"Adventurers in Paint": The Group of Seven

“Painting the Canadian scene in a Canadian fashion” was the vision of the artists who came to call themselves The Group of Seven. Between the years of 1920 and 1931, they held eight exhibitions of their works, and forever changed the landscape of Canadian painting. Rather than bore you with lots of text, today I want to let their paintings speak for themselves. Here are seven paintings by seven great Canadian artists!

The Edge of the Maple Wood

This first painting is by A.Y. Jackson. It might look like a muddy hill to us, but to the young Canadian artists at that time, it was “like a glowing flame packed with potential energy and loveliness.” That quote comes from Arthur Lismer, who saw the painting at the 1913 exhibition of the Ontario Society of the Arts with friends J.E.H. MacDonald, Tom Thomson, and Lawren Harris. They were so impressed that they invited Jackson to join their circle.

The Guide's Home

This painting by Arthur Lismer really shows the group’s debt to French Impressionism. Artists of that school used dabs of paint to express light and movement. With this painting, you can almost hear the rustle of the wind in the birch trees and feel the crunch of fall leaves underfoot.

First Snow, Lake Superior

Lawren Harris was a leader and visionary in the circle of young artists. One of the group wrote that art, for Lawren Harris, “was almost a mission. He believed that a country which ignored the arts left no record of itself worth preserving.” This painting of the north shore of Lake Superior shares the same smooth, rounded surfaces that are characteristic of his other works. He has simplified the ruggedness of the landscape to suggest a purified spiritual place.

Bisset Farm

Most of the Group of Seven painted with oil on canvas, but Franklin Carmichael developed a unique style with watercolour on paper. I like how this one displays the grandeur of the hills that rise high in the backdrop, set over the small, tenuous presence of the family farm in the foreground. Still to this day, our presence in Canada is small indeed in relation to the vast wilderness beyond our cities.

The Cloud, Red Mountain

Unlike most the group, Fred Varley preferred painting people more than lakes and trees. But when he took a teaching position in British Columbia in 1926, he couldn’t resist the grandeur and beauty of the Rocky Mountains. He wrote enthusiastically to a friend “British Columbia is heaven.” At first, I didn’t like The Cloud, Red Mountain, but it has grown on me since. Varley lifts our gaze to the sky above the mountains, with its rich deep blue in contrast with the sun-touched clouds.

Fire-Swept Algoma

The artists didn’t always paint scenes of arresting beauty; sometimes they turn our attention to the wild or destructive power of nature. In this composition by Frank Johnston, we see a hillside ravaged by forest fire. What I like here is how the artist shows us both the fierce and regenerative side of nature. If you look closely, you can see green blades of grass rising up from the forest floor.

Fine Weather, Georgian Bay

Georgian Bay was a favorite subject for the artists. Some of their most memorable works show windswept trees clinging for dear life to the rocky shoreline. In this one though, James MacDonald shows a rare view of the Bay in peaceful weather. The foreground shows three friends together enjoying the wide expanse of sun and sky, giving a vivid picture of how the artists saw themselves and their work. On a camping trip to Algonquin Park with his friends Tom Thomson, A.Y. Jackson, and Arthur Lismer, Fred Varley wrote that they were “all working to one big end… emptying ourselves of everything except that nature is here in all its greatness.”

Sources:
The Group of Seven and Tom Thomson, by Anne Newlands
The Art History Archive, "The Group of Seven." http://goo.gl/vYfdS

The Hardy Boys and the Case of the Arrogant Critic

I mentioned in an earlier post that I used to be a grad student in literature. Part of why I chose to abort my professor goal had to do with the feeling that I was becoming a self-righteous intellectual. Whether I was reading a novel for fun or watching a play at Stratford, I felt that I, the scholar, had to identify everything that was “problematic” and condemn it. Let’s see what that looks like in a sample book by a Canadian author.

The Tower Treasure (1927) is the first novel in the immensely popular Hardy Boys series. Leslie McFarlane, a Canadian, was the first author to ghost write under the pseudonym Franklin W. Dixon. Frank and Joe Hardy are the teenage sons of a middle-class, suburb-dwelling family in Bayport, a modestly sized city of 50,000. Aside from the crimes that drive the plot, the world of the books is basically a wholesome place where things are “swell” and “good night!” is an acceptable exclamation. The boys’ detective work fits around classes, church, baseball practice, and family meals.

An especially problematic feature of the story is the class values that operate in the background. When a package of jewels disappears from the mansion of a reclusive millionaire, the father of the boys’ friend Slim Robinson is the prime suspect. Mr. Robinson loses his job, and Slim, the A-student and aspiring engineer, is forced to drop out of school to get a job. Now here’s the thing: the family also has to move into the poor neighborhood of Bayport. The story describes their fallen state in one scene when Frank goes to visit his pal:

When they came to the street where the Robinsons had moved they found that it was an even poorer thoroughfare than they had expected. There were small houses badly in need of paint and repairs. Shabbily dressed children were playing in the roadway.

The Robinson’s misery is complete. The father is unemployed, their son has lost his future, and they have nameless street urchins for neighbors. To be identified among the poor is the worst possible condition, and the Hardys must solve the mystery to clear Mr. Robinson’s name and restore the family to the middle class.

