Painting Class - Background

Readings and re-readings, past and contemporary (art discourse), of Group of 7 landscape paintings make Canadian Shield rock outcrops in Ontario and the lone wind swept pine tree iconic motifs in Canadian Art (Harris, Hill, Reid, O'Brian). These painted motifs, and the group's texts, 1900-39, are part of the canon of Canadian art history. According to members of the group, Group of 7 artists 'bushwhacked' through forests and made meaning in paintings of the land for people living in Canada (becoming a nation)(Harris). The presence of the 'other' is revealed as a result of the Group's paintings, texts, and speech, around their work and paintings, which excluded newcomers (immigrants), First Nations, women, species, and other others, such as Nature. The 'other' fulfilled the group's desires in their texts and empty landscapes. For instance, when the members of the Group of 7, all white men (some working-class backgrounds lead by mostly wealthy English and Scottish immigrants), went to the bush to paint they were away for months from the over populated and impoverished new immigrant neighborhoods in the city of Toronto. Are the Group of 7 paintings racist statements, reflect nationalist intentions, and a doctrine prescribed for people living in Canada (Canadians?)? The director of the National Gallery of Canada (NGC) in the 1920s-30s, supported and acquired the work of the Group of 7 painters and promoted the artists as well, casting the painters as Plato's warrior heros. The socratic warrior hero taken from the republic ideal of civilization from Plato, was applied to a new nation, Canada.

As a visual arts undergraduate and painting student, at the turn of 20th century, my family and I were implicated in the fine arts discourse, Nationalist and Canadian. It was further alleged, by a few fellow students, we were (are) either complicit or ignorant of it. As I grew up, I heard (and still hear) stories of our working-class lives lived, of lakes, and memories of cottages and house building, road building, logging, good times, injuries, deaths, births, of fishing, boating, and hunting, mistakes, and joys, etc. These folks are really not interested in contemporary art. While attitudes and lifestyles change, generations continue in the tradition of my parent's generation who drive a few hours north/south/east/west from cities and towns, to cottages, fishing and hunting camps, built on Canadian shield rock, in forests, and on lakeshores, in Ontario. In my family's case, our cottage is in the area where my grandparents and great-grandparents travelled too from Ireland and Germany in the late 19th Century, settled to make a better life, lived and worked, where some still lived, while some moved elsewhere. It was also some of the geography the Group of 7 artists travelled through in Ontario in the early 20th Century, sometimes sketched from or painted images from, and in regards to their finished paintings, wrote and spoke about as Nature, empty, and the wilderness. Some members spoke about the spirit of the nation, while in their letters they also briefly mentioned their concern for the loss and disappearance of landscapes for painting. The forests and wilderness they painted were being damaged by resource industries: forestry and mining development (Hill). At the sametime, mining and rail developers provided support of transportation to members, plus they helped collect the paintings.

The content of the Canadian art history survey class I encountered in Vancouver, BC, in the 1990s, included the texts on Canadian landscape painting and, coincided with the terrain I knew growing up in eastern Ontario. The paintings by the Group of 7 and the identity of Canada as a Nation were also stories we were told in my Ontario grade school. This fulfilled one of the aims set out by the Group (Lismer). The nation's references were not of the land of my family, friends, neighbors, and I, but the images made by the Group of 7. For the men and women living in Canada during WWI, according to Historians, it was a significant moment. The battle for and win of Vimy Ridge. The independence gained by signing the Treaty of Versailles, independent of England (as a colony) and, war times brought many changes to people living in Canada.

Images of the death and trauma in war's aftermath appear in the Group of 7 artist's paintings of the war (some were war artists). The similarities can be seen between the scene's of the battlefield paintings from WWI of Souchez, France, by A.Y. Jackson and later landscapes damaged by fire, or water; as can the application of paint. The thick application of paint (impasto) and bold colors by members of the Group, taken from Tom Thomson's technique, is unlike the minimalist and feared approach seen in later painter's minimalist application of paint (just after WWII) reflecting the fear 'of uncontrollable, unexpected, stirrings of their own 'interiors,' as described by Mira Schor (Schor, 149). The heightened (bright) colors of a Group of 7 painting could also present samples of a world beyond the earth's identity that provided continuity to the republic of Plato. In western philosophy, Plato created continuity as an "other worldly identity" (Plumwood 98). The warrior hero (in this case the artist?)"experience[d] nature in the form of death, as a hostile force that sever[ed] continuity" (Plumwood 99). Nature's impermanance, always changing, suggested the need for an idealized image not in the real or present:

While travelling abroad, and when living in BC (another province in Canada), upon seeing an exhibit of Group of 7 paintings entitled 'Art for a Nation', that spoke of the 'spirit of a nation' according to the Group and Art Historians (Hill), I was reminded of the place very close to me, where I grew up and where my family still lived. However, for me, the landscape paintings worked in ways the National Gallery, art history, and the Group of 7 had not intended or counted upon. The nationalist intentions of the Group and the NGC are well documented in texts, and in contemporary critiques and essays. My desires of the place and responsibility and acknowledgement of the missing did (do) not reconcile with texts by artists and art historians, contemporary or past. My art works are my attempt to reconcile these notions and involve a rereading of the paintings of the Group of 7. Are the paintings representative of the ideal other world, of the future for the 20th Century, which is now the past, and bright(er), an ideal, not attainable in worlds, nation states, built with western philosophy in mind (Plato's writings)? What is the nature of here now?

There were artists working in the modern way at the same time as the Group who seem not at all interested in what is described as the Groups search for the Nation's motif. My M.A. thesis explored further the work of one painter, Prudence Heward, based in Montreal.

This subject has been part of my art projects for over 15 years now. The mpg clips in Painting Class - Memories of A Non-Dutiful Artist were taken over one year, 2005, when I returned to Toronto from Vancouver. The 'lake' in this piece is one of the areas in Ontario the Group of 7 artists travelled too and painted from.

-- L.M. Moriarity, BFA, MA, B.Ed.

2008.