Peacetime (Tokyo, Forever)

About Peacetime (Tokyo, Forever)

This contemporary figurative oil painting explores themes of politics and culture.

Deborah Root’s dynamic colourful compositions tell an intimate story about her experience during socially relevant and politically important moments in time.

“I am thinking about the nature of "victory," in this case the US victory in WW2. For some, peacetime could never compete with the intensity of war. My father was a young man during the war--and he had secrets, including a love affair with a man in his flight crew. In part because of his career ambitions, after the war he married a suitable woman and attempted to live a conventional life. Even as a child, I recognized how bored he was in the suburbia of Portland, Oregon.
He spoke of some aspects of the war -- the airplanes, the friends who died, the uniforms. Yet he said nothing about civilian casualties, if indeed he ever considered them. He said nothing about the excitement of combat, and certainly nothing about the man he was involved with.
The long-range bombing of Japan was extremely destructive, but in his B-29 my father remained high above the devastation. As I worked on this painting I was thinking about the area or carpet bombing of Tokyo by the US Army Air Corps in 1945. Tokyo burns, but the flames resemble blossoms of light. I am reminded of the Gulf War, when the US pilot famously said, "Baghdad lit up like a Christmas tree." But what about the people below, the civilians?
Were young men like my father war criminals (as Robert McNamara suggested in The Fog of War)? Was there a repressed understanding of this that he brought into our home?” Deborah Root

Deborah Root is a painter, writer, lecturer and professor. She has written extensively on the relationship between visual arts and cultural politics. Root was born in Seattle and attended university in Canada before settling here. She acquired both her BA and MA in Archeology and Anthropology at Canadian universities and finally a PH.D. from the Graduate Program in Social and Political Thought at York University. Her 1996 book entitled ‘Cannibal Culture’ was included in a 2017 Buzzfeed list (digital media company) of the 16 books to read to understand white supremacy in the United States. She has taught at several Canadian universities and has sat on the boards of a number of Toronto-based art and political magazines. Deborah Root has exhibited her paintings in both solo and group shows in Canada, the U.S. and Europe since 2017.