Bluffing #2

Written by Carrianne Leung

A story told in two parts.

Take One

I am back in my best friend’s dad’s tank of an old Buick, and it’s 1984 again. We were always driving in the direction of the bluffs. The iconic bluffs, the place at the end of the place that I called home. I can still feel the cold wind in my face through the car’s open window on the long drive from our neighbourhood in North Scarborough to reach the bluffs. We often skipped school to make this trip, only to park and talk and smoke cigarettes, gazing at the cliffs on one side and the lake bluer than any sea on the other. As the hours stretched, the changing sunlight swirled the colours of the bluffs, and we never lacked for things to talk about. The cliffs rising dramatically to end in water was the perfect place to project our dreams, desires, and fears.

The colours in this painting remind me of the excitement of those days. Our small world was animated by the exhilaration of being a teenage girl pushing up against the confinements of what it meant to be a teenage girl. This was our launching point, our convergence, our end, and, ultimately, the beginning of other things. Our lives to ahead – technicolour and jagged, beautiful and dangerous, bluffing our way into something real.

Take Two

The bluffs were also the place of white settlement, emblematic in the English naming of this place. Elizabeth Simcoe, wife of John Graves Simcoe, the first lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada, said in 1793 that the bluffs reminded her of her home in North Yorkshire, and so this place was renamed: Scarborough.

Yet this painting defies the bucolic English landscape paintings of the eighteenth century. Those serene and tame gardens caught in luminous light were the signatures of the day. Instead, Bluffing #2 interrupts Elizabeth Simcoe’s version of a colonial nostalgia stamped onto the land. The bluffs in this painting are in dynamic movement, the cliffs rising and reaching in all directions, alive in their bold, dramatic colours. A ribbon of blue seems to flow through the peaks, further animating the land. This is another kind of arrival to the bluffs, one that defies the gaze of those who try to tame it.

About the Writer

Carrianne Leung is a fiction writer and educator. She holds a PhD in Sociology and Equity Studies from OISE/University of Toronto. Her debut novel, The Wondrous Woo (Inanna Publications), was shortlisted for the 2014 Toronto Book Awards. Her collection of linked stories, That Time I Loved You, released in 2018 by HarperCollins, was shortlisted for the same prize. Her work has also appeared in the Puritan, Ricepaper, the Globe and Mail, Room Magazine, Prairie Fire, and Open Book Ontario.

About the Artist

Rachel MacFarlane works primarily in painting, collage, and digital animation. She holds an MFA from Rutgers University, a BFA from Ontario College of Art and Design University. Solo exhibitions have been presented at Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto; the Howard Park Institute, Toronto; and Anna Leonowens Gallery, Halifax. In addition to the Doris McCarthy Artist in Residence, she has been awarded the Robert Pope Artist Residency at NSCAD, Participant at Triangle Artists Workshop, NYC, and Visiting Artist at Cow House Studios, Ireland. Her work is included in the collections of the Royal Bank of Canada, Scotiabank, and the Donovan Collection at St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto.