There are mysterious images in some of my mother’s paintings of aboriginal myths and symbols. When I asked author John Robert Colombo what one of them might be, he replied at once, “Wendigo”. Then he gave me a copy of one of his hundreds of published books, Canadian Tales of Terror.
The collection of Algernon Blackwood stories includes a ripping tale of horror in the Canadian bush, wherein a French Canadian guide is swept up by a powerful spirit, transported at burning velocity and dizzying height, away from his camp and companions. He returns, a broken shell of his former self, hardly recognizable, demented and soon dead. He had seen the Wendigo.

The monster spirit of Algonquian lore is just one manifestation of similar beings known to the original peoples of this continent. West Coast cultures had their own versions and they probably inspired Helen’s imagery. Tsonokwa, Wild Woman of the Woods, another spirit figure, also appears with some frequency in the paintings.
Just what these images meant to my mother, I cannot say, but they spoke to her — and for her — in some way. Her art is often restless, unsettled, edgy and raw. That she felt some spiritual truth in tales like those of the Wendigo does not surprise me and I think John Robert Colombo has got it right.

Freehand airbrush on black paper by Helen Andersen