What Our Younger Artists Don't Know About Canadian Painting

This is a no holds barred blog entry. Older artists won't likely raise an eyebrow when they read what I am about to write. Hopefully, the words I write will impress younger painters to see the Canadian art scene from a different perspective.

To begin with - Canada is a vastly different country today then it was 50, 60, or more years ago. Canadians are a pretty patriotic lot today. We have our symbols in place and we know who we are as a people. But I want to turn back the clock 60 years or more.

English Canadians in the early to middle of the 20th century, struggled with self identity issues. Let me give you a couple of examples. When I was a kid in 4th grade my teacher would occasionaly have us sing - our other national anthem, 'The Maple Leaf Forever'. A picture of Queen Elizabeth looked down on each school classroom and when we chose to identify ourselves by flag we used either the Union Jack or our Naval Ensign. (not a bad looking flag either).

Ask any Canadian over the age of 60 to sing God Save our Queen - and they can stand and bellow without losing a beat. Ask any Canadian under the age of 40and they would look at you as if you have a mental problem. Canada sure had a problem. We had a colonial mentality and we were caught between two pretty big international players. School kids up until the middle of the 20th century had a strong sense of belonging..............to the British Commonwealth.

Ok..you may ask, where am I leading with this?

Because we had a weak national identity, we also had a big national insecurity complex. Older Canadians can remember the days when we used to say, "Canadians are not a funny people...we don't have much of a sense of humour?" It seems hard to imagine that today, doesn't it?

As Canadians we didn't see ourselves eclipsing the ordinary. The CBC, for instance did not allow for a "Star System", in broadcasting. Our few heroes were Foster Hewitt, Barbara Ann Scott, Frederick Banting and a whole slew of hockey players.

This attitude was particularly hard on the Group of Seven. Their colour driven, impressionistic style of painting did not go down well in Canada.

AY Jackson didn't pull any punches in his autobiography of the early days of the Group. Jackson quoted some of the many letters received by readers to the Toronto Star.

"They daub and squirt." "Art is desecrated by modernism," "A horrible bunch of junk," The brazenness of these daubers," "Arrogance of Canadian Group," Fignments of a Drunkards Dream".

Jackson went on to write in his autobiography about how the group fought back.

How do you fight national insecurity and a country unwilling to bestow recognition on its own citizens? Well, you put this article in the Toronto Star.

GROUP OF SEVEN
ART GALLERY OF ONTARIO
9TH TO THE 30TH JANUARY

What press says about modern Canadian Art
1. They are garish, loud, affected, freakish. (Toronto Star)
2. A single, narrow, formula of ugliness (Saturday Night, Toronto)
3. A school of landscape painter who are strongly race of the soil (London Times)
4. The foundation of what may become one of the greatest schools of landscape painting. (The Morning Post, London)

AY Jackson then wrote this letter to the editor of the Mail and Empire

Sir,
for nearly ten years there has been no cessation of the carping criticism of academic painters of the National Gallery of Ottawa, the Group of Seven and the modern movement in Canada generally, the efforts made to prove that what recognition the modernist has received is due only to favouritism in Ottawa.

That the many exhibitions the Group of Seven has in the United States at Boston, New York, Philadelphia Washington and various other cities, might have been due to the merits of their work seems inconceivable to the academic mind. The fact that these exhibitions have nearly always resulted in invitations to exhibit again might suggest that they were appreciated. Those who are in charge of American art galleries have heard that in Canada there are artists who are trying to interpret their country with freedom and freshness of vision. Seldom has there been any of the brash criticism these artists have received at home, and the generous recognition they have received in the USA should have been a stimulant to all Canadians instead of arousing feelings of envy and bitter partisanship.

No Canadian exhibition that has ever went abroad has won the fine eulogies that the Wembly Show did. It was only in Canada that the London times and Morning Post were sneered at. If the academic painters in Canada are not overwhelmed with invitations to exhibit abroad, it is inherent in any long established societies. The natural instinct is to look after their own members first and to show tolerance towards old members who should be retired. Inability to control members who are better politiicans than artists results in exhibitions which may be representative but which are nevertheless dull and monotonous. So in self protection they seek to gain control of the work of artists, who have more vision than they and to be the sole and final arbitrators or what is to be called Canadian Art.

