Monday Morning Art #12 - A. J. Casson

By 1926, the increasingly-poorly named Canadian "Group of Seven" artists added Alfred J Casson to the mix.  The Toronto-born Casson, then working as a commercial artist (at the same firm as Frank Carmichael) was invited to show at an event with the other members.  Frank Johnston had left the group a few years earlier, so there was a numeric opportunity at least.

Stylistically, there was also a good affinity, and Casson fit right in.

This landscape sketch captured near Rosseau, in the Muskoka region shows his chops. 

Besides painting the landscapes of Ontario's 'Near North' and further towards Lake Superior, the small Southern Ontario towns and their architecture were one of Casson's favourite subjects.

Some of his views of rural buildings and simple structures reminds me of Edward Hopper. (See my MoMoArt#3 on Hopper)  Certainly the magical lighting effects, and the stylized, simplified details are evocative of Hopper's work. In Casson's work the landscape is always and important element there as well.

This piece is an "Anglican Church at Magnetawan" and besides the brightly illuminating sunshine, there are the sculpted, somewhat ominous trees, a distant treeline and the river in view.

This piece, the Store at Salem also has a Hopper-esque feel to me. While the clouds and rocks and shaded contours are reminiscent of what Lauren Harris was doing too.










Ultimately, the organized Group of Seven artists disbands in 1932 - though Casson as the youngest of the group is still in his prime. He begins the "Canadian Group of Painters" in 1933. But with Harris, Carmichael, Lismer and Jackson on board, it's clearly just a (better-named) reconstitution of the same crew.  (The Canadian Group on Wikipedia. Oh look, Varley, Carr etc too).

The graphics and screen-printing aesthetic of Casson's background comes through in his work. This one of "The White Village" is a good case in point.

There, the golden trees are towering over the buildings, and the water and rocks in the foreground place the houses squarely in nature.  Figures are rare in his work - all the personality coming from the landscape. 

I shouldn't skew this too much toward the views of small towns, as his trips into the northern bush are a key part of his work.  Casson did many views of Moose lake as well. 

This piece is simply "Moose Lake." 

Here is his a more dramatic, less controlled view of the "Ragged
Sky at Moose Lake" as well. It's a bit more wild and lively.










Back in the urban landscape, there are a pair of pictures from around 1927 that stick with me.


These are the rooftops-in-the-snow pictures that capture well the cold, crisp, sunny days in the neighbourhood, familiar to urban Canadians. 

The colour in this image of his "Rooftops of the Ward" might be a little skewed into the orange from the original, but a winter warmth comes through that is very appealing there. 

His "Rooftops" in this second image has a somewhat different style. It's reminiscent of some of the Quebec artists of the time (perhaps Marc-Aurele Fortin).

Alfred Casson played an important part in the development of Canadian art in the Twentieth Century, without doubt.  It's the cross-fertilization of styles from the other artists of the time that is particularly appealing. 

Unlike many of the others at the time, Casson did not have a prolonged European period in his development, as far as I'm aware (though I haven't researched that in any thorough way).  Many other members of the Group of Seven and the Canadian Group had, as part of their education, some time spent painting in France. Some had been born in the UK and had some exposure to the artists of that area.

Casson picked up Impressionist and Nouveau influences once removed from that scene. Perhaps that helped allow him to carve out his own unique melange of those elements.

I'll wrap up with his "General Store" (he found many 'stores general' to serve as subjects).  This one intrigues me somewhat because of the magical background of ghostly blue shapes, reminiscent of Emily Carr's work. 

The piled-up twilight clouds are not unlike Carr's rainforest tree-shapes. Again, structures dropped into a dramatic landscape.  One gets the feeling of these outposts of humanity finding a foothold in the wilderness, but tolerated rather than dominating their environment.  

Monday Morning Art #11 - Tom Thomson

It's a bit cliché for a Canadian to haul out Tom Thomson pictures in their art tribute, but how can we resist? His works capture something of the soul of this country. And (hopefully) most Canadians grow up having seen his work thousands of times. Hopefully most learn his name, or at least remember his work or style.

Interestingly, Thomson only really starts painting seriously after about 1912, when he visited Algonquin park.  But he did apparently learn to paint and draw as a younger person.  There are a few pedestrian portraits of ladies in suitably Victorian garb.  I found this ink sketch from 1905 of a Young Fisherman to be one of his early good pieces.  And it hints at his future obsession - landscape, fishing and the interaction of people with nature.

Probably the most iconic of Thomson's works is Northern River (1915).  The vertical lines, the silhouetted spruce trees. and the glow beyond over the river epitomizes the Thomson view of the mysterious landscape.

For me it puts me squarely into a spot I knew as a kid growing up in the northern landscape. A favourite path off into the bush, where the next city in that direction was probably Moscow over the other side of the North Pole.

The tangle of the brush and red leaves underfoot could only be captured by someone who had been there.






His piece "The Pool" from the same year catches that moment when everything is red and orange, just before it has all turned to black and white.

 There's a chill in that water that is palpable. You'd feel it splashed on your hands as you pushed your canoe into the little lake to pick up your route on the other side.

