This is Group of Seven Day in Ontario and you may not have realized it existed -- at least I didn't. Last December a bill received Royal Assent to create this day, so this is the first. I haven't been able to ferret out who initated this legislation, nor why July 7 was chosen for what will now be an annual celebration. Museums such as the Art Gallery of Ontario and the McMichael Collection are acknowledging the influence of these artists (actually 10 in the end) on the artistic zeitgeist of a country that had been shaped by European notions of landscape painting. Another painter, Tom Thomson, was a profound influence on this group but he mysteriously drowned in Algonquin Park in 1917, before they first exhiibited together in 1920.
In recent years we've become aware of the excellent women painters who weren't considered for this men's club, and that Indigenous peoples were almost never included in their work, even though those of a settler background were. We need to acknowledge this but we can still celebrate their sense of the beauty and spirituality of landscapes throughout this country. Several of the members were WWI veterans, some acting as war artists, and it has been suggested that their explorations were a form of healing for their wounded souls. Their technique of venturing into the wilds and painting sketches to be expanded into larger works was distinctly Tom Thomson/Group of Seven.
Curiously, we were at the lovely used bookstore in Tamworth yesterday and I purchased a 1955 book about Arthur Lismer, an original member of the Group who narrowly avoided being blasted to bits by the Halifax Explosion of December 1917. The title alone meant that resistance was futile. Lismer was instrumental in establishing a teaching program at what is now the Art Gallery of Ontario and OCAD.
I've written about having my photo taken with AY Jackson as a boy when we visited the newly opened McMichael. Our family spent plenty of time in Killarney, Agawa, the north shore of Superior, during the summers we lived in Sudbury. We've camped on OSA lake in Killarney PP, those letters standing for Ontario Society of Artists. We've literally stood on various vantage points at Grace and Nellie lakes the artists would have used for paintings. I'm grateful beyond words.
Yesterday, we were also in a canoe on a river with two of our grandchildren, our way of contributing to their spiritual appreciation of Creation. The older of the two is an eager and increasingly adept paddler and later this week we will be camping in an Ontario Provincial Park, so we may get in some more strokes while we're there. Who knows, he may explore some of that same wild country to the north some day.
I'm trying to imagine how we might have a brief period of reflection and appreciation for the ways in which the Group of Seven experienced the natural world and reflected it back to the world with a sense of the holy. I would encourage you to do some snooping about the Group of Seven today to honour their legacy.
https://ago.ca/collection/group-of-seven-ago
2 comments:
It would be easy to taken them for granted, because it would be hard to imagine Canadian art without them. But we shouldn't. KB
I agree about not taking these artists for granted Kathy, nor dealing with them too harshly for their shortcomings. The September Gale book has been a revelation about Arthur Lismer.
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