My Father’s Car Stranded in the Flooded Desert: Art Therapy in the Face of Climate Chaos

Emmanuel Stip
Directeur
emmanuel.stip@umontreal.ca

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My Father’s Car

Abstract

This reflective editorial essay emerges from a personal experience of being stranded for over 12 hours in a car during a sudden flood between Dubai and Abu Dhabi, an improbable confinement in the desert. As a psychiatrist, accustomed to listening and guiding others, I was instead confronted with my own stillness and isolation. In that immobility, I turned inward and found unexpected companionship in memory: the paintings of Philippe Lemaire, an artist I had met in a Montréal mental-health art workshop. For more than 2 decades, he has painted the same image, My Father’s Car, transforming repetition into resilience. In the desert’s silence, his work became my refuge. The patient’s art, once a therapeutic act, now offers healing to the physician. This essay reflects how art, repetition, and memory can bridge the distance between illness and care, and how art therapy, in a paradoxical reversal, can extend its grace to the healer. When glaciers melt and storms roar, the spectre of climate change sets its pace and the anguish of remaining immobile, or drowned grasps us and draws us closer to narrative medicine.

Résumé

Cet éditorial introspectif est né d’une expérience personnelle : celle d’être resté bloqué pendant plus de 12 heures dans une voiture lors d’une inondation violente et soudaine entre Dubaï et Abou Dabi, un confinement improbable en plein désert. Psychiatre, habitué à écouter et à guider les autres, je me suis retrouvé confronté à mon propre silence et à mon isolement. Dans cette immobilité, je me suis tourné vers l’intérieur et j’ai trouvé une compagnie inattendue dans mes souvenirs : les peintures de Philippe Lemaire, un artiste rencontré lors d’un atelier d’art-thérapie à Montréal. Depuis plus de 20 ans, il peint la même image, « Le Char de mon père », transformant la répétition en résilience. Dans le silence du désert, son oeuvre est devenue mon refuge. L’art du patient, jadis un acte thérapeutique, offrait désormais un réconfort au médecin. Cet essai explore comment l’art, la répétition et la mémoire peuvent combler le fossé entre la maladie et le soin, et comment l’art-thérapie, dans un renversement paradoxal, peut étendre sa grâce au soignant. Quand les glaciers fondent et que les tempêtes rugissent, le spectre des changements climatiques impose son rythme et l’angoisse de rester immobile, ou noyé, nous étreint et nous rapproche de la médecine narrative.

Imaginez-vous victime d’une grave inondation en plein milieu d’un désert. Cauchemar relié bien sûr au stade du sommeil paradoxal ! Ce paradoxe devient de moins en moins paradoxal. Selon plusieurs études d’attribution publiées dans Nature et PNAS, (1-3) le changement climatique anthropique augmente la probabilité et l’intensité des épisodes de précipitations extrêmes, même dans les régions historiquement arides. L’atmosphère y est plus chaude, et l’air plus chaud contient davantage de vapeur d’eau : environ 7 % d’humidité supplémentaire par degré Celsius ; c’est la physique de Clausius-Clapeyron, pas une métaphore. Ainsi, le désert, jadis catégorie de l’immuable, peut aujourd’hui se retrouver noyé. Cela m’est personnellement arrivé et j’en ai perdu mon latin, y compris mon français, et, volontairement, je rédige cet éditorial en anglais. Le but est aussi de faire connaître à notre monde anglophone la richesse de notre organisme d’art thérapie qui nous fournit des oeuvres pour la couverture de Santé mentale au Québec : les Impatients et en particulier un artiste exceptionnel qui a passé sa vie à peindre le char de son père.

Corps de l’article

“Twilight will never defeat dawn. Let us marvel at evenings, but live for mornings. Let us despise the immutable, like stone or gold.…”Guillaume Apollinaire, The Melancholy Watcher

“May your life be closed, smooth, round like an egg, may your gestures be fixed by an immutable order that decides everything for you, that protects you in spite of yourself…”Georges Perec, A Man Asleep

As a doctor, I have often found myself humbled in the presence of my patients’ artistic creations. Over the years, I have accompanied several artists who taught me that painting, music or poetry can sometimes reveal more than a diagnostic scale. My scholarly path led me to write on bibliotherapy (1), but my lived path has been shaped as much by the studios of Les Impatients, a Montreal art association and collective that opens its doors to people living with mental illness (https://impatients.ca). There, I witnessed repetition become resilience, vulnerability turn into colour, and silence finds voice in paper and gouache.