It's election day here in Canada, as I pulled together this Monday Morning Art spewing of pictures on Twitter, and it makes me think of what the Thomson legacy says to us. I keep coming across symbolism and ideas I might not have thought up had it not been election day.  I offered Thomson's "Twisted Maple" as a bit of a kick-off for the my Monday art stream.


Again, it's an autumn scene.  Thomson liked to capture this time of year. Sure he has other works, like A Summer Day which depicts the big blue skies and fluffy clouds of another season. But often he'd use the colour of his Masonite panel in the work to provide the hue for the reddish purple leaves in his composition.  Autumn gave him lots of opportunity to do that.

Much of Thomson's sketch work (and the 'Group of Seven with which he is closely associated) used small plywood or Masonite panels of about 27 by 21cm, on which he would paint an image on both sides. 

It creates a challenge for galleries hanging his work. Some rotate the panels every few days or weeks. Others display them in two-sided glass cabinets so we can see both pictures.



 The sketchy quality of the pieces adds to their appeal. In the quick capture there is an immediacy and an immersion into the landscape that you might not get from another artists more larger, more polished piece. 

Much of the landscape Thomson and the group of Seven painted was often burned over by fires that would sweep across the boreal forest unchecked. Occasionally there work was in cut-over lands as well. 

These somewhat denuded landscapes expose the rocky Canadian shield, like the bone structure of the region.  Like the meandering rocky sections of the shield, the burns also afforded the artists vistas that would otherwise have been obscured by trees.

It's the visceral 'like-being-there' sense of the bush that captured most in the Thomson paintings.  And for those of us living in that environment, or growing up with it, it is always "the bush" and never the forest or the wilderness.  Those terms were always giveaways that you were from down south, in a city somewhere.

The authenticity captured in Thomson's work shows him to be 'of the land' in that it connected with him, and he knew how to live in it. I suspect if I ran across Thomson in a canoe on some northern lake and talked around a cooking fire on an exposed chunk of granite, he'd only use the term 'bush' too.

This view of the birches in "Early Spring" (1917) was in the spring of his last year. Sadly he was found dead in July of 1917, in Canoe Lake.  And while it was ruled an accidental drowning, there were also hints of murder or suicide. There is much written on the topic, and so I'll leave that to the many theorists.  I think though that it is unlikely Thomson would have willingly left this world. With the prolific and inspired work of his last five years, it's unlikely that he would have seen his work as anywhere near finished yet. 

I regret that there are many would-be paintings that we never got to see.

Monday Morning Art #10 - Maurits C. Escher

Born at the end of one of the most dramatic centuries in art history, Maurits (aka Mauk) Escher was a contemporary of Salvador Dali and René Magritte, and there are certainly some similarities to those artists in some of his early works. No doubt they were cross-influenced at numerous stages in their careers.

Escher has difficulty in academics and focuses on illustration. In the beginning his work with centres around portraits, figures and landscapes. And a few cats.  But his chosen media drives his style and fosters a later interest in patterns and line that is quite profound. The stark blacks and whites lead him to an early exploration of shapes. 

This early piece is called "Twon Tree" (1919) takes a simple landscape, but departs from realism and turns tree branches into a swirling, surrealist pattern that explores the geometric. 





But for another two and a half decades, Escher's work is well grounded in reality.  His landscapes and buildings are sharpy captured, with strong lighting and perspective.

He does a number of works around Italy, from the Amalfi coast, to rural mountain villages in Tuscany.  The stark lights-and-darks of the tower faces in "San Gimignano" (1923), capture the village just south of Florence, are are captivating with their drama 





This untitled village (1930) nestled in the mountains is a striking asymmetric composition.

There is an underlying hint of magical realism gained from unusual angles and somewhat organic, amorphous shapes.

A pivotal piece for me is this one called "The Bridge" from 1930. Presumably this is on the Amalfi coast, where he was painting many scenes at the time.  The combination of three things appears to be important:

• The unusual angle
• the complexity of the blocks of houses, and 
• the geometry of the staired-bridge, and the adjacent stairs on the buildings. 

This surely leads him towards some of his best-known works of impossible staircases,  like the House of Stairs in 1951 and the famous "Relativity Lattice" (1953), shown here.








 Across his career, Escher also likes to explore the impact of unusual optical effects on an image. He does several self portraits based on looking at himself in a spherical lens.  Here is a rough montage of five of those portraits.  Beginning in the top left, the years of creation are: 1921, 1934, 1935, 1946 and 1950. 

 
By the time we're into the late 1940s and '50s, Escher's work is almost completely exploration of geometric patterns, eye-twisting illusions and fascinating negative/positive space interconnections. Flying Fish,  Lizards or Butterflies for example - all fitting together perfectly in a pattern. 

To wrap up, I thought this very Internet-friendly image of a cat, from Escher's early years (1919) captures a bit of his earliest thinking about negative and positive space.  This appears to be a woodcut, leaving the artist the challenge of representing fuzzy fur with only lines. The result is very successful indeed.