Robert Markle (1936–1990) was an infamous figure on the Canadian cultural scene for almost three decades. His paintings and drawings celebrating the female nude were deemed obscene by Ontario courts in 1965, and Markle defended them on national television, emphasizing what he considered a crucial distinction between eroticism and pornography. Although Markle was a Mohawk who employed Native symbolism in his later work, he refused to identify himself as a Native painter.
Blazing Figures chronicles Markle’s boyhood in Hamilton, Ontario, his early exposure to the worlds of burlesque and jazz, and, following his expulsion from the Ontario College of Art, his immersion in the Toronto world of painting and music. It recounts his emergence as a controversial expressionist painter of the figure and a beloved teacher of his craft. After his abandonment of urban life for small-town Ontario, Markle, in the last twenty years of his life, produced his greatest works and formed close friendships with his fellow painters and with public figures Patrick Watson and Gordon Lightfoot, both of whom were interviewed at length for this book. The book also takes a frank look at Markle’s complex relationship with his wife and muse that survived his affairs with other women.
The only full-length work written about Robert Markle’s life and career, Blazing Figures is based on Markle’s copious personal notes and numerous interviews with his family, friends, colleagues, and former students. This snapshot of Canadian cultural history will be of interest to scholars of art history, Aboriginal studies, and Canadian studies as well as the general reader.

J. A. Wainwright has lived in Spain, Greece, and England, and for the last twenty years has lived in Nova Scotia where he teaches. He edited Notes for a Native Land, coedited Soundings, is the author of Moving Outward, The Requiem Journals, After the War, Flight of the Falcom: Scott's Journey to the South Pole 1910-1912, and Landscape and Desire: Poems Selected and New. He received a B.A. from the University of Toronto and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Canadian Literature from Dalhousie University where he is McCulloch Professor in English.  

J.A. Wainwright's profile page

• Short-listed, Evelyn Richardson Memorial Literary Prize for Non-fiction, Atlantic Book Awards
• Short-listed, ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award, Biography Category

This book makes an indisputably original contribution to Canadian visual and cultural studies.... In well-crafted prose, J.A. Wainwright explores the range and complexity of Robert Markle, who was, at turns, loyal, thorny, ribald, fierce, passionate--and does due justice in measuring these facets of his personality in relation to his art.

Canadian Journal of Native Studies, Vol. 30, #2, 2010

"Blazing Figures is most successful in discussion with Markle's individual paintings, and the best of Wainwright's writing offers attentive readings of the paintings as visual text. The book also notes the evolution of Markle's technique and a compelling narrative of the burgeoning Toronto art scene of the 1960s and 1970s, complete with energies and antagonisms.... Certainly the beautiful colour reproductions of his works that burst from the pages of Blazing Figures suggest a visionary spirit and a passion for understanding the strength and vulerability of the human body, its intimacy and its fierceness, that make the 1965 pornography charges laid against gallery owner Dorothy Cameron for mounting a show with Markle's work look like so much old-Ontario fogeyism.... In the end, the images have their say, and the muscular, brilliant toned or deeply charcoaled limbs and curves of the bodies on Markle's canvas speak loud. The ecstatic attention paid to him by Markle's eye and Wainwright's prose overcomes all arguments about the biographical rhetoric in Blazing Figures. Robert Markle emerges as a figure who wrestles with the angel of art and is blessed through his willingness to risk damnation.''

Canadian Literature, #296, Autumn 2010

"This book makes an indisputably original contribution to Canadian visual and cultural studies.... In well-crafted prose, J.A. Wainwright explores the range and complexity of Robert Markle, who was, at turns, loyal, thorny, ribald, fierce, passionate--and does due justice in measuring these facets of his personality in relation to his art."

Linda Morra

"Blazing Figures is meticulously researched, based on personal notes and numerous interviews with family, including Marlene [Markle's wife], in addition to friends, colleagues, and former students, all of which makes the study authoritative as well as definitive. Eloquently written, it provides a timely reappraisal of an important Canadian artist who courageoulsy straddled the line between native and non-native, urban and rural, monogamy and polygamy, nature and nuture, artist and teacher, figuration and abstraction.... While Blazing Figures, deals specifically with Markle's life, career, and art, it [also] does an admirable job covering the wider Toronto art scene from the 1960s through the artist's death in 1990."

Guelph Mercury

"An impressive blend of meticulous research with an astute, often poetic reading of imagery, both informed with an insider's savvy and the whole just touched with the soft glow of friendship, Andy Wainwright's biography of Robert Markle is an exceptional contribution to our understanding of this singular figure in Canadian art history. And it is so timely. With what he reveals of Markle and his art it is clear that we will understand a whole period of our cultural history more clearly when we fully comprehend the workings of this brilliant, complex artist."

Dennis Reid