Fine Canadian Landscape Art - Auction and Previews

There's an auction of "Fine Canadian Art" being held in Toronto, Canada by Heffel Fine Art Auction House on 27th November 2014. The majority of the works in the catalogue are landscapes.

Heffel Fine Canadian Art Catalogue Cover
The Trapper's Return by Clarence Gagnon

oil on canvas, circa 1909 ~ 1913

signed and on verso signed and titled and titled

21 x 28 3/4 in, 53.3 x 73 cm

$500,000 ~ $700,000 CAD

View the catalogue

You can the works in the auction as follows:

• view the Live Auction Catalogue on the Heffel website - this includes the details of the works and what each is expected to fetch
• by downloading the catalogue from the Heffel website. This includes detailed notes about artists and paintings
• on Issuu - which has the complete catalogue (free) - and provides this widget which allows you to click to read

The Artists

Artists who are new to me who impressed 

These included:

David Brown Milne in 1909

• David Brown Milne (1882-1953) - I liked his watercolours. You can see more of his work on Wikimedia - these include some very fine paintings of the First World War eg Montreal Crater, Vimy Ridge and there is more information on the National Gallery of Canada website
• Clarence Alphonse Gagnon (1881 - 1942) - whose painting is on the cover of the catalogue. A woodcut of the same scene is also included in the sale together with a number of other paintings. He was apparently renowned as a painter of the Canadian winter - with snow being pink in the morning and blue at the end of the day. His landscapes were more 'dreamed about' than painted on the spot - with some being completed in his studio in Paris.  Paysage de Charlvoix is simply stunning!

He invented a new type of landscape - a winter world composed of valleys and mountains, of sharp contrasts of light and shadow, of vivid colours, and of sinuous lines. He ground his own paints, and from 1916 his palette consisted of pure white, reds, blues and yellows.   

National Gallery of Canada profile

• Alfred Joseph (AJ) Casson (1989 - 1992) was a m,ember of the Group of Seven and has a delightful watercolour of birch trees in the auction.

Artists familiar to me

• Lawren Stewart Harris - I was surprised to find out that Harris is Canada's top artist in terms of auction sales. I'd never before seen any of Harris's urban landscapes - his painting of Houses on Gerrard Street is very fine and is on the back cover of the catalogue

Back cover of catalogue: Gerrard Street Houses by Lawren Harris(Estimate $350,000-400,000)

Harris’s depictions of Toronto streets are like portraits. Sometimes poignant, sometimes regal, sometimes sad, each of his buildings can be seen as a sitter whose character, carriage and personality are depicted with exacting skill under Harris’s brush Catalogue

• One of my favourite painters Franklin Carmichael (1890 - 1945) - who has one work in the show. Carmichael's paintings included in the show at the Dulwich Picture Gallery really impressed me - see my blog post about Painting Canada: Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven - Review

Information about the auction

The evening auction is being held at the Park Hyatt Hotel, Queen’s Park Ballroom, 4 Avenue Road, Toronto. 

Works can be seen in previews as follows

• Preview At Heffel Gallery, Vancouver: 2247 Granville Street Saturday, November 1 Through Tuesday, November 4, 11 Am To 6 pm
• Preview At Galerie Heffel, Montreal: 1840 Rue Sherbrooke Ouest Thursday, November 13 Through Saturday, November 15, 11 Am To 6 pm
• Preview At University Of Toronto Art Centre 15 King’s College Circle Entrance Off Hart House Circle Saturday, November 22 Through Wednesday, November 26, 10 Am To pm Thursday, November 27, 10 Am To 12 pm
• Heffel Gallery, Toronto 13 Hazelton Avenue, Toronto Ontario, Canada M5r 2e1 Telephone 416 961~6505, www.Heffel.Com

Places to Paint: Agawa Canyon, (Algoma)

I'm very grateful to Jeff McColl for a comment he left on my post about Canada's Group of Seven at Algoma.  This alerted me to the fact that he's been putting an awful lot of effort into pulling together a portfolio of photographs on Google+ of the locations where the Group of Seven painted in the Agawa Canyon in Algoma.

