Motor Flight Through France
Rachel Berman was an American-born Canadian painter known for her figurative works depicting solitary city dwellers, street characters, and working-class figures observed in international urban centres. After years working as an illustrator, she dedicated herself fully to painting following formative periods living and working in Ireland and England. Later settling in Victoria, British Columbia, Berman developed a distinct visual language characterized by literary allusions, psychological introspection, and a weathered, tactile surface treatment achieved on birch plywood panels.
The development of A Motor-Flight Through France is illuminated by Berman's preparatory working study, inscribed: "Ragpicker. Docklands. Victoria. '7 rain 4:00 pm, winter / 1st study for 'Motor-Flight through France' unfinished." While the study documents the artist's initial observation of the figure within a detailed industrial dockland environment—complete with warehouses, factory chimneys, streetlamps, and a distant pedestrian—Berman significantly edited the setting in the final panel. Borrowing the title from Edith Wharton’s 1908 travel memoir A Motor-Flight Through France (as noted in Berman’s working correspondence attached to the drawing), the artist introduced an ironic, poetic counterpoint between Wharton’s early automotive leisure and the modest reality of her subject pushing a weathered pram laden with salvaged burlap.
In the final painting, Berman strips away the dense dockside architecture of the drawing to heighten the psychological weight of the central figure. The ragpicker stands in profile in heavy winter boots, a dark overcoat, and a woolen cap, one hand resting on the handlebar of a vintage perambulator carrying a bundled sack. By replacing the industrial background with an expansive, chalky ground and a dark, scrubby ridge beneath an overcast sky, Berman isolates the figure against the pale field, lending the composition a stark, monumental presence. Through thin glazes, scumbled pigments, and visible scraping across the birch support, she transforms a chance encounter on a Victoria winter afternoon into a poignant reflection on memory, solitude, and resilience.
Rachel Berman
1946 - 2014
Rachel Berman was born Susan King in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1946. A self-taught artist, she spent decades working as an illustrator and painter across the United States, Canada, and Ireland. In 1998, at age fifty-two, she uncovered her original birth records and biological parentage, an event that led her to reclaim her birth name of Rachel Berman.
Over the final decades of her career, Berman made Victoria, British Columbia, her primary residence while maintaining a regular creative presence across Canada. Alongside her studio painting practice, she achieved national recognition as a children's book illustrator, receiving nominations for the Governor General's Literary Award for English-Language Children's Literature (Illustration) in both 2009 and 2013. Berman died at her home in Victoria on May 28, 2014, at the age of sixty-eight.