I Fell in Love with a Beautiful Highway

Standing tall
By the side of the road
I fell in love
With a beautiful highway

—Talking Heads, Nothing But Flowers

A funny thing happened on the way to the Forum.

That is the title of a 1966 film I’ve never seen, but in my version, a funny thing did happen on the way to the Forum. Not the one in Rome, but the National Historic Site in Montreal — former home of the Montreal Canadiens.

All roads lead to Rome, which is true in Italy, but here in southern Ontario all major roads lead to Montreal. Where we hope to check out some art galleries and museums. But first, one must negotiate the gauntlet that is the 401 highway.

The 401 corridor across the top of Toronto is one of the world’s worst traffic jams, and circumventing that makes the 87 dollar cost to take the 407 bypass worth it. Linking back up to the 401 past Oshawa, it’s gonna be smooth sailing on to Montreal. Until it’s not. Accidents Will Happen by Elvis Costello is playing on the radio. “Thankfully,” I say, now in stand-still traffic, “we are stuck behind this.”

If you have to be stuck in a sea of a thousand stagnant sedans, it’s nice to have a good view to Mt. Temple in Alberta.

When traffic opens up, including a clear vista to the actual sky and an empty highway ahead, I take out the camera to capture the moment.

The images were startling: the highway can be a beautiful thing. I send them to Charles Jaffe — an artist who has a thing for highways, the way the characters in Cronenberg’s Crash have a thing for, er — asking, “did I inadvertently take a homage pic to Jack Chambers’ 401 Looking West Towards London No.1? I’m thinking that a light bulb would go off in Jaffe’s mind.

What we know is that Jack Chambers was driving east on the 401 near Woodstock, Ontario in 1968 when he looked in his rear view mirror by Exit 232. We don’t know where he was heading, though it’d be fitting if he was headed to the Forum in Montreal. Or, Expo 67; there was a rush in the mid-60s to complete the then titled Macdonald-Cartier Freeway in time to enable an easy passage to Montreal. Returning to the site later, Chambers photographed the view he initially caught a glimpse of in his rear view.

The resulting painting, almost two years in the making, would change his style and mark the introduction of a spiritual dimension and practice philosophy— together, Chambers would call it “perceptual realism” — in his later work. “It’s funny how this came about,” says fellow London Ontario artist Wyn Geleynse. “Artists are always looking out for the next inspiration, trying to look ahead to their next body of work, and here, Chambers finds it by looking backwards.”

I was five years old when I fell in love with a beautiful highway, in the same year and season that Chambers captured it.

In the front seat of my father’s Ford Econoline van, a panoramic view of fresh tarmac of the 401 stretched into a horizon I’d never seen, a world beyond what little southern Ontario landscape I had laid eyes on. Mostly devoid of traffic, the road rolled out ahead like a welcoming carpet to I knew not what. An endless expanse of green fields, the occasional concrete overpass, the odd truck to stare at as we passed in the fast lane was better than watching TV. In time, with dusk approaching, a sphere of white light ahead, revealing a large city lit by fluorescent lights as we entered Toronto.

We were driving not just a highway but a way to a larger world, a highway to possibility and discovery.

* * *

I’m not the only one to see Chambers’ 401 as one of the more iconic Canadian images. While a student at Nova Scotia College of Art & Design (NSCAD), artist Gary Spearin says guest instructor Eric Fischl proclaimed that “Chambers owned that landscape.” Later in life, in 2018 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of this masterpiece, Spearin did a tribute show of work, 401EXIT232, at Woodstock Art Gallery, which lead to a commemorative plaque installed at the site by the Ministry of Transportation.

“It’s a really big painting, so it’s wonderful how it encompasses you as you see it,” Spearin points out. “And that curve at Woodstock is also where the weather changes. You either get the Lake Erie winds or the Lake Huron winds running through there, and when you look at the Chambers painting you can see the diagonal movement of the clouds, which is probably a Lake Huron wind coming through.”

* * *

If you are standing in front of Chambers’ 401 at the Art Gallery of Ontario where it hangs, the sheer dimensions, 72” X 96” scale of the painting envelopes you, pulls you in to the landscape but just what trick is creating its awe and majesty is not so simple to explain. There is the slight tilt to the left in the landscape grounding that luminous sky. The ribbon of road pulls you in and upwards until the image seems to be more about the sky., the beatific quality of light creating shadows on the road. And, in the foreground— a solitary object, a cement mixing truck. Is it placed on purpose, a symbol of a country in its centenary building itself out into the future? Is it happenstance, mere documentation of another load of concrete being carried down the road to be poured at another 401 intersection? Or is it the play of light and shadow that makes this image most compelling?

