On Canoe Lake: A stroke behind Tom Thomson
Group of woodsy painters cast off on a tribute journey to the master painter, finding his gifts as elusive as they are powerful
ALGONQUIN PARK— The little girl in the pink bikini launched herself in a cannonball off Blueberry Island, hitting the colacoloured water with a gleeful shriek. Clambering up a rough granite shelf past her family splayed sunbathing in the latemorning sunshine, she skittered to the island’s southern shore, dripping wet, to look in on Paul Mantrup’s progress.
“You get used to it,” Mantrup said, roughing in blue bands of sky with oil paint on a small board clamped to his portable easel. “When we were here last fall, there were busloads of tourists up to see the fall colours. That was hilarious — I would hear someone clear their throat behind me and there would be a half-dozen men, arms crossed, watching.”
In the 100 years since the death of Tom Thomson — woodsy loner, master painter, outdoorsman extraordinaire — Algonquin Park has changed a lot, and Mantrup and his loose crew of about a dozen painters know the modern-day wilderness as well as anyone. For more than a decade, the group has ventured gamely into the woods — against trend, convention and, yes, tourist throngs — to paint as Thomson and his Group of Seven cohorts did decades before.
But cannonballing grade schoolers aside, Canoe Lake this year is different: It was here, on July 8, 1917, that Thomson died, face-down in its inky waters, and Mantrup’s crew has assembled here very much as homage.
In Thomson’s last season here, he worked feverishly, producing a small oil sketch every day under the shifting skies of an onrushing spring. There were no tourist buses, no jostling for picnic spots or campsites, no canoe gridlock. And there were precious few painters with whom to share his sharpening view of a changing world, beyond those he knew and had likely invited to join him in the serene pleasures of wilderness painting — his calling, his joy, his life.
The centenary of his passing on July 8 brought forward both a flood of tourism and the expected array of tributes, many of them intended to reinvigorate a weary myth. Paul Walde, a Victoria-based performance artist, swam the length of Canoe Lake, past the very spot where Thomson died, as tribute. The McMichael Canadian Art Collection has paired him with the late avantgarde contemporary artist Joyce Wieland. At the Tom Thomson Art Gallery in Owen Sound, Betwixt and Between, an augmented-reality exhibition, merges the Thomson story with First Nations histories on the Bruce Peninsula; histories largely ignored in the heroic nationalism that Thomson and his cohorts in the Group of Seven have most often been torqued to represent.
Even after all of these commemorations, there’s nothing tired about Thomson’s sketches: small, electric bursts of colour and gesture that have embedded themselves, against fashion, trend and convention, among the most vital art ever made in this country. Mantrup, along with a loose crew of about a dozen artists coming and going here over a week, are focused on one thing: Thomson’s legacy as painter, nothing more.
“It came together, like a lot of things, over a few beers,” Mark Berens said. “We just looked at each other and said, ‘Let’s do this.’ ”
The group chose a name for the excursion: “Untamed Things,” a phrase lifted from the memorial cairn to Thomson that stands at the lake’s northern end. They set up camp on Tea Lake, which links to Canoe Lake by a narrow channel, to stay close to where Thomson was last seen alive.
On a recent morning under the rising heat of the day, Mantrup, Berens, Rob Saley, Peter Taylor, Andrew Peycha, David Marshuk, Lonnie Doherty, Paul Nabuurs and Jon Houghton packed into a half-dozen canoes and set out for Blueberry Island, where they’d set up shop. All around them, canoes and motorboats crisscrossed the water in a kind of midmorning nautical rush hour where Thomson, a century ago, would have been alone.
“The only thing we can really recreate faithfully are the bugs,” Peycha said dryly. “It would be nice to not have all these people on top of you.”
Doherty, a novice paddler, smiled nervously. In May, he had arranged a painting trip for the group in Kiosk, in the northern reaches of the park, in the height of bug season. “I think I have one painting with about 700 blackflies stuck to it,” he said. “Rookie mistake.”
Doherty finds the bugs less intimidating than the work itself. “When you paint from a photograph, nothing changes,” he said. “Out here, you’re just chasing it all the time and it’s terrifying. But that’s when the magic happens.”
Amid shifting notions of art-world significance, landscape painting folds easily into stodgy convention, alongside classic rock.
But Thomson, with his kinetic skill and intuitive, electric sense of colour, has never seemed less than fresh. With his quick hand and dynamic gestural brush strokes, he could make his en plein air sketches come alive with a raw immediacy of the moment that, even a century later, hardly anyone can match.
“Sometimes, it’s just a quick stab and drag; he punches the board and pops his brush at the end,” Mantrup marvelled.
Thomson died before the Group of Seven, assembled partly in homage to his committed wilderness ways, was to form. As a result, perhaps, he’s never been yoked quite so completely into the service of artistic nationalism as his colleagues.
For a young country groping for an identity, to find itself expressed in idealized images of a fictional wilderness was almost too good to be true. Some, like Lawren Harris, grew weary of the Canadiana mantle and departed into abstraction. But others made hay of the myth all their lives. A.Y. Jackson, the Group’s torchbearer until the end, would trek up to Canoe Lake alongside the tourist buses and, for the benefit of CBC TV cameras, gamely paint on rocky outcrops for the broadcaster’s benefit.
A century on, following in Thomson’s broad wake would seem almost to extend the cliché, were it not so devoted to Thomson himself.
“I think most that do it, do it because they don’t give a damn about any of that,” said Marshuk, hunkered down beside a small juniper bush on the island’s south shore.
He was swiping briskly at the sky on his board as, overhead, the sun ducked and weaved from one cloud to the next. “I’m not the kind of guy who can walk into a gallery and be able to appreciate a red shovel propped in the corner,” he said. “That strikes me as a middle finger to the viewer. What I’m interested in is great painting and, for me, Thomson was an absolute master.”
Many in the group met at the Ontario College of Art and Design in the ’90s, when conceptual art ruled all.
Up on his small rise, Marshuk dabbed at his sky, battling himself to capture the moment. “When we were at OCAD, we couldn’t even remember the term ‘en plein air’ being brought up,” he said. “But this is invigorating. You’re trying to capture less a scene than a feeling.”
He fretted a little, considering the evolving image in front of him.
“When you think about what he was able to achieve, it’s easy to get bummed out. But he’s the master. You don’t walk into a life drawing class and pull off a Michelangelo.”
Marshuk sighed. “On our last trip, I was trying to paint super loose, like Thomson did, but mine were pretty clumsy,” he said. “That’s what I envy about his work, how he could just be so in the moment with it. That’s what keeps me from breaking out my tiny brushes and doing perfect little branches. What he did, and what he wanted to do, stands alone — and I mean against anybody.”
Mantrup agreed. “The emotion he could put into a sky — it’s just tremendous work. It’s stuff we’re still chasing, and always will be.” Untamed Things, a group exhibition of en plein air sketches, opens Sept. 8 at Arta Gallery, 14 Distillery Lane. For more information, go to artagallery.ca/exhibition/future