Ross Rheaume. Photo by Mike Levin.

The emphasis here is on story, with narrative and realism because abstract roars of rage that typify contemporary art, he feels, are the least adventurous. “Modern-art history says art has evolved and that it’s better. Wrong. Canvas isn’t better than rock, and Avant-garde has no archetypal resonance…… If there is no story, there’s no (empathy).”

Rheaume has always tried to paint a well-told story, but he’s been a loner, using isolation for inspiration. Until this year when he hooked up with a group of four others, all but one a relative, and found a kindred belief in the “somewhat modern conceit that only the bizarre deserves to be seen or heard.

“We’re part of a 400-year-old tradition that says art is cyclical, that it doesn’t move linearly from crude to fine, that nothing (in the creative process) is new.”

So they called themselves the North Light Artists Group and will hold their first show at The Green Door Restaurant starting August 23 and running until September 18. The question that inspires them: why art as a spiritual path has become an excuse for narcissistic navel-gazing?

All five members have individual creative paths: Ross Rheaume as a painter/accountant; Dave Rheaume as a TV director; Amanda Rheaume as a singer/songwriter; Anne Marie Bourgeois as an art therapist; and Blair Haynes as a film marketer.

Sparks Street, by Ross Rheaume. Courtesy of North Light Artists Group.

Every group with a radical view (some might even call it a “school”) needs a nemesis. For North Lights, it is the Group of Seven, the hallowed set of painters that define Canadian art. “The story of Canada is not just about its landscapes but about its people. Canada as the spirit of the pine tree is wrong. Russia has pine trees,” Rheaume says.

What bothers him most is the Group of Seven’s manufactured iconography. How member Lawren Harris used millions of dollars from the Harris/Massey/Bronfman family businesses to market the painters’ work as the Spirit of Canada, an invented mythology that showed up everywhere from cross-Canada train tours to postcards.

The frustration within North Light is not about the quality of The Group of Seven’s work (and Rheaume is quick to exclude Emily Carr, and one or two of the group’s individual paintings, from his broad brush strokes), but about its artistic message – that the best of Canadian art is devoid of humans. “(They) painted the tree. We have painted the man who cut down the tree,”  says Dave Rheaume.

Children of the Land, by Anne Marie Bougeois. Courtesy of North Light Artists Group.

The story they want to tell is about the winter slush in your shoes on a city street or the uneasy relationship we have with indigenous tribal imagery. Their paintings all have roots in existing moments of human action, and that’s the whole purpose: recombining artistic skill with the message that human experience is about what we can recognize, even if it uses animals as star charts on 15,000-year-old cave walls.