5th 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.