Swamplands by Edward Struzik

Author:Edward Struzik [Struzik, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781642830811
Publisher: Island Press

Chapter 7

Peat and Reptiles

The bog floor shakes

Water cheeps and lisps

As I walk down

Rushes and heather.

—Seamus Heaney, “Kinship”1

Staring down into the water, where light from the late afternoon sun refracted into a kaleidoscope of colors, the one thing that stood out on my first canoe trip on Georgian Bay’s French River was the dark silhouette of a white pine parallaxing in ghostly fashion. The pines, smooth rock, and dark water evoked an intimidating sublimity that did not reveal its secrets readily. If you were lucky back then, as I was sitting by a campfire on a starry night, you could hear the howl of a wolf, or maybe, as my companion swore, see its shadow lurking in the damp forest beyond. But you didn’t know what else was out there, because venturing into the bogs and fens beyond the riverside was not the thing to do at night.

Georgian Bay is situated in a corner of Lake Huron where there are 30,000 islands of pinkish-gray granite. Many are dotted with the cottages of affluent New Yorkers and Torontonians who can do the drive in a day or two. It’s the world’s biggest freshwater archipelago. The bay is famous for those wind-swept pine trees that magically grow out of slim, peat-filled frost fractures in the Canadian Shield.

It’s a Group of Seven art scene that never gets tired because it is still, culturally speaking, a relatively fresh Canadian landscape image. Up until the time painters A. Y. Jackson, Lawren Harris, Arthur Lismer, and their fellow Group of Seven artists, as well as Tom Thompson (who died before the formation of the group), began venturing north into this part of the world in the 1910s and 1920s, sketchers and painters made Canada look like a country dominated by hills and dales filled with butternut, maple, oak, and lakes that resembled those in the English and European countrysides. It was a metaphorical way of taming the chaos of colors and the otherworldly tangle of a boggy landscape. “Healthy, lusty colour which you see in Canada is no doubt considered vulgar,” was the way artist J. W. Morrice described it in 1910 when he complained to a friend that English art dealers were “poisoning everything” with their “ghostly Dutch monochromes.”2

More than anyone else, members of the Group of Seven informed Canadians that their “North” was unforgivingly boreal—spongy, buggy, running with wolves and bears, swimming with beavers and snapping with turtles more than it was pastorally Carolinian and populated with noble stags leaping over babbling brooks. “We the North,” the rallying cry for the Toronto Raptors NBA basketball team, was one of the many identity-shaping truths that was firmly rooted in the culture that grew out of the Group of Seven paintings.

Many Canadians at the time resisted this reality. Hector Charlesworth, a Toronto-based art critic, was appalled when he took in a Group of Seven exhibit in Toronto in 1921. In reviewing Lawren Harris’s painting Beaver Swamp, Charlesworth wrote: “A while ago I saw in an art gallery, a .

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