‘My Land(scape) is Winter’ - Literature and Painting in Quebec: From Imagery to Identity - page 299

the perceptual and emotional weight of winter. It is, however, as with
Vigneault, less through the home itself than by the means of its repre-
sentation that culture comes to dominate nature, in Côté's case not
only by the innovative use of colour, but also by the highly visible and
very dynamic brushwork. 28 Applied in patches of strokes, alternating
in direction and streaked by the bristles of the brush, the swathes of
paint not only suggest the undulations of the landscape but also cap-
ture the viewer's attention, standing out on the surface of the canvas,
where they reveal the hand of the artist and trigger the imagination of
the viewer; as Babinska notes, 'l'œil moderne aime l'épaisseur de la
peinture, les sillons de la brosse, le rebours des tracés, le mélange au
carrefour des couleurs. Cette peinture en volumes subtils accroche in-
cessamment la lumière naturelle et sollicite l'imaginaire tactile du spec-
tateur.' (90; the modern eye likes the thickness of the paint, the furrows
of the brush, the nap of the lines, the mixing point of the colours. This
painting in subtle volumes incessantly attracts the natural light and en-
gages the spectator's tactile imagination.)
This is not to imply, however, that the prominence of colour and
brushwork in any way diminishes the painting's composition. Indeed,
in the work of Côté, whom Babinska aptly calls an 'architecte' (30), the
structure of the painting often emerges subtly and progressively from
the arrangement of the colours. Here, for example, the nearly sub-
merged fence posts in the lower left corner lead the eye into the paint-
ing and up the fence-line, becoming increasingly pink as it moves
towards the massive pink barn at the right. The barn itself is turned
towards a line of pink houses running diagonally left, where it meets
the houses on the shore, which in turn form a counter-diagonal line
heading towards a stand of trees at far right, slanting upward towards
the far shore such that it brings the river to a point and lends it a trian-
gular shape, matching that of the island. Indeed, the entire painting
can be seen as a series of interlocking wedges that imposes a quasi-
geometrical order on the irregular shapes of the natural landforms, an
order rendered all the more visible by the uniformity of the winter
snows, which smother the details that would have hindered perception
of the underlying architecture. As Guy Boulizon puts it, in a generaliza-
tion that could apply to Côté as well as Bergeron and Leclerc, 'Pour un
peintre, l'hiver et la neige sont d'étonnantes occasions d'explorer
l'organisation spatiale et d'exprimer son langage plastique ... Et si l'artiste
utilise une même sorte de touche, dans tout le tableau, l'impression de
bidimensionnalité et de planéité peut être encore renforcée.' (166; For a