Norval's trailblazing work as an artist gave birth to a totally unique Canadian school of art called Woodland or Legend or Medicine painting. He is an Ojibwe whose work has influenced many younger Ojibwe and Cree artists, such as Blake Debassige, Tom Chee Chee, and Leland Bell.

Because he grew up in the remote wilderness areas near Thunder Bay, Norval was removed from the influence of other artists, who traditionally group together in urban environments where they talk art and copy each other's styles. Unlike them, Norval - largely by circumstance of where he was born - was a one-man band.

Norval's painting style is therefore entirely original with him. It evolved because he wanted to express stories, and legends of his Ojibwe people, and thought it could be best expressed through the symbols and pictographs of his ancestors, which he found scratched on the cliffs and rocks in the wilderness areas of North Western Ontario.

Norval was born in Northwestern Ontario, on the Sand Point Reserve, near Beardmore, Ontario, March 14, 1932. He grew up on the shores of Lake Nipigon.

Norval went to the Indian boarding school in Ft. William (now Thunder Bay) but only got to the fourth grade.

A bigger influence on his life was his grandfather, from whom Norval absorbed stories, myths, and spiritual tales of the Ojibwe people. These became the fountain of inspiration that has influenced all Norval's painting life. At first Norval would draw the images he conjured up from the stories he heard, with a stick on the sandy beaches of Lake Nipigon, and watch as the waves brushed them quickly away. "It is best this way," Norval could hear the elders say, "Do not give away the secrets of our people in your drawings." It was also his grandfather who gave Norval the name Copper Thunderbird, Miskwaabik Animiiki, with which - in Cree syllabics - he signs all his paintings.

On the reserve Norval explored old historic sites and canoe routes, and sought out, especially, ancient Ojibwe petroglyphs or rock art. When he tried to paint his thoughts, dreams and visions, seeking to form a spiritual connection with his forbears, he was warned against it by older people in the tribe.

When he was 19, Norval got tuberculosis - a common and often fatal disease among Indian people. He was sent to a long-term care hospital at Ft. William, where one of the doctors encouraged him to paint. At the hospital, he also met Harriet Kakegamic, a Cree, whom he married.

Harriet taught him syllabics – in fact it was she who taught him how to write his own name - and they had six children before the marriage broke up. Like so many artistic people – who grapple constantly with inner demons that drove them creatively - Norval proved to be a hard guy to be married to.

Still at the hospital, Morrisseau had a series of dreams and visions that he said were calling him to be a shaman-artist - in other words, a psychic or medicine man, those people who stand midway between ordinary people and the spirit world beyond. "My paintings are icons, that is to say they are images which help focus on spiritual powers, generated by traditional belief and wisdom" he would say. (below, Animal Totem 1976)

Like so many First Nations people across Canada - even today - Norval grew up in poverty (during the 1940s and 50s). Money was hard to come by for people with few marketable skills, living in remote communities, where there are no jobs. He traded paintings for art supplies, and food for his growing family.

In the early 1950s he met Selwyn Dewdney, a former missionary who was studying rock art on the Canadian shield. Norval was his local guide. (Dewdney would later edit Morrisseau’s book of legends.)

In 1962 Norval met Jack Pollock, a Toronto artist and gallery-owner who was teaching painting in Northern Ontario. Pollock was so impressed that he put on a solo exhibition of Norval’s art in his Toronto gallery. It was an astonishing success; all the paintings sold on the first day.

But Norval was not a success at home.

A corrosive mix of jealousy, and fear that Norval was undermining the spiritual heritage of his people, led to bitter words against him in his home community. The criticism became stronger when Dewdney edited Morrisseau’s book “Legends of my People: The Great Ojibway”

In defence Norval said all he wanted to do was restore cultural pride in a people he felt were downtrodden and heavily Catholicized by missionaries. Other native artists saw what he was trying to do and took up his example. In fact the visual language he developed went on to redirect and influence powerfully a whole generation of First Nations artists across Canada.

Norval, as an artist, never wavered in being true to his roots. (Some have noted with sadness that some of the artists who were influenced by Norval have gone to study in Santa Fe, under the American Indian Navajo painters like RC Gorman, and have returned to Canada painting “US Indian style,” hoping to find the fame and fortune of these economically successful Americans.How legitimately can they speak now on behalf of Canadian Indian culture?

As his artistic reputation grew, Norval donated paintings to raise money for the Indian school on his reserve and for other community needs of the people, including food, and heat in winter. Norval’s spiritual journey has been long and hard, in fact far harder than that of most artists, because he is an Indian as well.

Artists in general have chosen an extremely hard way to make a living, even when working in their own culture among people they are part of, and whose values and milieu they understand.

Norval was depending on making a living by selling art to appeal to a culture he was “apart” from. A culture that routinely, directly and indirectly, discriminates against First Nations people, and the ideas they stand for.

Yet that culture was his only source of income to keep body and soul together. Well body anyway...

The soul was another thing altogether...

Norval was brought up a Catholic and has struggled over that experience his whole life, being a spiritual – as well as a cross-cultural - wanderer. In 1976 he adopted the Eckankar religion which focuses on astral soul travel, which Norval said has echoes of Native religious beliefs.

But the demons set loose by his fractured existence as a man, an Indian, and as a painter, continued to burden Norval with health and alcohol-related problems. The drinking crises in his life have undermined himself and his art.

In 1972 he suffered severe burns in a hotel fire in Vancouver. For several years thereafter, while recovering in a Catholic-run detox centre, his art reverted to themes that included Roman-Catholic imagery.

Was this a step forward or backwards? Or forwards for the man, and backwards for the artist? Not an easy life to live, is that of Norval Morrisseau.

In spite of it all Norval has had more than 40 one-man shows, many of them in France. Over 12,000 people attended one of his shows there.

His work now hangs in the most prestigious art galleries and museums around the world, and has had many exhibits in Canada and Europe (especially France). 

At Expo 67 he was commissioned to paint the mural for the Indians of Canada Pavilion.

He was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1970, and in 1978, received Canada's highest civilian honour, the prestigious Order of Canada medal.

In 1989, he was the only Canadian painter invited to participate in the "Magicians Of The Earth" exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, France, as part of the celebrations of the 1989 Bicentennial of the French Revolution.

Norval presently lives in British Columbia.

Left, the Shaman's Journey, 1980.

But with success comes a price...

Go to Norval Morrisseau Fakes