A great adventure to find the hidden places painted by members of the Group of Seven began with a novice’s tapestry.
Every year for 30 years, Jim and Sue Waddington, long-time residents of Hamilton, have embarked on canoe expeditions to find the painting sites of the fabled Canadian artists. They will give a presentation based on their forays into wild painting country, and the popular book that evolved out of those expeditions, Thursday evening in Guelph.
Back in 1976, Sue, a nurse, enrolled in a traditional rug-hooking course, soon acquiring the skills she needed to attempt her first pictorial tapestry, she said in a telephone interview. She was a Group of Seven fan, and based that first effort on a very pretty painting, A.Y. Jackson’s “Nellie Lake.”
Accessible only by canoe or foot, Nellie Lake is tucked several portages deep into the La Cloche Mountains on the north shore of Georgian Bay.
Upon seeing the painting up close at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection north of Toronto, the Waddingtons were moved to embark on a search and discovery mission, which they undertook the following year.
Avid canoeists, they dipped their paddles into Killarney Provincial Park and set out for Nellie Lake. Discovering the precise scene Jackson’s painting was based on was an extraordinary experience, they said, and it was the impetus behind a shared hobby of exploration that has gone on for three decades and continues to this day.
“We began to wonder if this place really existed, or if it only existed in the artist’s imagination,” said Sue. “We decided to find out.”
The couple said they grew up with images of the Group of Seven in their homes, and have had a life-long love for the work of painters like Jackson, Franklin Carmichael, Lawren Harris and A.J. Casson, just some of the group’s members. All of the painters were under the influence of artistic adventurer Tom Thomson. Thomson died in 1917 in Algonquin Park before the group was created.
While the couple has focused much of their search for Group of Seven painting sites in the Canadian wilderness, they have also found some sites closer to home, and close to Guelph. Among the slides in their presentation, Jim said, are images of Casson paintings done in Elora and Rockwood.
“The Elora area was one of his favourite painting destinations,” Jim said. “We’ll show some of those sites at the beginning of the talk.”
During the winter months, the Waddingtons immerse themselves in research on Group of Seven paintings, mapping the locations as best they can on the basis of historical records, and painting titles.
While a title like “Nellie Lake” makes a location somewhat easier to pinpoint, other locales have been very difficult to find, they said. All require paddling, map reading and orienteering skills.
Every site discovered has been through photographs, and those pictures, and the stories behind them, formed the rough material for “In the Footsteps of the Group of Seven,” a kind of explorer’s handbook to Group of Seven painting sites. It was published in 2013 by Goose Lane Editions of New Brunswick, one of Canada’s longest standing independent publishers.
Thursday’s presentation is a PowerPoint overview of the book, which, in part, compares the paintings with the actual sites as they were discovered by the Waddingtons. While many of the paintings were done in the early 20th century, the locations in modern times are often remarkably unchanged.
Jim, a retired physics professor, said much of the credit for the creation of the book goes to the Art Gallery of Sudbury, which spearheaded the design of the volume and found a publisher for it.
Jim and Sue Waddington, both 74, will indulge in their unique hobby again this May, when they embark on another canoe expedition into Algonquin Park. Their destination is, for now, a secret, but it is most certainly another Group of Seven painting site.
The presentation “In the Footsteps of the Group of Seven” takes place Thursday evening at 7:30 p.m. at the University of Guelph Arboretum Centre. It is sponsored by Nature Guelph, a local club for nature lovers.