What else is problematic in this story? Gender. Mrs. Hardy’s role in the story is limited to enabling the boys’ adventure, mainly by packing them lunches as they go off sleuthing. For example, “When [she] heard the boys’ plan, she thought it an excellent one and immediately offered to make some sandwiches for them. By the time they were ready to leave she had two small boxes packed with a hearty picnic lunch” (157). The mother has her own car, but doesn’t seem to need it; she never leaves home. The only exception is the final scene when all the characters gather at the house of Mr. Millionaire to celebrate the solved case (and I’m not sure why, but I pictured her wearing oven mitts).

Leslie McFarlane

 Now what do critics do with all of this? Here’s what I would say: “Aha! I knew it, you backward, middle-class, patriarchal so-and-so! (to borrow an expletive from Joe Hardy) “I see your ideology of class and gender oppression, and I censure it!” This is the spirit of judgment and condemnation that just stinks from a mile away. It’s the petty mindset that claims moral high ground and elevates one’s self above the author. Yes, The Tower Treasure perpetuates a vision of the middle class that alienates the lower class and limits women. But (and I say this to myself) let’s not go the extra step of using a children’s story to inflate our moral ego.

Alistair MacLeod – Bard of Cape Breton

Recently I’ve been considering my decision to write about history and literature on this blog. Is there any relationship between those two? Or did I just throw them together like green eggs and ham? Over the past two months, I’ve been reading an author who has helped me to realize how both history and literature feed into and enrich one another.

Alistair MacLeod was born in 1936 and grew up on Cape Breton Island. I discovered him at the recommendation of a friend, and have thoroughly enjoyed his writing from the start. The great thing is that, unlike Charles Dickens, you can reasonably set out to read all of his published work. All you need are two books: Island (1999), his collected volume of short stories, and No Great Mischief (2002), his novel.

 As I said, MacLeod has helped me to think about the relationship between history and literature. In stories we have, as Northrop Frye said, an “imaginative key to history” (76). For example, No Great Mischief traces the family history of Calum Ruadh, the Abraham-type patriarch who emigrated from Scotland in 1779. In a history textbook, you might read that “nearly 40,000 Scots arrived in Nova Scotia between 1785 and 1849” (Conrad 240). In the novel, however, you get to read about the experience of one man, widowed on the crossing, and his effort to establish a new life in Cape Breton Island with his twelve children. The story brings life and emotion and compassion to compliment the historical facts.

In Island, MacLeod’s short stories centre on the family life of Cape Breton. The fathers are miners, farmers, fishermen, and loggers who take pride in the dignity of physical work. Again, you could read in a textbook that “Cape Breton's economy faces significant challenges with unemployment and out-migration” (Wiki). But what you have in Island is the story of a young man fed up with his futureless life in small town C.B., who leaves home to “kick the dust off his shoes” and yet discovers new-found respect for his father and grandfather even as he travels away (The Vastness of the Dark). In another story, a miner wrestles with his alienation from his wife and children as he prepares to leave Cape Breton to work in the mines of South Africa (The Closing Down of Summer). Again, as Northrop Frye says, stories “tell us things about human life that we don’t get in any other way” (77).

This Group of Seven painting illustrates the typical setting of a MacLeod story. (1)

I want to know the Canadian experience. I want to understand its regions, and appreciate the character of their inhabitants. I want to see their strength and feel for their trials. If we are to have any hope of progress to that end, we need both history and literature. History tells us what happened, and literature fills it with life.

Sources

Northrop Frye, The Educated Imagination.

Margaret Conrad and Alvin Finkel, History of the Canadian Peoples: Beginnings to 1867. 

(1) Painting: Jackknife Village by Franklin Carmichael

The Difference between Canada and the USA

I just got back from a week in Florida with family. Apart from the chance to swim in the ocean in January and eat a full hamburger as an appetizer, the trip gave me the opportunity to think about cultural differences between Canada and the United States.

Sunset at the beach in Naples, FLA

Certainly, Canada has a long history of receiving culture from America with open arms. Most of our songs on the radio, movies in the theatre, and athletes in the CFL are American. It’s easy to take all that for granted. But during my stay, I was struck by one thing that definitely stopped at the border: religious nationalism.

You might first notice it when you exchange currency at the airport. Suddenly all of the bank notes and coins in your hand bear the refrain “In God We Trust.” Later on, as you toast the New Year, the band leader says “This next song is dedicated to our troops in the field – may God bring them home soon,” and they begin to play, not Auld Lang Syne, but God Bless America. A few days later, you are browsing a large bookstore and you find a thick volume titled Southern by the Grace of God, singing praises to sweet home Alabama et al. And as you drive around town, you are struck by the insistent presence of Old Glory, the flag that adorns public buildings and houses everywhere.

In application, religious nationalism can lead people to present their political values in religious language, intensifying debate from matters of justice to matters of good and evil, righteousness and sin. At its most extreme expression, this has produced the “God Hates Fags” movement out of Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas.

