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.
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.
