Perhaps the most ‘wilderness’-y
aspect of my calendar is the pictures that are displayed with it. The pictures
are prints of paintings by the Group of Seven. My first encounter with the term
was when I moved here to Victoria from Jakarta, Indonesia in 2014. I was on a
bike tour of Victoria with my mom and stopped by the Emily Carr house. Here, we
were told Carr was on par with the Group of Seven and regarded as a contemporary,
but the tour guide said because she was a woman, she was never able to be part
of the group. I just assumed the Group of Seven was just that – a group of
seven painters. I didn’t give it much thought or put in effort to learn more
about them. Now, I have the opportunity to uncover their origin and learn about
them and their philosophies.
The Group of Seven, I have learned,
was born out of the artists’ desire to create a distinctly Canadian art form.
Branching off from Romantic views on the cathartic power of nature, the group
sought to create a nationalistic Canadian identity through capturing Canada’s
wilderness landscapes. This is a narrative that is a common thread in much of
what we have read. Charles G.D Roberts, for example, was a proprietor of this
notion. As was David Campbell Scott. The connection between Scott’s “The Height
of Land” and poetry by the Romantics is clear – Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”,
for example is a prospect poem. Both describe a view from above. Connecting to nature
has long since become an instinctive facet of Canadian identity. Pierre Trudeau’s
essay, for example, reveres the power nature has to strip man of his societal
self and discover the true person within (Trudeau). It is interesting to note, then, that much of
the wilderness these authors and artists so revere has been touched for
centuries by the Indigenous people who made many of these areas their homes
long before Europeans came to North America. Time and time again we have
discussed this at length.
No comments:
Post a Comment