June 21, 2001

Plains Folk: Loaves Without Fishes–A Plains Depiction

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

Plains Folk: 

After completing some work for Ducks Unlimited at the University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, I took the opportunity to visit St. Thomas More College Chapel and view the remarkable William Kurelek mural that graces its north interior wall. Now, regular readers of this column probably do not consider me a particularly reverent man, but I challenge any one of you, if you are a plainsperson, to stand before this humble and grand work and not be moved.

"Humble," I say, because although Kurelek is acclaimed as a prairie regional and Canadian national treasure, he was a modest man working in humble ways. He was a memory artist, often depicting scenes from his Ukrainian farm boyhood in Manitoba, and a naive primitivist in style. (I read his books, A Prairie Boy’s Summer and A Prairie Boy’s Winter, to my grandson.) "Grand," I say, because the work is large in both its size and its themes.

The mural, painted in 1976, is based on the story of the Loaves and Fishes as recorded in Matthew XIV. (So Kurelek himself said; I think he relied also on other Gospel accounts of the incident, because Matthew does not mention the boy who provided the victuals, but I think I see the boy in the painting.) There are lots of loaves, but no fishes; this is a work for wheat country. Christ stands central to the field, his arms raised in what seems to me an ambiguous blessing. Around him disciples--here depicted as black-robed Basilian fathers, who recruited Kurelek to paint in the chapel--gathering and distributing loaves.

Christ’s upraised arms, and the birds spiraling toward the sun directly above, divide the painting into left and right halves. The left half is devoted to the peoples of the prairies before mass settlement arrived. Natives, Metis, Mounties, surveyors, and Chinese railroad construction workers stream in loose procession toward the field behind Christ where the multitude is being seated. They proceed across prairie foregrounded by a Red River cart and a family of flickertail gophers. In the distant background a thunderstorm approaches, with a herd of bison running before it.

Across the right half of the mural stream the immigrants--English, Dutch, Ukrainian, the whole works--also moving to join the seated multitude. They are crossing a wheat field that is half harvested. Neat rows of sheaves dropped from the carrier on the binder stretch into the distance, and grain elevators spike the horizon. Closer by, stookers--two of whom represent Kurelek’s immigrant parents--are at work. Still closer, across a three-wire fence, is summer fallow, with gulls picking through the clods.

On each side, certain individuals are leaving the procession, deliberately turning their backs on God. One of these on the right side is Kurelek as a boy, his face screwed up in rebellious torment.

I should not neglect to note that at the base of the mural, Saint Thomas More and Cardinal Henry Newman point out the path to Christ. They do not seem to be of the prairies, however; they provide something like a celebrity endorsement of the proceedings depicted.

I was joined in the chapel by Margaret Sanche, college archivist, a woman whose knowledge and generosity model the ideals of the college. We talked for quite a while about the story of the mural, about its themes and details, about Kurelek the man. Then I sat by myself for a while.

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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2941, tom@plainsfolk.com 
Editor: Gary Moran, (701) 231-7865, gmoran@ndsuext.nodak.edu 

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