Excerpt:
...Inside the walls of a Quebec City psychiatric hospital,
a troubling yet fascinating world has unravelled. For
the past two years, a fifty-nine year-old self-taught
artist with schizophrenia is engrossed in his greatest
achievement and legacy: a fantasy and delusional world
obsessed with children. In order to better appreciate
Mr. Wilkie's art, I will briefly introduce elements
of his life on the edge. Born in 1939 in Montreal, Canada,
Roland Claude Wilkie is the second youngest of five
siblings, with four older brothers and a baby sister,
Jocelyne, who died when he was three years old. Regarding
the only family portrait Mr. Wilkie owns he added the
following annotations: 'Liturgy to the dead. Tribute
to my sister Jocelyne who died when she was two years
old. Tribute to my deceased father Duncan Wilkie, who
I miss terribly'.
He claims to have had very little or no contact with
his sister due to illness, having spent a good part
of his first three years of life in hospital 'strapped
to a [pediatric] harness'. Mr. Wilkie will return to
wearing a harness at the age of fifty-three. To this
day, Mr. Wilkie says of his sister Jocelyne '...she
is always present in my mind'. The importance of this
loss is self-evident in a work called 'My sister Jocelyne
as I see her' in which Mr. Wilkie portrays himself as
a young boy wrapped in his sister's loving protection.
His father, who worked for a shipbuilding company, died
of tuberculosis when Mr. Wilkie was two years old. Ships
occasionally appear in the background of his drawings.