Places to Paint: Agawa Canyon, Algoma, Canada
Some of Jeff McColl's portfolio of photographs matched to paintings by the Group of Seven
© Jeff McColl

Between 1918 and 1923 several members of the Canada's Group of Seven painted in the Algoma region including Lawren Harris, A. Y. Jackson, Frank Johnston, J. E. H. MacDonald, and Arthur Lismer. To gain access to this remote area they rented a boxcar from The Algoma Central Railway, which had been outfitted like a cabin and was shunted to sidings near choice painting locations. From these locations they set out on foot or canoe to capture this untamed area on canvas. Their paintings brought this vast, rugged, and beautiful part of the country to fellow Canadians and the world.Wikipedia - Agawa Canyon

Below are links to Jeff's photos and the paintings by G7 artists at various locations.  Do read his comments as to location as it's obvious that not all the original locations are now accessible due to changes in growth of vegetation or changes in the course of rivers made as a result of floods.  He also provides photographs of what the locations look like in winter.

The links in the name of the artist are to the biography of the artist on the National Gallery of Canada website.

• AY Jackson's "First Snow, Algoma County" - Photo | Painting
• AY Jackson's "Agawa Canyon" - Photo | Painting
• Lawren Harris's "On the Agawa River, Algoma"  - Photo | Painting (click painting to see larger version)
• Bridal Veil Falls (68.5 meters (225 ft) - painted by various of G7 from various angles) - Photo | Painting by Lawren Harris
• AY Jackson's view of Bridal Veil Falls from the south side  - Photo + Photo (winter) + Photo @ -25℃ | Painting
• J.E.H. MacDonald's "Little Falls" located on the Little Agawa river on the east side of the ACR bridge - Photo + Photo + Photo (winter) + Photo @ -35℃ | Painting
• Lawren Harris site of one of his sketches, Algoma Waterfall, Canyon 1, Sketch 111, downstream of the ACR and Little Falls site - Photo | Painting
• Lawren Harris Algoma Stream - Photo | Painting
• JEH MacDonald's Landscape sketch Northern Ontario - Photo | Painting + the rock where he probably painted from
• JEH MacDonald's site for "Agawa river, Algoma" (McMichael Collection) - Photo + Photo + Photo + Photo | Painting (click though to third image)

You can also read an article by Jeff - Paddling/Hiking/Photographing in the footsteps of Legends by Jeff McColl - in the Spring Newsletter of the Group of Twelve - Fine Arts Society of Milton 

Mention the Group of Seven to any artist or photographer and there are instantly visions of great Canadian Landscapes. I have known for years that the Group of Seven had visited the Agawa Canyon and when asked to describe the area I have said it was like paddling into one of their paintings. I have also known that fellow canoeists Sue and Jim Waddington of Burlington have a hobby that include working with the McMicheal Gallery in finding locations where they painted. They have been very successful in finding locations in Georgian Bay, Killarney and Algonquin Prov. Parks. They know that I frequent the Agawa area every year and they asked me if I could identify a few areas

All photos are copyright Jeff McColl. You can see more of Jeff's wonderful photographs of the Canadian countryside on Panoramio

Seems to me that the logical extension of all this work by these canoeists is a book - complete with maps and details of how to get to these places to paint!

Group of Seven fans may also like:

• my post about 'Painting Canada: Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven' at Dulwich Picture Gallery
• my website about Canadian Art Calendars 2013

Hopewell Rocks, New Brunswick - Winter Landscapes #2

Hopewell, New Brunswick, 24×12 © 2009 Michelle Basic Hendry

From a painting near the USA Canadian border in Washington on the west coast to the another place near the USA / Canadian border - but this time on the East coast in New Brunswick, Canada.

This is the Bay of Fundy in January at the Hopewell Rocks.