The idea for this narrative arose unexpectedly, far from Montréal, when I found myself trapped in my car for 12 hours during a flood between Dubai and Abu Dhabi, where I was the Chairman of psychiatry at the United Arab Emirates University (UAEU), a wonderful university. Flooding in the desert; what a paradox! Yet this paradox has become increasingly less paradoxical. According to multiple attribution studies published in Nature and PNAS (2-4), anthropogenic climate change has increased the statistical probability and the intensity of extreme precipitation events, even in regions historically defined by aridity. In the Arabian Peninsula, the atmosphere is now warmer, and warmer air holds more water vapour: ~ 7% more humidity per degree Celsius; this is Clausius-Clapeyron physics, not metaphor. The desert, once a symbol of immutability, is thus no longer a stable category; it can now drown.

In that enforced immobility, my thoughts returned to My Father’s Car, the lifelong series of paintings by Philippe Lemaire, an artist from Les Impatients. His work, steady, repetitive, and strangely luminous, suddenly resonated with my own confinement. The car became more than a vehicle: it was memory, protection, and an immovable symbol. What follows is not a clinical case report, but a personal encounter with art, time, and the immutable presence of a father through his son’s brush.

If Andy Warhol succeeded in turning the soup can from a mere container into an authentic work of art, the automobile has likewise earned this privilege. One of those responsible is Philippe Lemaire. Born in Montreal in 1954, Lemaire has had mental health care since the age of 26. He joined the Impatients workshops in 1991. Since then, having discovered gouache painting, he has never depicted anything other than the car his father used to drive when visiting him at the hospital to take him for a ride (https://impatients.ca/collection/philippe-lemaire/). The title of his paintings, no less than their subject, never changes, invariably,  My Father’s Car. Yet the mode of representation evolves, moving from a vehicle set in some form of landscape, to increasingly schematic outlines where only a few lines recall the car, and a rectangle suggests the garage. A closer look reveals that each painting is, in fact, different, bearing subtle details hidden beneath what one might too hastily dismiss as mere repetition. Alongside the almost unchanging title, the artist always adds the date and his name: a signature of the immutable.

I met Mr. Lemaire a few times during workshops at Les Impatients (5). His gouaches are well preserved, and, in my view, his entire series of vehicles stands as one of the masterpieces of the Impatients Collection. I have studied 87 of his drawings, immersing myself in this body of work, gripped by a fascination that seemed linked to a paradox: the stillness of the immutable set against the mobility of an automobile.

The automobile has long been a source of inspiration for artists. In Quebec’s French language, a char is not a tank, nor a parade float, nor a horse-drawn wagon, it is simply a car. From the early 20th century onward, the car embodied modern design and became the ultimate possession for many families. Whether steam-powered, gasoline-fuelled, or now electric, the car has captivated artists, offering both fascination and a means to critique consumer society.

The list of car-loving artists is telling Jean Dubuffet, Gabriel Orozco, Salvador Dalí, Benedatta Cappa, Hervé Di Rosa, Claudio Lara, Damian Ortega, Ichwan Noor, Ivan Puig, Margarita Cabrera, Erwin Wurm, Jeff Koons, Giacomo Balla, Luigi Russolo, Joe Rush, Ian Cook, Betsabeé Romero, Kim Adams, Salvatore Scarpitta, Antoine Dufilho, and, of course, César, who crushed cars into cubes. The automobile symbolizes speed, progress, power, virility, eroticism—but also pollution, pursuit, destruction, and death. It is beloved by cinema and celebrated in song. In Quebec, Luc Plamondon and André Gagnon’s first hit in 1970, Dans ma Camaro, still lingers in the summer air: “In my Camaro, I’ll take you down all the summer roads…”

For Futurist artists such as Marinetti, Boccioni, Balla, Carrà, Severini, and Russolo, the car embodied youth, velocity, and violence, a new ideal of beauty. Today, artists project onto it their environmental anxieties and social critiques. Some reshape cars with playful excess, turning them soft, swollen, broken, or monstrous, displayed in museums with irony and euphoria.

But with My Father’s Car, we encounter something new: an artist who has spent nearly 3 decades tirelessly repeating the same motif, just as Warhol endlessly reproduced Campbell’s soup cans. Week after week, Philippe Lemaire paints his father’s car, sometimes blue, sometimes brown, often with a figure in the driver’s seat. Viewed together, his works resemble frames of a long animation, akin to Disney’s Mickey Mouse. Yet unlike Mickey, there is no movement, no smile emerging frame by frame. The car remains static, unyielding.

