Canadian Geographic - The Group of Seven Special Edition
LANDSCAPE PAINTING IN CANADA
An excerpt from the August 1930 issue of the Canadian Geographical Journal.
While the landscapist’s art is concerned with much more than the recording of topographical features, topography and climatic conditions play a major part in supplying him with incentives for expression. In this respect the Canadian landscape painter is born to a rich heritage of the most varied motifs. From the fruit farms of the Niagara Peninsula to the ice of the Arctic, from the fogs of the Bay of Fundy across Quebec and Ontario to the dry clear air of the prairies and over the Rockies to the moist Pacific slope, the various atmospheric conditions veil, or reveal with extreme clearness, a landscape equally varied in its physical characteristics. Add to these the dramatic difference of the seasons and the painter has material for his art that is inexhaustible in its significance and variety.
Art is a universal language, a language used to express not only the immediate thoughts and feelings of its time, but, if it is sincere and deep enough and sufficiently purged of affectation, it expresses also the fundamental things of humanity, the racial characteristics of its makers,
and the long effect of environment. All these are of the essence of any art that is to endure, and though art is a language that may need no interpretation throughout the world, it is generally conceded to be at its best, and most significant, when retaining its racial tang and its local accent.
RICH AND VARIED FUTURE
Canada, with its wealth of the most varied material and made up as a nation through immigration from many countries, may well expect, if art is permitted — or shall we say, encouraged? — to pursue its natural course, a future in landscape painting both rich and varied.
In spite of many of the theories that have succeeded one another in the last few decades and the absurdities of that contradiction in terms, the non-representative picture, a survey of art both Oriental and Occidental seems to show that the painting of pictures that shall endure as art consists neither in representation divorced from design nor design divorced from representation, but a unity formed of the two; expressing in the highest and most subtle kind of design the thoughts and feelings engendered in man by his visual contact with his environment.
THE BEAUTY OF TRUTH
Obviously, for any real expression of these, the artist must speak the truth, and yet speaking the truth does not necessarily make of him an artist, nor does the device of truth, plus an artificial beauty, solve the problem. Is it not rather that the art that has had the strongest and most lasting effect on mankind has been that which has revealed most clearly the beauty of truth? Individuality plays a large part here and the old saying that art is Nature seen through a temperament, still holds good.
The training that an artist receives in the technical side of his art is merely a basis on which to build; a necessary preparation so that he will not be continually frustrated by incompetence in his attempts at expression.
ORIGINALITY NOT A DEVICE
In the recent turmoil of “isms” and “ists” when to be of a “movement” seemed to many the most important thing while others pinned their faith on eccentricity, there was danger of losing sight of the fact that originality is an endowment not a device and that a sincere and unaffected expression on the part of the painter will give to his work as much of originality or of personality as he has — he cannot hope to give more.
In our own country the earliest pictorial maps and the somewhat later topographical sketches of engineers and others, while of much historical interest, had generally less to do with art than with geography or with the recording of fact.
A VITAL PERSONALITY
Tom Thomson, whose tragic death was a calamity to Canadian art, showed in his early work a vital personality with a single-minded and forthright mode of expression. Most painters who win through to a really personal expression, pass through three phases more or less distinct according to their various temperaments. A first stage where they are
learning to draw and paint what they see before them, a second, more experimental stage, where they are more preoccupied with composition, and a third which is the uniting and the fruition of the earlier periods. Thomson was not more than well launched on his second phase, which in his case, due no doubt to many factors of time, place, and associates, took the form of experimenting with a poster-like effect of flat patterns, when his career was cut short by his untimely drowning.
ADDED OTHER THEORIES
His followers, confining themselves at first almost exclusively to the idea of pattern, which while always part of the concern of a painter was at that time being much discussed abroad, soon added others of the many theories that were agitating the studios in Paris and elsewhere and appear to have missed entirely the essence of the work of Thomson whose name they had invoked.
Most of these painters seem now to be emerging from their second phase of experimentation and entering their third, which promises to give us a more free and more natural expression of their various personalities. A. Y. Jackson, in his more personal works, shows a preoccupation with tone and a quite personal and distinguished, if rather dour, colour sense. A. J.
Casson and Frank Carmichael, while paying more attention to drawing in their recent very interesting water-colours, are also evidencing a more natural and personal expression.
Walter J. Phillips of Winnipeg, in his watercolours and woodblocks interprets the clear air and clear waters of the lakes of Manitoba and Western Ontario, and L. L. Fitzgerald, in such pictures as “Williamson’s Garage” and “Oakdale Place” shows evidence of a technical competence and a refinement of vision that promise a very worthwhile expression of an interesting personality.
Many of the younger painters might be mentioned. It is interesting to see some of them who started painting under ultra- modern influences slowly broadening their outlook and regaining their independence. The revolt abroad against the impressionist emphasis on light and atmosphere to the neglect of form and structure in both drawing and design has made itself felt in some cases here, as there, in an over-reaction that ignores the existence of any atmosphere whatever, but this violent swing of the pendulum will no doubt right itself even in the case of those most strongly affected by it.
REFLECTED CHANGING LIFE
In so brief a sketch no comprehensive treatment of the subject of landscape painting in Canada is possible and names and tendencies that might well have been mentioned will occur to many.
Reviewing the general course of our landscape painting, it would seem to have supplied a fitting expression of the life of the people from decade to decade. Men such as Jacobi and Fowler, and their contemporary painters were expressing not only their own outlook but that of a community which was largely made up of people more or less recently transplanted to a new environment, and as the community became increasingly composed of those whose background and outlook were Canadian, painters of the same upbringing carried on, each period representing the Canada of its time. That this is an age of easy communication and many periodicals, art and otherwise, is evidenced in the examples of landscape painting coming from different parts of Canada which show strongly the effect of the various ultra-modern theories which, while now on the wane in Europe, are still being rehashed on this side of the water, both North and South of our international boundary, in the name of, of all amusing things, originality.
MODERNISM WITHOUT ‘‘ULTRA”’
If Canada has suffered less from some of the worst forms of these fevers and hallucinations it is, I think, because our Northern climate is too healthful and invigorating and our mode of life too wholesome for the more insane and degenerate ideas spawned in the hectic and unwholesome atmosphere surrounding the Moulin de la Galette in Paris, to take any real hold upon us and even such of its milder forms of miasma as may have affected us are unlikely to make anylasting impression. The dictum of de Vilaminck that “In art, theories have the same utility as the doctor’s prescription; in order to follow them one must be ill” is more than a mere ‘‘jeu-d’esprit”’ and a healthy man will act on his own initiative and express his own reaction to the world about him rather than as a marionette who can only move when some theorist pulls the strings. Evidences of infection have not been lacking but the true modernism which is alive in all countries rather than the “Ultra” affectations may be trusted to win out in the long run.