This is one of Michelle Basic Hendry's favourite places in Canada any time of year.  She wrote

In a place that bustles in the summer, the silence and emptiness of the Bay of Fundy on the east coast of Canada in January gives the feeling of being the first to discover it. We were visiting on the New Brunswick side and the sun was setting behind the red cliffs tipping the trees with gold and lighting up the beach. This was my first trip to the east coast and between the landscapes and the gracious people, it is one of my favourite places in the world.
The Bay of Fundy was nominated for the New Seven Wonders of the World. 

Michelle has Michelle has lived most of her life in Ontario, but has just been on a major road trip and is currently embarking on a new adventure in Oklahoma.  I guess this is when we remember one of the other major pluses of landscape painting - the memories.

Michelle has been elected by her peers to become a member of the Society of Canadian Artists and the Landscape Artists International. I think might just be getting near to painting again after her big move.  You can read her blog here http://artscapes.ca/blog-home/

Links:  The Bay of Fundy

Niagara Escarpment - Reader's Autumn Landscapes #4

November, Letting go (Sold)
oil on canvas, 24x36in

Jan Yates SCA (Jan Yates) lives on the Niagara Escarpment in Canada (a UNESCO world biosphere reserve) and this is the view out of her studio window this month - see Cycle.

She's  a Canadian visual artist - inspired by Canada's Emily Carr who very much focuses on painting the natural and agricultural landscapes around her home.  She wrote in response to my post about the Painting Canada exhibition about the Group of Seven.

Jan paints almost entirely plein air in fields and farms surrounding her home on the Niagara Escarpment.  I very much like the idea that she finds November to be very stimulating

For me November brings a new cycle of inspiration and tends to be one of my most prolific months. As I write there are already a couple of ‘Novembers’ waiting on the easel in various states of ‘undress’.
words written last November and reiterated this week in Cycle

Below she describes her artistic practice in developing her work in general.

My artistic practice is fuelled by changes in our agricultural world. For the past decade in all seasons and weather I have hiked and painted in farms and fields surrounding my home on the Niagara Escarpment (a UNESCO world biosphere reserve). I have developed a body of work in direct response to climate change, specifically affecting agriculture in the Niagara region. In order to create an intimate dialogue with the earth’s growth, decay and renewal my paintings are rendered directly on the land. As well as painting plein air with oil on canvas in an immediate and visceral approach, I have started to synthesize these paintings with my encaustic works. After an outdoor painting session I gather wild seeds, old growth fragments, field flowers and vine to embed and embroider into beeswax. This process reflects a connection with the seasons and cycle of growth and also represents preservation of faith in what the land will give. I will continue to explore and cultivate this fusion and see where it will take me.

How to get your paintings of Autumn posted on this blog

This is the fourth in my series of Autumn Landscapes by readers of this blog.

If you're interested in having your images displayed as part of the seasonal changes, just drop me a line (see side column for email) and reference the blog post in which I can see the painting.

Places to Paint: Please note that I'm interested in the place as well as what led you to paint it in Autumn.

I can't promise to display all that I'm told about. Plus there is an absolute rule which is that this is for art bloggers only ie "no blog post, no feature on my blog".

Note: If you like Canadian landscapes, you might like to take a peek at Canadian Art Calendars 2012 which provides some economical options for hanging a lot of landscape art by Canadian artists

Links:

• Ontario's Niagara Escarpment
• Wikipedia - Niagara Escarpment

Yukon, Canada - Reader's Autumn Landscapes #3

Title: Driving the Dempster

Medium: Mixed Media

Size: 6x8

Jackie Irvine (Jackie Irvine's Landscape Art) lives in the Yukon in Northern Canada which, for those who don't know it, is wilderness country.

Jackie paints purely for her own enjoyment - having dreamed of being a painter since she was a child.  Her painting is #6 of 100 painting in 100 days, all of which are in this same area of the Canol Road. I'm guessing that, given the location, getting out to paint gets a tad more difficult in the coming days!

