In 2019, when the world tragically lost rapper, activist and entrepreneur Nipsey Hussle to gun violence, his life-partner Lauren London eulogized him with the words, “grief is the final act of love.” My first time hearing that quote, the sentiment moved me deeply. I had often imagined grief to be a bitter season grudgingly waded through, never an act of the heart that could be lovingly offered up. It was the first time I considered grieving not merely as a reaction to loss, but as a powerful extension of relationship that could still serve a purpose; a resting place for love left without a home. One year and an international pandemic later, writer and director Frank Abney’s Canvas tells a touching nine-minute story of this type of grief, a final canvas for a beautiful picture of love.
It was the first time I considered grieving not merely as a reaction to loss, but as a powerful extension of relationship that could still serve a purpose; a resting place for love left without a home.
Initially I had been drawn to Canvas because of a personal mission to support Black creators; I stumbled across Abney, (a Black animator with a laundry list of Academy Award wins and nominations) when he tweeted about his first project as director and its arrival to streaming giant, Netflix. I would soon find that in my haste to contribute to the trajectory of this new short film, it would be the film that left something with me.
With a freckled, elderly widower as our protagonist, we enter the animation in media res — after the death of his wife, squarely at the center of the old man’s sorrow. We are quickly introduced to his young granddaughter, who seems to remind him of both the beauty that inspired him to paint, and the love that seems to have left him. The girl’s visits serve as joyful but brief intermissions to the man’s seclusion, happily drawing alone while her grandfather’s art supplies remain painfully untouched, paralyzed and uninspired in the shadow of his wife’s passing. And though it may seem cliché, it does not make the film any less applicable that it is the child’s undaunted commitment to remember her grandmother that begins her grandfather’s healing.
Watching him struggle as he copes with the absence of his late wife, the hopelessness our central character seems to feel is immediately relatable. Ironically, in a year where it was almost impossible to touch one another, virtually no one in the world remains unscathed by loss. Canvas, like the year 2020, is a study in navigating where to place love (and life) interrupted by loss. What this film reminded to me though, is that Grief is not the villain, no matter how much it may seem that way. Grief is simply a byproduct, the terrible remnant of this whole “life” experiment gone wrong; an ugly yet misunderstood character, painted as a monster for the damage it does when confined to a place that it does not belong. What Grief needs, is legroom.
Grief grows restless in isolation. No matter how many people are affected by the loss of a person, we all feel our loss was singular — and we are right. Relationships are unique. That’s why each moment of grief must have its own day in the sun, its own stage. But in Canvas, as a husband grieves his wife and a young girl grieves her grandmother, we are shown a beautiful way to survive the agony of loss — by piecing together our individual experiences of pain to create the fullest picture of the person who has gone.
The message of the film could not come at a better time; as 2020 begins to take its final bow, it seems obvious that it has taken with it so much of what we hold dear. Some of us lost grandparents and parents; some of us lost brothers or sisters. Some of us felt like we were losing our minds and others of us simply lost our patience with trying to survive a society hellbent on our destruction. With a new year on the horizon, faced with the terrible task of carrying on without the things we thought we could not live without, Canvas is a subtle reminder: the tidal wave of grief is survivable, but strength may come from locking arms with those who share in our hurt, and diving deep into the fray before us.
As the movie draws to a close, the final scene carries a thinly-veiled symbolism that is both a balm and a recommendation to all who may be entrenched in a valley of loss. As the nameless grandfather sits before a blank canvas, struggling to envision a new work of art through a swirl of painful memories, his granddaughter approaches, gently placing her hand on his arm. His daughter follows suit, grasping his shoulder with a reassuring smile. The belief in their eyes, the unity in their embrace, seems to hold him fast until the brush is steady enough — until he is steady enough — to begin again.
