MOUNTAIN LIFE - Blue Mountains | Fall 2017

70 ML BLUE FALL 2017 words :: Ned Morgan While Canada celebrated 150, another commemoration was in the works on the lakes and rivers that define our national character. To mark the 100 th year since Tom Thomson’s death, a loose collective of 11 Ontario landscape painters became rugged pilgrims last summer, tracing his canoe routes through Algonquin Park, pinpointing many of the scenes of his works—and painting as he did, en plein-air . Plein-air takes its name from a 19 th century French expression meaning “open air” and refers to a style of painting done outdoors to capture a moment in nature. It is a style that Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven made famous in Canada in the first half of the 20 th century. The 11 artists spent last summer on various canoe and hiking trips in Algonquin Park (and other locations) including Thomson locales Tea, Smoke, Kiosk and Canoe Lakes. The final products of these excursions formed an exhibition in September, Untamed Things , at Toronto’s Arta Gallery. The exhibition title is inspired by an inscription on the memorial cairn at Canoe Lake (where Thomson’s body was recovered in July 1917) that calls the painter “the brother of all untamed things in nature.” “In plein-air painting, you have sun, you have rain, sleet, snow—you’re at Mother Nature’s mercy,” says Andrew Peycha, a Collingwood-based artist who was part of Untamed Things . “So your timeline is, ‘OK, I’ve got to get this done.’ You’re making minute-by-minute decisions. And you have to stick to those decisions. If the clouds look like this now, in a few minutes they look totally different. And if you’re painting in a cloud of blackflies, you gotta just sit there and paint as fast as you can.” Undoubtedly, many of Tom Thomson’s plein-air paintings were hastened to completion under the duress of bugs and weather. “Plein-air painting is insanely difficult,” says Kimberley-based artist David Marshak, another Untamed participant. “You’re not in your studio looking at a photograph and reproducing it. You’re out in the environment, and it’s overwhelming; you look around and think, ‘How do I narrow my focus?’ It’s easy to get caught up in trying to capture every detail. You have all the grandeur of this huge vista but you’re working on a tiny 8x10 surface. So instead you’re trying to be immediate, expressive, and capture something of the day.” I asked Marshak if there were any rules in plain-air painting—ie, can you touch up the work when you get home, away from the bugs? “Often what I’ll do is get down a good sketch after about two hours and then take that back to the studio and tweak it,” Marshak explains. “[In Algonquin Park] all of us were talking about how Thomson maybe did ABOVE LEFT Lonny Doherty, The Island at Canisbay Lake . RIGHT Tom Thomson fishing at Tea Lake dam, date unknown. COURTESY LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES OF CANADA