It is wrong to pray for blessing upon your country? Surely not. Is it wrong to love your flag? Nope. Is it wrong to let religion inform your views of justice? No, we all do this. Is it wrong for interest groups to use language of sin and evil in public debate? Yes, and I’m grateful that the practice is foreign to Canada. It's not easy to maintain a language of shared values, especially given that people from every religion and worldview have made Canada their home. But for the sake of unity and understanding, surely it's worth the effort.

For a brief overview of religious nationalism, see:

http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/March07/Dyson.cover.AP.html

History and Fun: Oil and Water?

My memories from history class have little to do with history. Far more than the King-Byng Crisis or responsible government, what stands out is my grade 10 teacher’s vigorous pacing and his rock-hard gel hairdo. He seemed unable to stay in one place for more than a moment. As a class, we were like the audience of a tennis match, our eyes going back and forth as we followed our tennis-ball teacher.

History class is a hard sell to the present generation of students, and it’s not hard to see why. Traditional approaches rely heavily on memorization of facts and dates, both of which are instantly available to anyone with a smart phone these days. What format would make Canadian history engaging? Well, today I want to share just one answer from an unlikely source: board games.

My wife and I love board games. One of our favorite dates is to go out to a café called “Snakes and Lattes” – Toronto’s first board game café. It’s a wonderful place, and I urge you to go there immediately. During our visit yesterday, we discovered a game which re-enacts the contest for North America. “A Few Acres of Snow,”(1) as it is called, places you and your opponent in command of the Thirteen Colonies and New France. As it won a prestigious Golden Geek award in 2011, I had high expectations.

We sat down at our table and eagerly opened the box. I asked one of the helpful staff to teach us the rules, but he said “Ooh, sorry... It’s a real niche game. There’s a small group of people who love it, but I’ve only played it once.” Not discouraged, we opened up the manual and began to unravel the rules of play. About two hours later, my voice was hoarse from reading 12 pages of rules, and Jess had a look of despair and protest on her face.

The rules were complicated because, well, running a colony is complicated. On any given turn, you can choose from 21 actions, including different types of expansion, attack, and money-making. It was tough going for us unseasoned n00bs to learn the game, but its complexity is also its strength. The game leads you to see the economics of scarcity and choice in the history of the colonies. The different strategies in the game are analogies of the real choices that were available to the British and French. Of course, playing a board game is not the same as learning the real story, but is has the effect of making the real story more interesting. The game shows that our history came from choices – things didn’t have to turn out this way, as there were countless other choices available to those with power. Add to that innumerable contingencies and chance events, and our history is transformed from a bore into a tense drama.

(1) The name came from a quote of Voltaire, who dismissed the loss Quebec in 1759 as just "a few acres of snow."
All photos taken from: http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/79828/a-few-acres-of-snow

Winter in the Prairies

Last month, I was walking through Seneca College when I stumbled across the motherload – library clearance sale! I had to sift through piles of deadwood, but my persistence was rewarded. I came away with an anthology titled The Prairie Experience and a very promising Canadian historical atlas. Being an Ontarian, I was surprised and delighted to learn that Canada has provinces west of Manitoba (which the atlas confirmed), and they even have a unique literature of their own. Boldly, I steered the birchbark canoe into uncharted waters.

The anthology was a rewarding read. It includes poetry, short fiction, memoirs, and a one-act play, all written by prairie authors. Central in their writing is the landscape, fruitful at times but more often harsh and uncompromising. I want to share one poem that captures the mood:

PRAIRIE IMPRESSION

By Margot Osborn

The world is a silver penny

Impossibly large

And I am in the middle of it,

A penny reaching from rim to dull grey rim of sky

That curves above my head, a lustreless bowl.

There is nothing but the snow and I.

The snow in shadowed hummocks is its superscription

But I cannot read the language nor make out the design.

I am alone in this white desolation.

Though I move, it travels with me,

Featureless,

And still I remain in the middle. (1)

Saskatchewan in Winter, outside Prince Albert.

I like how the author begins by casting the prairie as a silver penny. A penny is as flat as can be, and it’s not worth a whole lot. In 1971, around the time that this poem was written, the average Saskatchewan farmer made a net profit of $4,616. As the speaker surveys her surroundings, the snow covers any variety in the “Featureless” landscape. Even the “dull grey” sky offers no landmark. I had to look up “hummocks” – it’s a small hill, or a mound. In this case, I gather that it would be a snow drift, casting a shadow on the ground before it. The line “I cannot read the language” is interesting. I think it speaks of the expectation to see traces of design in nature: order, harmony, balance, beauty, &c. But the design in this prairie landscape is either buried under the snow, or it is absent altogether. I think the second interpretation is supported by the following line, as speaker calls the plain a “white desolation.” I love the image of the speaker traveling, yet always in the middle. The lasting impression of this poem is that the prairie landscape is as vast as it is bare, and the speaker finds herself, in the words of another poet, “Alone, alone, all, all alone, Alone on a wide wide sea.”(2)

Sources:

(1) Terry Angus, Ed. The Prairie Experience. Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada Ltd., 1975.

(2) "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by S.T. Coleridge