In the top sketch, Robert recreates a moment from his 1986 cancer treatment at St. Margaret’s Hospital in Toronto. His mother Isabel accompanied him on this trip. Below this, Robert returns to the exterior view of the VG hospital in Halifax, now putting the watching man in a toque and overcoat.

When Robert worked on multiple images at the same time like this, it’s tempting to look for connecting links between the images. Robert himself cultivated and encouraged these links. Mother and son show a human relationship, while the man and hospital suggest the relationship of patient to institution. One is an interior view, the other an exterior view. Mother and Son is a picture of loyalty and love–a most reassuring form of familiarity in a strange and hostile place; Man and Hospital is a picture of fear, an entering the unknown, a confrontation with a road block obscuring the artist’s path in life and blocking access to other forms of experience.