Interview with Lisa Christensen, author and art historian, for Dreamers and Doers.
I think
people are absolutely in love with Canadian literature now. We have such a wonderful, short history and that makes it
manageable for people to look back and look forward through some of the writing.
My main interest is a
connection to something more significant than the monetary value for instance of
a painting or its role in Canadian art history. For me, my reason for being here at the Whyte Museum is I am
in love with these places. I am a
hiker and if I could I would spend all my days in the backcountry.
And when I started
looking at paintings in terms of my own feelings about them, I saw this whole
separate layer of understanding. Like
you would have if you were looking at a portrait of someone you knew.
You understand it in a different way than if it’s a portrait of a
stranger. No matter how great the
painting is, it has more significance for you.
And the places like O’Hara, Skokie, all these places meant something more to me so I thought, well, create a guide book that allows people to go to the spots were artists have worked. So that’s what I’ve done in my books - lead hikers down trails to places where Lawren Harris and MacDonald, and Belmore Browne, Carl Rungius and Walter Phillips and AY Jackson and many others sat to work. I think its not like I happened on a brilliant idea. I just pointed out something that was already there. Because many people have said to me, we’ve always loved these paintings because we have a history at Emerald Lake. And when you put the two together in a guide book it just makes it so simple for people to get even more in touch with that connection
Q: Talk about the group of seven and why they came here?
A: They went to many regions of Canada after they’d exhausted
the scenery of their home turf which was basically Ontario, Quebec, that part of
the world. They wanted to branch
out so they were looking for new subject matter and new stimulus.
And of the course this
was a real attractive place for photographers, painters, spectacular scenery.
Press releases were talking about how beautiful it was and so members of
the group of seven came out, individually and together, to look at this new
scenery and were just overwhelmed by what they saw.
Some used mountain
scenery throughout their careers, Lawren Harris for instance, always was
referring to mountains. Even in his
late abstractions. JEH MacDonald
became obsessed with Lake O’Hara. Really
didn’t go anywhere else to sketch except for a health break to the Barbados.
After he discovered the mountain scenery, he really didn’t want to go
anywhere else.
Arthur Lismer had to
abandon what he knew about composition and style in his paintings to capture
these great big vast geographic forms in his work. So it was a real change for them, especially for people like
AY Jackson. Rolling, rhythm pattern
of Algoma, of Quebec, it’s a completely different country than the Rocky
Mountains it was a real challenge for him to find his footing as a painter out
here.
AY Jackson spent quite
a bit of time teaching at the Banff Centre.
He came in 1914 before the group of seven had formed. He was hoping
to get a commission for the Great Northern Railway.
He really struggled with the mountain scenery. As his niece and biographer, Naomi Jackson Gross, sums it up best. She said he struggled with the mountains and their up start, up thrust ways. He really preferred rhythm and rolling pattern but he found the front ranges and the foothills, where the mountains meet the prairie, where the mountains start to get really big, to be a really wonderful fit for him and loved the Canmore area, Pincher Creek, down around Waterton where he had family and visited every year of his life. That whole terrain really appealed to him, especially under snow. When you get those wonderful patterns of light and shadow.