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The Honourable Noël A. Kinsella

“Magic Realist,” chronicler of a Maritime “rustic attitude,” a “visual poet,” over a career spanning nearly seven decades, Tom Forrestall has lived and worked in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. Forrestall’s prolific creative output includes paintings in egg tempera, acrylic and watercolour, and writing in journals that he has kept without interruption since the early 1950s.

The landscapes and people of the Maritime provinces have inspired Forrestall since the beginning of his career. The streets and alleys of the neighbourhoods in Dartmouth and Fredericton, the woods and orchards of the Annapolis Valley or rural New Brunswick, and those who live and work in them all serve to generate ideas – what he calls “visions” – which he translates as paintings.

As a Magic Realist, Forrestall is part of a group of East Coast Canadian artists, including Alex Colville, and Mary and Christopher Pratt, who studied or taught art at New Brunswick’s Mount Allison University. Although their personal styles and approaches are similar, each explored in different ways the expressive range of Realism, and in the process established a unique school of modern Canadian painting.

Colville’s formidable influence on Forrestall set him on an artistic path that was grounded in a deep understanding of artistic materials and processes, especially egg tempera painting, an ancient process demanding a sure sense of drawing and meticulous brushwork. Forrestall quickly mastered this demanding method whose rules he adapted to both watercolour and acrylic painting. As a result, all his paintings show a keen eye attuned to capturing nuances of light and the fine details of his subjects that he lays down with a delicate, sure hand.

More than precisely rendered records of people and places, Forrestall captures a sense of uncanniness in his subjects. While his compositions are sharply focused, creating hyper-real illusions, he injects into his interpretations of them mysterious, inscrutable overtones. The “magic” of a Forrestall painting is not immediately evident in the represented object or person, but rather seems to hide behind it, absent but nonetheless present in the picture.

These qualities are all evident in this portrait of Hon. Noël Kinsella, Speaker of the Senate of Canada from 2006 to 2014. Forrestall has placed his subject, dressed in black officiate robes adorned with a military ribbon and holding a scroll with a red wax seal, at the centre of a formally balanced composition, standing in front of the ornately carved Speaker’s chair flanked by a Canadian flag. Also shown in the work are emblems of the office and the man: a tricorne hat with a pair of white gloves set on its brim are resting on a stack of books arranged on the table at the Speaker’s right hand.

On the back of the painting, Forrestall has written a lengthy commentary about his “vision” for the painting, while also acknowledging his brother, Michael Forrestall, who served in the Canadian Senate from 1990 to 2004. In his painted inscription, Forrestall writes that he was seeking to render the Speaker with “a calm dignity” in a way that a photograph could not attain, and which he struggled to reach “on a plateau beyond my grasp.”

While the painting attests to Speaker Kinsella’s career in academia and politics, Forrestall captures his humanity informed by a lifelong pursuit of human rights.

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Tom Smart is the Director and CEO of the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, New Brunswick.