“Stormy Weather, Georgian Bay” by Group of Seven member Fred Varley
A friend of mine sends me the artwork I sometimes share here and this is what came in my mail today.
"The Group of Seven captured the vastness of the Canadian landscape, and how that landscape affects Canadians in terms of their social and political outlook; namely, the tendency of Canadians to be less assertive and domineering than their American cousins, and to be humbled by the vastness of the wilderness around them. You really must see the works of the Group in person, because many of them are enormous, and are intended to depict the Canadian landscape as a place of beauty, as well as a place where humans are at the mercy of their climate and where human ambition is dwarfed by the enormity of Canada and the unconquerable expanses that exist between the people who inhabit the land. There is a famous poem by AJM Smith, “The Lonely Land”, that captures this ethos:
“Cedar and jagged fir uplift sharp barbs against a grey and cloud-piled sky. And in the bay, blown spume and windrift and thin bitter spray snap at the whirling sky, and the pine trees lean one way. This is a beauty of dissonance, this resonance of stony strand; this smoky cry curled over a black pine like a broken and wind-battered branch when the wind bends the tops of the pines and curdles the sky from the north. This is the beauty of strength broken by strength and still strong.”
That is quite lovely. Thanks for sharing.
When I came to Canada as a grad student from Germany in the mid-eighties, one of my first weekend outings was to the National Gallery in Ottawa. I bought a poster of Stormy Weather, Georgian Bay, and taped it to the wall in my dorm room at Carleton University.