In 1996, while performing in a production of The Threepenny Opera, Claude MarQuis invited fellow actors, staff from the Mercury Lounge, and one summer fling to sit for a new series of paintings.

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The result was Worriers — a deliberate play on Warriors — more than twenty large-scale portraits exhibited at the opening of the Mercury Lounge in Ottawa’s ByWard Market in November 1996. The venue would go on to become one of the city’s most beloved arts institutions, a jazz and soul mecca for over two decades. MarQuis was there on opening night, his paintings covering the walls.

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The titles of the works were drawn from “Who Am I?” by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics that ask the questions no one can quite answer: Who am I? Did I ever live before? Can I be the only one who thinks these mysterious thoughts? Each painting presents a different face, yet each face carries the same unanswerable question.

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The subjects are rendered with MarQuis’s characteristic psychological light — a light from above that falls on the skin like shared emotional weather: intimate, introspective, slightly melancholic. Some figures emerge from pure black, interior and unreachable. Others stand before open landscapes, suspended between inner and outer worlds. Others are set against urban architecture, arms crossed and guarded, defining themselves against the structures behind them. Several hold cigarettes — not glamorously, but contemplatively, something to occupy the hands while the mind drifts elsewhere.

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The paintings range from 30×40 inches to 36×48 inches, with one monumental work measuring 15 feet, a canvas that sold and ultimately found its way into a castle in Scotland.

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Worriers captures MarQuis at the height of his early portrait practice — transforming the people immediately around him into something universal. Not just who they were, but who any of us are.