Charles Jaffe has his own playful speculative musings. Chambers trained in Spain and the history of Catholic art could have been an influence, Jaffe says, where his 401 could be mimicking that tradition of religious paintings and altarpieces where there is a division in the works between the realms of Heaven at the top and the world below. In that context, “the cement truck is heavily laden,” he suggests. “Its shadow is aggressively horizontal, earthbound. The landscape’s horizon however is rising, suggesting ascension, while definitely separating the earth from the sky. It has transcendental implications. Is the weary cement truck, laden with sin, on the road to the sky or just going to London?”

Nancy Poole — former director of London Regional Art & History Museum (LRAHM), what is now Museum London — has an important insight into the work. Poole was a close friend and confidant of Chambers; she was present at his bedside when he died at the age of 47. She notes that the 401 painting was conceived coincidentally around the time of his leukaemia diagnosis. Indeed, it was a struggle for him to finish the work at all.

“We need to remember that in 1968 Jack’s energy level was troublesome but he was so excited by his revelation of Perceptual Realism he managed to complete 401 towards London before his diagnosis was made,” she tells me. “In my opinion, and Ross Woodman concurred, that after the diagnosis there was always the haunting shadow of death in Jack’s work. The sparkling light in 401 is unique only to that painting. It was only when Ross and I together viewed the Chambers retrospective at the LRAHM that this was revealed to each of us.”

Dave Kemp, a professor and director of Photography Media Arts at Toronto Metropolitan (formerly Ryerson) University has taken on a daunting project called Returning to the Source: In the Spirit of Jack Chambers, replicating or documenting the sites of all of Chambers’ paintings. Kemp’s version of the 401 is a composite of 160 separate photographs, taking Chambers’ working method a bit further.

“This approach,” says Kemp, “introduces an element of duration into the process, in the sense that the final image is no longer a single captured instant, but instead is an extended and moving acquisition of ‘perception’ over time. Although not exactly the same as in Chambers’ painting, I feel this connects in a way to Chambers’ desire to convey an extended process of perception instead of a simple straight-forward reproduction of the scene. 

“As described by Chambers himself in his essay on Perceptual Realism: ‘A painting gets put together just like an experience — in particles. (The work) isn’t the description of a visual moment; it’s the accumulation of experienced interiors brought into focus.’”

Additionally, these stitching techniques are not perfect, so small errors and slippages creep into the image. In other, more practical applications, this could be seen as a flaw, but I have found that such slippages produce a subtle uncanny quality akin to the ‘sublime unreality’ that art historian Mark Cheetham describes as emanating from Jack Chambers’ Perceptual Realist paintings. His theory of perceptual realism is described by Cheetham as “a profound reflection on primary sensory experience, not simply a reproduction of it” where Chambers’ goal is to make ‘the depth of his perception in terms available to his audience.’”

* * *

My hunch was right, and Jaffe went to work, taking over 1000 shots at the 401 Exit 232 site. Jaffe’s layering and manipulation begins with a similar quality or version of perceptual realism, but soon veers off into a philosophic aesthetic that one might call “perceptual surrealism.”

In a process Jaffe calls “accelerated” imaging, created by multiple layerings of photographs, he achieves an experiential feel for the highway as both landscape and vortex of the passage of time, and, well, traffic.

And of course, these days, that bucolic view of southern Ontario landscape by Chambers has morphed too, until most days what one experiences is a brutal parade of transport trucks. In the early days of the 401, 80 percent of the transport of goods was by rail, and the rest by road and sea. Today, the economic demands of just-in-time delivery has flipped those numbers around. If Chambers saw the 401 landscape in 2025 for the first time, would it have caught his imagination?

Life-long friend and sidekick Donald Ford was with with me the first time a funny thing happened on the way to the Forum; on a grade 11 art class field trip to Montreal, we weren’t planning on going to the Forum but somehow someone placed tickets into our hands. We witnessed the legendary Mr. Hockey, Gordie Howe — recently out of retirement in his 50s so that he could play with his kids on the Hartford Whalers — hold his own against one of the most celebrated, stacked Habs teams in history. Sometimes astonishing things happen when you’re busy making other plans, or looking in the rearview mirror..

Donald Ford was also with me the first time I saw 401 Looking West Toward London #1 on an art class jaunt to the London Regional and Historical Museum. Today, Ford may know the 232 intersection better than any of us, including Chambers. As a manager of Oxford County, he even has the power to shut down that overpassing highway if weather deems necessary. I ask Ford, “since you commute and drive through that site of the painting five days a week, how would you describe it today?”

“Chaos!” says Ford.

