Picasso in the Canadian bush

Last October, as the leaves on our street were turning golden, I set off on a propitious expedition. Destination: The art section of the nearest Chapter's bookstore, where I'd decided to at last spend the lavish gift certificate that colleagues gave me when I retired. It didn't take long to hone in on this gorgeous book, packed with wonderful reproductions and a capsule saga of The Group of Seven and Tom Thomson, with whom I'd previously had only the most general acquaintance.

Why didn't someone tell me about these guys long before now? -- back in our Ontario years when, every late autumn, we'd set off on a 2-week canoe trip, for a couple of years in Algonquin Park, and later north of Sudbury on Lake Timagami. Later still, the canoe travelled on the van roof as we left southwestern Ontario for BC, driving non-stop for the first 24 hours, up along the north shore of Lake Superior before we (and the three cats) came to a stop in Thunder Bay. Group of Seven country, all of this -- and in the same sequence, too, as their individual and collective explorations.

I guess if I'd had a Canadian education, I'd be well versed in, and perhaps overdosed on, the propaganda mill that the Group generated. Instead, enchanted by their sources, the natural world of mountains and forests like those we enjoyed so closely and for so long at our cabin, I'm free to be enchanted at this late date with these Canadian artists -- particularly with Lawren Harris (oh, to do all that he could do -- landscapes, architecture, portraits) and also AY Jackson.

Propaganda aside, one can't help but be struck by how their paths differed from those of my heroes of early 20th century European art -- although both Harris and Jackson studied in Europe for a time. Despite being city boys, they headed for the bush at every opportunity. As my new book's author David Silcox describes their post-WW I seasons spent north of Lake Superior:

The region was not a settled or a resort area, and going there meant camping out....Harris, in an inspired moment, rented a railway box car and had it fitted up as a rolling boarding-house, complete with bunks and stove, which the railway obligingly shunted along from siding to siding when a new location was required...A.Y. Jackson recalled in his autobiography,"...The nights were frosty,but in the box car we were snug and warm. Discussions would last until late at night, ranging from Plato to Picasso."

Reading this reminded me of something Picasso said: "One must not let oneself be seduced by landscape." Long ago, I mulled that over and and rejected it, feeling that a meaningful landscape is by no means an easy thing to pull off and, like anything else in the world of shape and colour, it's what you make of it.

As I've continued along the written trail of the Group of Seven, I came across Harris's thoughts on the Canadian/European divide:

One can almost guarantee that two months in our North country of direct experience in creative living in art will bring about a very marked change in the attitude of any creative individual. It will bring him an inner release and freedom to adventure on his own that is well nigh impossible amid the insistences and superficialities of Europe.

You know what? I can picture Harris and Jackson on the sidewalks of Paris, where they both once walked, but I can't picture Picasso in that box car. I don't think he could have handled it -- or the landscape either.