The Stranger Song (2024)
40" x 60", enamel and oil on canvas
Collection of Auberge Shalom

The Stranger Song takes its name and emotional register from Leonard Cohen’s song of the same title, a meditation on disillusionment, fading glory, and the slow erosion of what once seemed certain. The painting does not illustrate the lyrics. It tries to embody the unease running through them.

Painted in late September, the work began with snow gathered from a hockey arena in Ville Saint-Laurent, a place of repeated seasons, early mornings, and countless passing games. Left to act on the enamel, the snow pits and pools the paint, leaving a surface that reads as both decay and record. The colour moves from a pale, burnished gold at the top, through a band of ember and coral, into cobalt, teal, and violet that deepen toward a dark, bronze-green base. Near the top, the gold is cratered and breaking apart, a memory of grandeur that has tarnished. The embers below are what remains of its heat. The blues cool the composition into something quieter and more resigned, the feeling of arriving in a present that no longer matches the promises of the past.

The painting extends the song’s disillusionment into a wider cultural unease: ideals that have lost their hold, a self that feels misplaced, and a flood of conflicting information that makes it hard to know what to believe. Standing before it, the viewer is invited to sit with impermanence rather than resolve it, and to see desire and conviction as things that weather like any other surface.

The Stranger Song was made for Abstractions, an exhibition in collaboration with the University Club of Montreal. It was also shown at a private ekphrastic cuisine event exploring communication between art and taste, where the painting’s mood and texture were set in conversation with food. It now resides at Auberge Shalom, where its calm, weathered presence brings a sense of peace to the residence.

October 14, 2024