It’s said that with regards to the journey, the anticipation can be more fervent than the destination. So perhaps, it’s no surprise that you find the work of art you need not in the museums, instead unanticipated, on the way there, on the 401. Oh well. “Forget your perfect offerings” Leonard Cohen advised in one of his more meditative songs. We do find the large mural of Cohen on Rue Crescent and as I take out my camera a passerby on the busy sidewalk stops so as not to get in my photograph.

“Thanks,” I say to the stranger “that guy up there means something to me.”

“Me too,” the stranger replies. “I used to work for him.” We chat briefly about the stranger’s history being Leonard’s head of security. Around the corner just down Ste. Catherine’s from the Forum, we stop for respite at Grumpy’s Bar, where we learn from the bartender that this was Mordecai Richler’s favourite watering hole, and in fact, I am sitting in his chair. Later, outside on the patio of Grumpy’s, a regular mentions they shot scenes here for the film version of Richler’s Barney’s Version, and that’s when it dawns on me. I was at the patio next door at the Irish Embassy fourteen years ago, out on the sidewalk, nodding at fellow smoker Paul Giamatti taking a break from that film shoot.

* * *

Exiting Montreal, Quebec Autoroute 20 crosses the nondescript border with Ontario and you’re back on the 401. Leaving Montreal always feels like leaving another country, another culture, another history. It is here on the highway that you think about all that is different between provinces, economically, political and cultural. Creators like Cohen and Richler could have possibly arisen in a place like WASP Toronto, but they didn’t. It is here at the border of the provinces that Toronto artist Will Gorlitz attempted a tribute to Chambers, a 401 Looking East Towards Quebec, if you will:

“There were different issues in my response to Chambers,” Gorlitz explains, “clearly an overt homage — including his incorporation of photographic optics, but also especially the strategic representation of optimism, both in the subject itself distinguished by the bright, sunny character of the scene depicted. My two paintings ‘bracketed’ Chambers light character through a play of photographic exposure — the one you have being extremely overexposed, and the other that I have, extremely underexposed. The presumably ‘positive’ view of London that his painting represents was obscured in my response specifically because the paintings were produced immediately before the Quebec Referendum, at the site of the Ontario~Quebec border where the 401 terminates. At the time a provincial border that could have hypothetically become a national border…”

Returning home to London, the traffic is still thick on the 401 coming out of Toronto even at midnight. You have to be on your toes as sleepy truck drivers veer into your lane, and a racing white Nissan, weaving in and out of traffic at a frantic pace, nearly clips you. Where’s a cop when you need one, you think.

There used to be the Schneider’s Meats sign with the Dutch girl near Kitchener to signal that home sweet home was within striking distance. Now that that landmark has been moved elsewhere, we still have the gentle ascending curve of Chambers’ landscape by Exit 232 to look forward to that, even in the dark, is a comforting beacon: only a half hour more to endure until a safe landing in London. But as we approach Woodstock, there are flashing lights ahead. Traffic slows again as we pass a car flipped over in the ditch. A white Nissan. Huh, couldn’t have happened to a nicer feller, you think.

The 401 may not be the place of tranquil passage, the promising idealistic yellow brick road that it was 60 years ago in its infancy. Flying on an airline, using the internet, driving the 401 are all now fraught with warning and caution; most technologies of connection become corrupted over time. By chance, Chambers caught that early nascent splendour in an unforgettable composition making us think more deeply today about our passage through time and landscape.

But there is a latent sadness underneath Chambers’ 401 image. We can sense his optimism cast in that beatific sky or, represented in that cement truck on a mission to build out the country. The highway, otherwise empty, but full of possibility, like the rails provided 100 years prior, or the lakes and rivers prior to that, the cement truck a contemporary take on the voyageur canoe forging new passages of connection and commerce. The sadness in that the 401 is, was just the next stage of a technology that will be displaced yet again. We all know we are a car culture and dependent on just-on-time delivery, and we all know that none of this is fully sustainable. And we all know that, despite the Talking Heads satirical yearning for a reverse of urban sprawl and more beautiful highways, that kind of future is just as overly optimistic as Chambers’ sense of wonder.

One can look at Chambers’ 401 as an iconic vision of a transformative infrastructure that connects us in this vast land of Canada, the way Pierre Berton celebrated something similar on the importance of the rail in The Last Spike. Or the way the NFB or CBC was designed to link us across this sparse northern geography. He may or may not have captured the freeway with that in mind. One could even argue that the 401 was incidental to what he saw in the rear view mirror. That it was an intrusion on a perfect landscape. A symbol then of both connection, and disconnection.

One thing does seem certain: the highway is the message of this painting.

Vincent Cherniak is no longer in love with a beautiful highway. He lives at a safe distance from the 401, in London, ON.