When artist Gertrude Kearns heard that Corporal David Braun had been killed by a suicide bomber last week just outside Kandahar, she responded a little differently than her downtown Toronto neighbours. Kearns returned from Afghanistan seven months ago after spending five weeks in uniform, embedded with the Canadian Forces. "When you have an on-the-ground understanding of what's happening over there," she explained, "you feel it in your mind and in your gut."
As Canada's death count in the Afghan mission nears 30, so too does the declining percentage of those who support our 2,300 troops' involvement. And death and ambivalence saturate the six sombre canvases Kearns painted from her experiences. "Being around war kind of blows any philosophical thoughts out of your head," she says, sipping tea in her sunny studio.
But along with ambivalence, what stares from her canvases is respect for the men and women who have put themselves in harm's way. "I can relate to them now with a growing sense of the hard practical reality of a theatre of war," she says. "A rational sensibility develops which can transcend the emotional. That's how soldiers have to function."
Kearns's six canvases were supposed to have been flown to Kandahar next month to be displayed in Canadian Forces HQ. The military has since decided the works are too significant and too fragile.
"We saw that more care should be taken," says Colonel Steve Noonan, former commander of Task Force Afghanistan, under whose aegis Kearns's visit occurred. "We want to see them get appropriate exposure." Negotiations are under way to install them in Ottawa, possibly at the Canadian War Museum or the Department of National Defence.
The canvases could draw fire en route; Kearns's works tend to create their own conflict zones. Last year, Cliff Chadderton, militant chairman of the National Council of Veteran Associations, threatened to boycott the Canadian War Museum for exhibiting Kearns's shocking painting of a Canadian soldier torturing Somali teenager Shidane Arone to death.
Retired Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire voiced his discomfort with the museum's prominent placement of his portrait by Kearns (the anguished image has since been moved to an interior gallery). Nor has the War Museum yet displayed a Kearns image of a wryly smiling retired General Lewis MacKenzie, which bears the bold words: KEEP THE PEACE OR I'LL KILL YOU.
Laura Brandon, the museum's war art historian, says the museum has more than 13,000 works of art, but calls Kearns's work "tremendous."
MacKenzie also likes her work. "My butt suffered, but the painting was flattering," he says of his portrait. As for the text, he says, "I used that phrase today when I did a BBC interview and said, 'Peacekeeping is: Please, we're here to help. But peacemaking means that: Keep the peace or I'll kill you.' "
Thanks to such images, Kearns has become one of Canada's best-known war artists since the Second World War. Born in 1950 to the family of Frederic Steiger, a professional artist, Kearns grew up in Toronto in the era of Vietnam draft dodgers, when few artists gave a flying paint fleck for military subjects. She didn't go to art school, but a life-drawing class she attended in her mid-20s was so enthralling that she moved into portraiture.
Then, during the 1991 Gulf War, Kearns found herself compelled by the newscast images of stupendous explosions of military might. "I had a sense of the power of the weapons, but also of resisting the seduction of the whole thing," she says.
She has tackled other subjects, too, from storm-lashed seacoasts to a series on the battered face of art critic John Bentley Mays. But the military, and its experiences in Somalia and Rwanda, branded her imagination. In 1997, the War Museum acquired two of her paintings of Kyle Brown, who was implicated in Arone's killing. Later, it picked up her MacKenzie and Dallaire portraits. These aren't just faces; there's Manichean meaning in the black-and-white cubes Brown holds in his hands, sardonic punning in the title of her Dallaire series ( UNdone).
Some of her work was made possible under the Canadian Forces Artists Program (CFAP), which enables artists to record Canada's soldiers in action. It was through CFAP in 2004 that Kearns underwent a nine-day training session at Ontario's Camp Petawawa. She finished, even as soldiers with sprained ankles were airlifted out, and earned the military's confidence that she could survive Afghanistan's rigours.
After obtaining clearance from her own HQ (her children, Hector, then 20, and Iona, then 18), Kearns donned a combat uniform and flew to Kandahar in December. She wore no hijab, just a helmet. At tribal councils, or the bedsides of wounded civilians, she sometimes sketched or shot photos; other times, she merely absorbed detail.
All the large, rectangular canvases stacked around her studio tell stories. One recalls Jan. 15, the day Kearns had breakfast with Canadian diplomat Glyn Berry. Later came the news that his convoy had been attacked. Berry was killed, and survivors were being rushed to the base hospital. Kearns tried to help, mopping blood off the floor. Months later, she produced a painting. The foreground shows a woman doctor and a local woman in a blue burka, both bending over a child. Beyond them is a medic, Master Corporal Paul Franklin of 1 Field Ambulance, cradling a hypodermic and explaining its use to another child. Not shown are Franklin's legs. One was blown off in the attack on Berry's convoy.
The War Museum's Brandon isn't sure if this painting will join her collection. But, she says, "Kearns is a very thoughtful artist. She's not just painting what she sees. She paints a multifaceted debate."
For her part, Kearns wants to return to Kandahar, even though she, better than most, appreciates the dangers. "Everyone was saying even before January 15 that it would have to be bad before it got better. . . . So these works reflect a turning point in our engagement," she says. "I hope they have enough depth to resonate with our current accomplishments and despairs."