This seven-part series explores grief through works from the Dalhousie Art Gallery’s permanent collection, tracing the emotional journey from shock and denial through anger, bargaining, guilt, and depression to final acceptance.
Considering the times of loss and chaos we’re living through and so much scattering of attention online, this series explores life’s reality of what it means to go through the tides. With every wave, I hope you find comfort and peace, the silver lining of the harsh reality, and the beauty I hope to walk you through.
I wrote this the end of 2025, and now, a few months in, it’s truer than ever. You are seen. I hope these words comfort you in the heaviness in your hearts.
1st Stage: Shock / Disbelief
Day to day, we uphold our promises and keep our word, ensuring expectations are met regardless of circumstance. Yet despite our intentions, we often lack control over what happens. We break those words, or at least fail to fulfill them. Human nature recoils from surprise even as our hopes get squashed. The world never promised to make sense; it only promised that nature is change, that nothing remains fixed.
Francisco Goya understood this intimately. After a severe illness in 1792 left him completely deaf, his work grew increasingly dark and introspective, culminating in his late series of prints, including the Disparates (Follies). Created during a period of political turmoil and personal isolation, these works satirize human institutions through grotesque, dreamlike imagery by commenting on social chaos, broken vows, and the absurdity of our attempts to impose order on an indifferent world.
In Disparate Matrimonial, Goya depicts two figures with their backs pressed against each other, one hunched and carrying an unbalanced weight, the burden of responsibility rendered visible and grotesque. Naked and vulnerable, they lean on one another while pointing toward a crowd of horrified, haunting, disfigured witnesses. This is the institution that first saw the upholding of vows, the witnesses who stood at the beginning when promises were made with conviction.
Now those promises have melted like objects losing form under heat and pressure. What remains is only a remnant of what was and a confrontation with what has come to be. The crowd’s horror reflects our own: the disbelief that strikes when we realize the world we created existed only in our imagination. The marriage, the promise, the sense that it was all supposed to make sense, were never guaranteed. We’re left staring at the grotesque truth that shocked Goya into his dark visions: the covenant was always fragile, and we were never as in control as we believed.
2nd Stage: Denial
Marilyn Monroe remains one of the most influential actresses and cultural figures of the 20th century. Her performances pulsed with magic and childlike charm that captivated audiences, and her blockbuster films, along with her appearances alongside the Kennedys, made her one of the first celebrities to blur the line between entertainment and politics. Her energy seemed unparalleled; admirers assumed no tragedy could touch someone so luminous. She was, after all, a marvelous actress, and with that skill came a facade that concealed the reality of her life from those who only saw her in the spotlight.
Behind the glamour, Monroe faced hardships no amount of beauty or performance could mask. She grew up in an abusive family, had three miscarriages, and struggled with depression, bipolar disorder, and severe anxiety. In her final days, she had to maintain the performance for a world that never looked away while dealing with neuroticism. Everything was seen, and stepping out of character meant career downfall. She denied it all publicly while everything inside was collapsing. When Monroe took her own life away from watching eyes, only her housekeeper found Monroe lying unconscious on luxurious bed sheets, a final rest for the restless, where the bed’s promise of comfort was kept only in death.
In Harold Town’s Superstar, Monroe’s image shifts from the vibrant, familiar illustrations of movie posters to stark black and white rendered in just a few decisive brushstrokes. Parts of her face remain undrawn, offering only suggestive details, just how the world saw her: both viewer and viewed looking at reality wrong. Not because it wasn’t there, but because it wasn’t pleasant to acknowledge. In denial, sketching only what we can bear to see, leaving the rest to space.
3rd Stage: Anger
Fritz Brandtner was a pioneer of modernism in Canada who believed art had the power to express both “the good and evil in life.” After surviving the trenches of the First World War and four years as a prisoner of war, he had witnessed hell on earth. Yet rather than letting bitterness consume him, he channeled his experience into his work as an artist and teacher, eventually moving to Canada, where he used his art to advocate for democracy while warning against the dangers of nationalism and materialism.
In this striking linocut, Brandtner captures a fundamental truth about anger in the aftermath of trauma. A towering angelic figure looms over a burning city while wrapping its hands around the neck of what seems to be a demon. The flames rise in violent red slashes, and indifferent to the dagger stuck on its wing. Yet the angel’s posture suggests something more complex than pure rage, a wrestling with the impulse to destroy what has been built.
A justified anger, where flashbacks and triggers place us one glance away from chaos. Brandtner understood that integration doesn’t erase what happened; part of our identity remains shaped by horror. The image asks: when we have every right to burn it all down, to take hold of evil and strangle it, what keeps us from crossing that line?
The answer lies in the artist’s choice to create rather than destroy. Like rocks that separate a turbulent ocean from solid land, Brandtner draws a boundary, not to suppress his anger, but to give it form and meaning. The angel hovers above the flames but does not add to them. This is anger that acknowledges its power while choosing another path, transforming wrath into witness, chaos into creation.
4th Stage: Bargaining
Miller Gore Brittain was a war veteran at World War Two as a bomb-aimer, flying 37 operational missions before becoming an official war artist in 1945. Having already lived through the Great Depression, he created important documentary work depicting the day-to-day suffering of the working class before turning his attention to capturing the experience of war. Not grand battle scenes, but the faces and humanity of fellow soldiers caught in the violence.
