Terre Sauvage
It is good, so long as one is trapped in Canada, to allow one’s mind to turn away from “current events,” and towards the things that are really here. This means trying to ignore our politics, and business arrangements for a bonus, and instead noticing our poetry and art. We have more and better than we have deserved, and may still produce it under some cosmic free trade agreement that we do not have to negotiate with Mexico or Trump.
The Canadian landscape required a new response, for we were further north than the others. It had, as it were, to be brought in from the cold. A century has passed since the “Group of Seven” began marking up the wilderness, leaving their Toronto commercial art jobs to explore the space between the bush and the muskeg. First and last among them was A. Y. Jackson, who came not only “a foreigner from Quebec,” but tramped the world and wandered towards Great Bear Lake and the Arctic coasts and tundra.
His accomplishment was to convey that the Canadian landscape was an enemy, to be not exactly loved, but with whom the artist must fight. He would show it as it was, with every unwhite of dirty snow, not even trying to be pretty and European; and in its persistently unearthly glory. He would bestow his relentlessly austere gaiety upon it. In contrast with our comatose official being, he would show things that were really there, and with unreal things like the people entirely omitted.
They were the painters of French Canada who depicted the life of villages and hamlets, and brought instruments to tame them. They provided the opposite extreme, even to Jackson’s Laurentian uplands. Both they and the Torontonians, marching into Algonquin Park, could be prey to sentimentality; but Jackson was instinctively pure. From near to his beginnings, he knew what he was doing, and never paused, painting in studio or field; and now, at the age of 142, he stands in my eyes as the true native Canadian.