Charles Pachter remains one of Canada’s most celebrated and prolific contemporary painters, due in no small part to his skill at blending whimsical humour, deft use of colour and an abiding love of Canadiana in his colourful canvases. His imagery has always been irrevocably tied to a sense of the country’s identity. Pachter’s works exhibit an affectionately playful approach to patriotism, skewering Canada’s sense of self and recontextualizing its colonial histories by satirizing and celebrating national imagery in equal measure. Rendered with sharp colour and bold graphics, this is Pop Art in the classic sense, made within (and for) a specifically Canadian context.
His body of work is characterized by repeated use of recognizable subjects that are often potent symbols of Canadian identity or drawn from its long history. These range from the reverential to the lightly iconoclastic: Queen Elizabeth II in full royal finery astride a moose; the national flag flying bravely in a breeze but viewed from the ground; maple leaves arranged to create optical illusions across abstracted blue fields.
These motifs are often presented alongside visual puns or utilizing wordplay—Pachter rarely forgoes the opportunity for an easy joke. On another level, Pachter’s humour draws attention to the mutability of many of these signs and symbols, emphasizing their artifice and asking us to reconsider their position as sacred landmarks of a collective national memory. Grounded in this sense of humour and theatricality (if not drama), Pachter’s works always maintain an abiding fondness for the shibboleths of Canadian culture.
Pachter’s most perennial subject may be his wandering moose. Portrayed in shadow-theatre silhouette, the icon of the Canadian wilderness is typically seen exploring the rugged landscapes and waterways of the country, itself usually reduced to abstracted geometries of colour. Striding along mountain ridges, gazing wistfully to the horizon, peering over cliffs (or occasionally, haplessly plunging over them), Pachter’s quintessential animal becomes something of a curious avatar to explore the breadth of Canada’s geographies.
Bay Watch situates the moose in an especially graphic vision of the landscape. Standing on the near shore, the dramatically antlered moose surveys the view across a bay towards the far shadowed hills, elegantly rendered in abstract masses of blue shades. Overarching the scene and blanketing the sky, we see the iconic stripes of the Hudson’s Bay Company, in green, red, yellow and indigo on a white background. The colours of the stripes were originally chosen by the British manufacturers of the woolen blankets that made up a major part of the HBC’s trade due to the colourfastness and availability of their dyes, but the design soon gained popularity for its recognizable graphic quality. As the HBC developed into a modern retailer beginning in the nineteenth century, the stripes became a favoured symbol of the Company’s brand, appearing on all manner of products and visual media. Here, Pachter’s colours are shifted to a slightly paler register from the usual pigments, most obviously in the green that leans closer to phthalo or turquoise than a darker emerald. In doing so, he echoes the bluer tones used in the landscape and water—literalizing “The Bay” as an immutable part of the Canadian landscape, with his moose as a witness. Starting in 2013, the HBC produced a collection of merchandise inspired by Bay Watch, reproducing the image across a series of mugs, blankets, throw cushions and tea towels.
It is perhaps notable that Pachter’s Toronto studio is known as the Moose Factory. A clear reference to Andy Warhol’s famous Factory studio in New York, here reincarnated as the locus for creating Pachter’s characters, the name also recalls the community of the same name located on the southwestern edge of James Bay. Explored in 1671 by Pierre-Esprit Radisson and founded two years later, on traditional Môsonîw Ililiw (Cree) lands, Moose Factory was the second HBC trading post to be established in North America, following Fort Charles in 1668. Here, “factory” referred to the HBC’s factors, the agents and merchants who administered the Company’s trading networks across the continent. By recalling this etymology, Pachter, however unintentionally, aligns himself with the long tradition of the production of a particularly Canadian identity.