Living in Halifax for the past 10 years has been a process of becoming aware of, and then falling in love with Atlantic Canadian art. I’ve been especially taken by the 20th century school of realism based around the Art College at Mount Allison in Sackville, NB.
This piece reproduces a talk I gave at the University of King’s College Chapel in the Spring of 2024. The prompt was “Hope without Optimism.” This immediately brought to mind for me a passage from Chesterton’s Orthodoxy about the spiritual virtues of the realist–the one who neither judges the world (like the pessimist) nor loves a part of the world at the expense of the whole (like the optimist). The realist loves the world as it is and for what it is. I have found that beginning from this insight opens the door to appreciating in new ways those artists who dedicated their lives to the vision of the Real.
“Hope without Optimism: The Atlantic Canadian Realists.” In Each Life a Poem: Celebrating Twenty Years of Halifax Humanities, edited by Susan M. Dodd et al., 146–160. Halifax, NS: Halifax Humanities Society, 2026.
Image: Tom Forrestall, The Golden Wrapper, 2013, egg tempera on masonite, 29.25” x 32.5”.
