Impressions of Difference: The Painted Canvases of Helen McNicoll

Type of resource
Author/collaborator
Title
Impressions of Difference: The Painted Canvases of Helen McNicoll
Abstract
The author examines the works of Montreal impressionist painter Helen McNicoll (1879–1915), analysing them as "creative inventions that mediate the irreducible gap between cultural symbolization and experience". McNicoll was a painter of women and girls, and the author centres on the difference that gender makes in her canvases. The author argues that femininity is not the works' only operative axis of distinction. She points out that McNicoll's nationality and, most significantly, her deafness, conjoined with gender as constitutive and structurally overlapping elements of her pictorial production. She explains that the artist's applications of paint to canvas are visible renderings of an ambiguous relation to symbolization wrought by this conjunction. In this context, McNicoll's choice of pictorial style is especially apposite, and the author explores the way in which impressionism's ideal of direct correspondence between experience and representation resonated forcibly with the ideologies of femininity and language available to a deaf woman painter at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Publication
Art History
Volume
Vol. 27
Issue
no. 2
Pages
212-249
Date
April 2004
Language
en
Citation
Huneault, Kristina. “Impressions of Difference: The Painted Canvases of Helen McNicoll.” Art History Vol. 27, no. 2 (April 2004): 212–249.
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