A Messenger From The North – A Painting About a Canada Goose

When I look back at the paintings I’ve made over the past two decades, a few things rise to the surface like landmarks on a familiar map. I return again and again to the stories of my Canadian experience as seen through the eyes of a woman travelling, observing, and painting her way across the country. I’m drawn to figurative landscapes where people anchor the land and the land shapes them in return. And woven through this long journey is one recurring companion: the Canada Goose.

The goose has appeared in many of my narratives about Canada. Sometimes it stands at the centre, a full-bodied protagonist. Other times it moves along the edges, framing the story with its quiet authority. No matter its position, it carries its own weight of meaning.

To many, the Canada Goose is more than a bird. Its steadfast flight speaks of loyalty, cooperation, communication, and endurance. Its V-formation is a testament to shared leadership. Its lifelong bonds echo the resilience of relationships built through weather and time. Across Indigenous cultures, the goose is a sacred seasonal marker, a signal of change and continuity. In folklore, it can move between worlds, a guide or a wandering soul. It is a creature stitched deeply into the cycles of nature and into our collective sense of the North.

In this new painting, a woman stands in the open hush of a snow-covered landscape, her gaze steady beneath the warm shelter of a fur hat. Behind her, the sky burns in a late-day flare of orange, as if the sun has cracked the horizon and spilled its final breath of light across a ridge of deep blue mountains.

A Canada Goose cuts across her face in full flight, its wing sweeping through the scene like a living brushstroke. It becomes an envoy, sliding the wild world directly into her line of sight, binding her to the land and to the long migratory stories carried on beating wings. Her embroidered coat glows with reds and blues, a pulse of northern life against the winter quiet.

The painting settles into something part portrait and part vision: a moment where human presence and the instinctive rhythm of nature align in brief, luminous agreement. The goose becomes the messenger, the woman the witness, and the landscape a silent accomplice to their shared moment of connection.