Victoria artist Elizabeth Litton spent last year in England, cut off from her son (who was in boarding school) and her husband (who had remained in Canada). She visited her elderly grandmothers, and both had tales to tell of loved ones in peril during the Second World War. As she passed the time, walking on greenways through the countryside, she was moved by the war memorials that marked every village.
“To the glorious dead,” she noted. “Think of those mothers who sent their lovely young boys off to war, and never saw them again. How could anybody think that sending your sons away could be worth … anything?” Tears came to Litton’s eyes with the thought of their sorrow.
Litton knows that art isn’t about art. It’s about philosophy, about religion, about where you come from. “It’s the sum of everything the artist has experienced,” she said. And the various facets of her practice, whether her apparently abstract paintings or high-realist portraits, are an expression of her deepest feelings. And these days, her thoughts are with people marked by war.
Her grandparents are English — her grandfather was an engineer invovled in the design of the Lancaster bomber — and they emigrated to South Africa after the Second World War. She was raised in, and indelibly marked by, that troubled land.
Profoundly pacifist, Litton knows what it’s like to feel threatened, and “to be capable of turning into a monster,” she told me. “That line between civilized and not, between human and animal — it doesn’t take very much to flip that switch.” She reflected that if she was living in Syria today she wouldn’t send her husband to fight — she’d fight herself!
After university she came to Canada with her husband and got her master’s degree in fine arts at the University of Victoria. While enormously grateful to be living in this caring and peaceful community, she is more than usually aware that we do our fighting by remote control, and that the veneer of civilization is very thin. Beyond that, she is “very grateful that wonderful boys and wives and mothers made a sacrifice to create this world, where I don’t have to be that monster I am capable of being.”
One soon realizes that her gorgeous striped paintings, with vertical drips poured down the canvas, are a meditation on the “war ribbon bars” from which medals hang on veterans’ uniforms. For many grieving families, these ribbons and medals were all that was left — that, and tears. She has made her art practice a witness to the courage, the bravery and the suffering of others.
“I don’t personally believe that we go anywhere after this place,” she told me. “What we do with this life is all-important, because you don’t get second chances.”
In England, everyone she met had been touched by the war, and this led her to use her skill as a portraitist to bear witness to the horror and the tragedy. People gave her images of their heroes. “They were young and they were beautiful. Some of them a little bit goofy, but they were young and they were beautiful,” she mused.
Photos of them, in uniform and looking to the future, show them in a moment of their greatest potential. “They hoped that they wouldn’t die, but many did. To me, painting them is a way of giving them that immortality that you would wish for in going to heaven or whatever.”
Litton is preparing an exhibition to be held at Red Art Gallery in Oak Bay in November. In addition to the war ribbon bar paintings and her portraits of young heroes, she hopes to involve Victorians in her memorial. She is asking for the loan of a photo from anyone with a young hero of their own — no matter what war, nor what side they fought on. The photos will be on display during the show, with or without names and stories. Each photo may be accompanied by a $2 donation, a way for the gallery to collect money to support a veterans’ charity and help out those who care for heroes whose lives continue to be shattered by war. One of those Victoria heroes will be chosen to become the subject of a portrait by Litton, and given to the person who loaned the photograph.
Through my long conversation in her studio, I was convinced by Litton’s sincerity and skill. If you would like to participate in her ongoing memorial, contact her through the Red Art Gallery ([email protected]).
The Torch — Be Yours to Hold it High: an exhibition by Elizabeth Litton, at Red Art Gallery, 2033 Oak Bay Ave. 250-881-0462, Oct. 29 to Nov. 13. redartgallery.ca