It is this immobility that gives the work its power. The fascination lies in the dissonance: between contemporary art’s obsession with the moving automobile and Lemaire’s portrayal of stillness. What I feel when contemplating these works reminds me of something familiar in my psychiatric practice: the ideo-affective discordance often observed in psychosis, where words and emotions no longer function as a coherent whole.

At first glance, My Father’s Car is timeless. It neither modernizes nor grows outdated; its shape is rigid and square. One cannot tell if it moves or stands still. Why is immutability necessary here? Does it reflect the artist’s difficulty in approaching change? When time fails to unfold, the subject inhabits a realm outside of time[1]. The subject is trapped in an eternal present, where events cannot be linked in a narrative sequence. Lemaire’s car is likely a memory frozen in time, a past that remains intact, unaged, and untransformed. Yet by exhibiting his work, by engaging with viewers and workshop facilitators, this past is reworked, reactivated. The presence of others may introduce a hint of movement, a demand for psychic temporality.

Occasionally, Lemaire disrupts his cycle: a green lawn, a garage, a pumpkin, a sugar shack. These rare deviations are precious, startling ruptures of monotony. They allow history to be constructed, even in small fragments. In Lemaire’s case, the repeated title seems to reinstate the paternal function: each painting inscribes the father’s presence anew. By endlessly titling his works My Father’s Car, Lemaire builds a symbolic reality: a personal graphic novel, a significant series for him, if opaque to us. And in recognizing it as art, we validate this creation as an inscription into the symbolic order, perhaps even as a gesture toward healing.

The beauty of My Father’s Car also lies in its stereotypy and minimalism. Just as repetitive music (Terry Riley, Steve Reich) achieves depth through constraint, Lemaire’s cars achieve resonance through sameness. At Les Impatients, he always begins with 2 horizontal lines and 2 wheels, pauses, then completes the car, adds silhouettes of himself and his father, and sometimes sketches a garage, a tree, or the sign of a long-vanished Montreal store. When finished, he leaves the workshop. The ritual is unwavering.

Repetition can be defensive, a way of preserving psychic integrity against fragmentation. The workshops of Les Impatients provide a safe “garage” where he can protect this fragile process, free from judgment, medication, or psychiatric evaluation. The series itself becomes a kind of repetitive music: minimalist, hypnotic, protective. It is as though the car, immobile on paper, moves in memory alone.

I imagine the car leaving the garage and the artist in the passenger seat being driven by his father. He looks at the landscape, the city, the countryside, the blue sky, the snow, the spruce trees, the red maples or the orange cones (6). He looks sideways at his father and smiles at him. And in that smile, there is happiness.

Epilogue: Every drop that strikes the roof echoes as a cruel reminder (7): here, in the heart of emptiness, I am captive to a nature suddenly enraged, and the sand, a powerless witness, is silent before this drama of water and isolation.

The water rises around the car, silent yet relentless, paradoxically, the desert, which usually evokes vast openness and freedom, becomes a prison, its dunes transformed into liquid walls. Then I started thinking about Saint-Éxupéry’s Little Prince (8): “What makes the desert beautiful,” said the little prince, “is that it hides a well somewhere.”

And believe me, dear reader, this was no mirage.

Parties annexes

Note

1. [1]Note for psychoanalysts, especially Lacanians: in Mr. Lemaire’s repetitive work, the Name-of-the-Father does not seem excluded or rejected from the subject’s psyche. But it is as if, with the title he gives to each of his gouaches, «My Father’s Car,» a new reality is created, a comic strip, a true story, a series significant for him, somewhat more obscure for us, the viewers who elevate this real creation to the level of a work of art. With this desire for promotion, we somehow validate the successful attempt by the artist Lemaire to engage with symbolism as a form of healing. Lemaire, in French, phonetically means «the mother» in the masculine form…

Auteur : Emmanuel Stip
Titre : My Father’s Car Stranded in the Flooded Desert: Art Therapy in the Face of Climate Chaos
Revue : Santé mentale au Québec, Volume 50, numéro 2, automne – hiver 2025, p. 9-16

URI : https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/1123611ar
DOI : https://doi.org/10.7202/1123611ar