| Lancette Arts Journal Founded in 2000 |
Art Reviews |
May 2003 |
On a clear, late May morning I rose at 6 a.m., went outside to fill the feeders for the many wild birds that entertain us daily with their antics. heavy with the scent of trees and blossoms, made all the more intense by the morning dew. The task completed, I drove south to catch a GO-Train to Toronto, took the University subway to St. Patrick's, walked along Dundas Street to the AGO and entered the gallery's great hall around 10 a.m. to find it transformed into a muted Tom Thomson landscape with birch trees, and was entertained by similar bird song not unlike that heard earlier that morning. An aroma of homemade baking rose from a delightful buffet of freshly baked scones , both sweet and savory (heaped in small birch bark canoes), served with jams and smoked fish, coffee and tea. So, why do we leave our little paradises to enter into the hustle of the city? The reasons are occasions as the one described below. One comes to celebrate great artists, because we humans have a need to take what nature gives us and turn it into an expression of art of one kind or another. For reasons of which none of us are sure, we are never just satisfied with the bountiful beauty nature gives us. So, on this morning we listened to the usual speeches that come with such an event. It was a fitting way to start a visual adventure that enriches our spirit and our soul.
By Alidë Kohlhaas
Something magical takes place at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) when you enter the gallery's latest exhibit, which offers a comprehensive look at the art of Tom Thomson. By magical I don't mean anything related to sorcery, but something beautifully transforming without implying any kind of ephemeral or ethereal beauty; it is a bold, gutsy, lasting transformation that makes the statement, "I must be seen, I must be felt, I must be believed, I do exist."
Thomson is a Canadian painter around whom a mythology has been woven over the years because of his untimely death in Algonquin Park's Canoe Lake in 1917. Even though he painted almost a century ago, he still can bring out in us a feeling of connection to our own landscape as no other painter has been able to do, although the Group of Seven comes close.
Thomson, a forerunner of the Group of Seven and a friend of several of its members, dared to paint our world as he saw it, and as it is, and not as proscribed by various European schools and conventions of his time. Mainly self-taught, he evolved into an artist of considerable proficiency in a very few years, after working for many years mostly as a commercial artist. Then, sadly, death cut his painting career short at not quite age 40.
The AGO, in collaboration with the National Gallery of Canada, created a traveling exhibit that previously showed at Ottawa's National Gallery, the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Musée du Québec, and will go to the Winnipeg Art Gallery after it closes in Toronto on September 7. It is the first retrospective of this magnitude of Thomson's work in more than 30 years.
At the AGO five themed displays of Thomson's work allow us to see how this artist in just six years developed into the seminal artistic spark that ignited the flame of Canadian nature painting in the early part of the 20th century, and—I believe—quite subconsciously built on the quietly awakening pride in being Canadian wrought by the sacrifices of such battles as Vimy Ridge and . . .
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