Pellan, the garden is a central theme that embodies his overall vision
of life and art, a repository of light at the end of the tunnel . 21
In 'L'ombre des jardins' (1956), the garden suggests the potentials of
life that are often left in the dark, neglected by the gardener:
Le fléau erre dans le jardin pendant que la jardinière fait sa nuit. Regarde
les saisons de santé, les chemins d'abandon, les eaux heureuses, regarde
l'osier de ta vie qui tresse un panier de fruits. Regarde et ne vois pas, dors
et n'entends pas.
Des mantes religieuses meurent autour des lampes,
Ce que la jardinière ne voit pas, le jardin le reflète.