After the war, he explored biblical themes and entered what seemed a promising period of healing, especially after marrying Constance Mary Starr in 1952. For seven years, there was hope, a mid-career flourishing, a path toward recovery. Then, in 1959, his wife passed away from cancer. Brittain never recovered. Four years later, he painted this haunting portrait. A figure stares blankly at the viewer with hollow black eyes that haven’t known sleep in days. The face is gaunt, almost spectral, rendered in bruised blues that suggest both coldness and the discolouration of grief. The eyes of someone lost in rumination, cycling endlessly through what-ifs and I-could-haves, bargaining with a future that will never arrive—the false guilt that haunts those left behind.
As Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: “When you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.” In Brittain’s Female Head, we see both the artist staring into the void of his loss, and the void staring back through those hollow, sleepless eyes, reflecting a grief that has become its own presence. He would pass away five years later, at age 56, never having emerged from that abyss.
5th Stage: Guilt / Self-Blame
The root of romanticization and idealization comes from expectation and the void of reality, graspable only when it’s comfortable to entertain thoughts that already exist in our minds. In Klinger’s etching, a figure kneels naked and vulnerable to the elements, consumed by her fall. The wind blows indifferent to her sigh; the waves roll with high tides that don’t need her tears. “It is my fault,” she seems to say, clasping her face, the identity the world sees and the mirror reflects.
Max Klinger, a German Symbolist painter, often portrayed Beauty as an ideal, lonely, and silent force comparable to a “high rock” or nature itself, that evokes both longing and pain. His work is rooted in philosophical meditation on the human condition, mortality, and the redemptive power of art. This print appears as the final plate in his Vom Tode, Zweiter Teil series, which explores the macrocosmic struggle of humanity against the inevitability of death. Drawing on the German tradition of the Totentanz (Dance of Death), Klinger shows that death claims everyone regardless of status or intellect.
Depicted here as Aphrodite, the embodiment of beauty itself, the figure paradoxically suffers. We believe that beauty does not see suffering or pain, that it is associated with perfection and evokes only positivity. Yet it is often beauty that stirs the deepest pain precisely because it defies expectation. The curated life, the carefully constructed personality and style, all of it, like clothes, lose their color, fade, and shrink with time. Only the naked truth remains: reality.
In grief, we blame ourselves for not being beautiful enough, good enough, perfect enough to prevent loss. We believe that if we had been better, more attentive, more loving, more present, death might have passed us by. But Klinger’s figure kneels before an indifferent ocean, clasping the face that could not save anyone, least of all herself.
The self-blame comes from saying no to reality. The guilt comes from having lived while the truth remains: we are mortal, vulnerable, and powerless before the forces that shape our lives. No amount of beauty, no perfection of form or devotion, changes what the tide will take.
6th Stage: Depression
Bruno Bobak, Canada’s youngest official war artist during World War II, understood intimacy with devastation. He carried that psychological weight into his post-war practice, eventually settling in Fredericton, New Brunswick, as Director of the UNB Art Centre. By the 1960s, his work had shifted toward raw, visceral expressionism, portraits seeking not likeness but essence, stripping away surface to reveal what lay beneath.
In Helga (1967), a woman lies cradled and exposed, rendered with aggressive, slashing brushwork that contemporaries described as having “X-ray vision.” Like a medical scan seeing past tissue and organ to bare bone, the painting refuses comfort or illusion. This is depression’s clarity: the stripping away of flesh, the reduction to skeletal truth.
What is it like to see through what was to what is? Does this disillusioned state offer strength against life’s relentless highs and lows? Could bones alone make us impenetrable?
Likely not. Despite how vulnerable our flesh is, how each slash and bruise sends us reeling, without those vulnerable parts, our bones cannot stand or hold firm. Depression reveals this paradox: in trying to protect ourselves by hardening, by reducing to the essential, we lose what sustains us. The softness, the capacity to feel, are not weaknesses to shed but the very things that allow us to move, heal, and live.
Bobak’s Helga lies exposed but not destroyed. She is cradled, held even in rawness. The brushwork that strips her bare also forms her, gives her presence. We are fragile, yes—bones and flesh together. Perhaps that vulnerability is not what we must overcome, but what we must learn to hold.
7th Stage: Acceptance/Integration
Every storm shall pass, and after winter must come spring. The revelation of grief’s whirlwind will ease. As real as the dark clouds are and as suffocating as they feel, they clear—the light always there above, unmoving. Despite life’s uncertainties and fragility, the light continues paving our way.
Carol Hoorn Fraser (1930–1991) was an American-born artist who became a vital force in the Nova Scotia art scene, serving as a teacher at the School of Architecture (TUNS) and Acting Director of the Dalhousie Art Gallery. Trained in chemistry and biology before turning to art, she brought scientific precision to her work, creating a “hard-edged organicism” style that merges surrealist vision with anatomical clarity.
In Beach (1974), Fraser depicts a woman lying in a landscape where boundaries between self and earth dissolve. With meticulous precision, she renders every texture like sand, stone, and skin. Beyond the scene of a simple landscape, the body and ground are indistinguishable from the environment.
Fraser understood what many resist: our detachment from nature brings the storms that break us when we withstand change rather than move with it. In Beach, the figure melts into the ground, finding rest in surrender and acceptance as integration, not defeat. Understanding that without winter storms, we cannot have warm summers.
In grief’s final stage, we learn to bend with the flow of transition, grounding ourselves in nature’s way. We integrate what was with what is, carrying both forward. The flesh and bone together. The self and the earth, no longer separate but whole.
If you’re eager to discover more about my upcoming work at the Gallery, be sure to subscribe and check out my writing on Substack and my other works on Instagram, and my website. Thank you for reading through this personal work.