They might better prove their right to such authority in some finer way than by getting a lot of malcontents to sign a petition to our overworked prime minister.

A.Y. Jackson.

When Canadian discovered that people in other countries recognized and paid tribute to Canadian art abroad, they were able to identify their homegrown, dismissive, and parochial attitudes.

All of which reminds me of Toronto Blue Jay baseball player telling Toronto fans in their world series.,,,in the press......"ITS OK TO SHOUT AND CHEER."

Early CBC - AY Jackson Documentary, complete with film footage of Tom Thomson's, Toronto 'Shack'.

I've been on a bit of an AY run lately. His autobiograpy caught my interest and with that I was off to the races.

Some background to this CBC documetary. It was created in 1955, making it 55 years old. AY, was 72 years of age at the time.

My attention picked up when the film showed footage of the famous 'shack', where Tom Thomson, lived in Toronto.

Lawren Harris, in his essay 'The Story of the Group of Seven,' wrote:

"The studio building was built in 1914. MacDonald, Jackson and I had studios in it. We tried to induce Tom Thomson to join us. Thomson loved the north. The north country and painting were his life. He lived in town in the winter with the sole idea that he could go north as soon as the ice broke in the rivers and lakes. Tom did not want a studio in the building. He would not feel at home in it. There was a dilapidated old shack at the back of the property which was built in the days that part of Toronto was the town of Yorkville. We fixed it up, put down a new floor, made the roof watertight, built in a studio window, put in a stove and an electric light, Tom made himself a bunk, shelves and a table and an easel and lived in that place as he would a cabin in the north. It became Tom's shack and was his home until he died in 1917. It has been known as Tom's shack ever since."

While Lawren doesn't say it, AY Jackson in his autobiography says that Lawren who was wealthy, provided the money for the studio and property. So it's conceivable that he paid for the refitting of Tom's 'shack'.

The Shack was eventually moved to the McMichael Gallery in Kleinburg, On., and AY Jackson spent the latter years of his life in the shack as a resident artist.

Anyway...its yours to enjoy. Its a real period peace documentary complete with tinny music, orchestrated dialogues and a voice over that makes it sound like a world war 2 film.


Please click here.

Lawren Harris essay extracted from Joan Murray's, 'The Best of the Group of Seven,', Hurtig Publishers, Edmonton, pg.27. isbn:0-88830-265-7.

Weeding out the Collection

A friend and I were engaging in art talk over coffee. He told me how he refuses to let his less mature works survive the passing of time. Now lets face it. He was really saying, "After I am gone, I don't want my art to be judged on what I perceive as my poorer paintings." His words hit the mark for my collection could do with a good weeding out.

This is the thought that went through my mind as background to this page from the autobiography of AY Jackson.

AY, writes:
"While we were in St. Malo, a little circus tent arrives there. The performances took place in a small green tent, outside of which stood a covered wagon drawn by a mule. I made a sketch of the tent in the evening light. Some years later when I was cleaning out a lot of old paintings, I came across the circus tent and told my sister to put it with other rejected pieces in the furnace."

One day Robinson said to me, "Do you remember a sketch you did in St. Malo of a green circus tent? Do you still have it?" I told him that it had gone to the furnace some years before.

He was shocked. "Why, he said," "That was one of the finest things you ever painted."

Thereafter he would often refer to it, and in retrospect the sketch got better with every telling. "It was as good as a Morrice," he declared, and in time I came to believe that it was and that I had been very foolish to destroy it.
Source:
A Painter's Country - the autobiography of AY Jackson, pg.19. Clarke Irwin & Co, 1963. Toronto, On. Canada.

The Beaver Hall Group

Lawren P Harris: Monster Forms, 1953.

It not uncommon for like minded artists to group together and draw support from one another on their artistic journey's. While the Group of Seven was advancing its style from its Toronto base, Montreal also had its Beaver Hall Group.

For that matter, Lawren Harris and AY Jackson were cross over artists, who migrated from Montreal to Toronto. The online Cybermuse site, reports that AY Jackson continued to maintain Montreal links after moving to Ontario, through ongoing letters and communication.

The Montreal group were originally students of William Brymner. It was a non structured association of artists who shared studio space in Beaver Hall Square.
It was formed in 1920 and while it had a lifespan of a year and a half its members maintained their relationships through the next two decades.

Included in the group were, Anne Savage, Sarah Robinson, Edwin Holgate, Prudence Heward,Lilias Newton,and Lawren P. Harris.

Its important to clear up any confusion which may arise about Lawren Harris. Lawren P. Harris, is the son of the noteable Group of Seven artist, Lawren S. Harris.

Click here and you will be taken to the Cybermuse reference for this entry.

Don't miss the click on related images tab. It will open for you a page of some of the surprising works of the Beaver Hall group. Click here.

Paul Dorsey on Artist Barker Fairley

Barker Fairley by AY Jackson. 1920


AY Jackson by Barker Fairley, 1939

"I remember seeing an exhibition of paintings by Barker Fairley some 30 years ago and being positively unimpressed. They were a bleak, washed-out lot. Renewing contact recently with John and Gisela Sommer, at whose Gallery House Sol in smalltown Canada the show was held, prompted me to have another look.
And now I think I see the point."


Francis Sparshot, U of T, Associate Professor. Author of Structure of Aesthetics,
by Barker Fairley.1957.

"There’s something quite moving in the gaunt portraits and sparse landscapes, particularly the latter. Rather than washed-out, the scenes now seem blindingly bright to me. I wonder, too, if he was consciously stripping away the utensils of the scenery so that we could see the countryside fundamentally naked."


Dale Fields by Barker Fairley

“People keep asking me if painting is hard work,” he once said. “Painting isn’t work. Painting is making decisions. I make decisions, nothing more.”

There’s an interesting political sidebar to Fairley’s career as well: he and his first wife Margaret Adele were once ridden out of the USA on a rail, their reputations tarred and the Canadian government in no mood to help them remove the feathers.

Fairley, who was born a headmaster’s son in Britain in 1887 — in Barnsley, Yorkshire, in fact, just down the road from my hatchling nest in Lancashire — but who spent most of his life in Canada, was far better known in his time as one of the world’s foremost authorities on German literary beacons like Goethe. He was an academic through and through, a literary and art critic, author of many books, and only then, it seems, a painter.

It was well after he brought his scholarship to the German department at the University of Toronto that Fairley was prodded to take up a brush by one of his former students, Robert Finch, himself a painter as well as a poet.

He couldn’t have needed too much encouragement. By then he’d encountered all of the Group of Seven, though he’d missed out on Tom Thomson, their spiritual heart.

“I knew them all,” he told an interviewer. “I met Jimmie [JEH] MacDonald in the fall of 1917. I never met Tom Thomson, he had died a few months before.”

Fairley began by rendering landscapes in watercolour but, lamenting that “Canada has no tradition of portraits, no tradition of freely painted faces”, soon switched to the human physiognomy in oil (without ever abandoning landscapes)."

To be continued:
With appreciation to Paul Dorsey's Dali House.
Please click here to view Paul's Blogsite.

Did AY Jackson's 'The Red Maple' influence the creation of the Canadian Flag?

A River, some rocks and a small tree with red leaves. Did this painting, have a profound influence upon the selection of the Red Maple Leaf for the Canadian flag?

When the late Prime Minister Lester Pearson, sought public input into ideas for the flag which would represent our country, George Stanely, submitted a single maple leaf, drawn in red ink.

Stanley wrote that the single maple leaf, "suggests the idea of loyalty to a single country".

But the power of the brush is mighty and when AY Jackson set down his brush and signed his work off, did he create an iconic symbol which would influence the hand that drew the red ink maple leaf that became our flag?

Of course not?

click here to read George Stanely's obituary in the Ottawa Citizen.