Places to paint:  The area she is painting is called the South Canol Road (Canol is short for Canadian Oil - which is why the road was built). Click the link to read about it.  This blog also gives an idea of what the area is like

How to get your paintings of Autumn posted on this blog

If you're interested in having your images displayed as part of the seasonal changes, just drop me a line (see side column for email) and reference the blog post in which I can see the painting.

Places to paint: Please note that I'm interested in the place as well as what led you to paint it in Autumn.

I can't promise to display all that I'm told about. Plus there is an absolute rule which is that this is for art bloggers only ie "no blog post, no feature on my blog".

Note:  If you like Canadian landscapes, you might like to take a peek at Canadian Art Calendars 2012 which provides some economical options for hanging a lot of landscape art by Canadian artists

'Painting Canada: Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven' at Dulwich Picture Gallery

Painting Canada: Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven is the latest exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery  It includes the largest group of Canadian paintings ever to leave Canada!

The exhibition opened recently and is on until 8 January 2012.  It's been organised in liaison with the National Gallery of Canada and collaboration with the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo and the Groninger Museum.

This is by way of a preamble as I've not yet seen the exhibition - but I hope to see it very shortly!  I'll also be doing more posts about the development of Canadian landscape art.

Franklin Carmichael, Autumn Hillside, 1920,
Oil on canvas 76 x 91.4cm,
© Art Gallery of Ontario,Gift from the J.S. McLean Collection, Toronto
© Courtesy of the Estate of Franklin Carmichael

Painting Canada: Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven

This exhibition is one of those "once in a lifetime" events.  

The famous landscape paintings of Canada which feature in this exhibition were first seen at the British Empire exhibitions at Wembley in 1924 and 1925. Although both Thom Thomson and the Group of Seven are greatly revered within Canada, they are much less well known outside that country.  However they very much deserve to be better known.

Sketch for the Jack Pine by Thom Thomson

This is the first major exhibition of Canadian landscape art outside Canada and includes the largest  number of paintings (122 paintings in total) ever to travel to Europe plus Tom Thomson’s sketchbox.

Painting Canada is displayed as a journey across Canada, from East to West, framed by two grand rooms dedicated individually to Tom Thomson’s electrifying sketches and paintings of Algonquin Park and Lawren Harris’s other-worldly paintings of the Arctic and the Rocky Mountains. Between these two ‘poles,’ a selection of the best work by Thomson and the Group of Seven will be on display. A special feature of the show will be the juxtaposition, wherever possible, of the initial sketch with the finished canvas. One room will be devoted entirely to a display of these vibrant sketches, which represent one of Canada’s most impressive contributions to 20th century art.

Exhibition Catalogue

The 216 page fully illustrated catalogue is available online from the Dulwich Picture Gallery shop.  It tells the story of the beginnings of the Group of Seven and how and why they started to try and depict the landscape of Canada in paint, the challenges they faced and the journeys they undertook to find their subject matter.

Tom Thomson developed an artistic language that captured the unique qualities of the Canadian landscape - dazzling in colour and in tune with the subtle changing of the seasons. After his untimely death, Thomson’s friends organised a memorial exhibition, and followed this up by forming probably the most famous artistic force in Canadian art history: the Group of Seven. Lawren Harris, J.E.H. MacDonald, Arthur Lismer, Frederick Varley, Frank Johnston, Franklin Carmichael and A.Y. Jackson created - along with Thomson - a landscape style that to this day influences the way Canadians visualise their own country.

Highly revered in Canada, these great artists are virtually unknown outside. This spectacularly illustrated book, arranged according to the geographical areas depicted, with scholarly essays investigating different aspects of the painters’ craft, aims to redress that imbalance.

Interestingly this exhibition also has a related art blog - which also focuses on the journey across Canada. Here are some of the posts - and a quote from the first which explains what they are all about

• Coast to Coast with Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven – meet Julian Beecroft

Over the next three months and seven blog posts, Julian Beecroft will travel across Canada from Atlantic to Pacific coasts. During the course of his extraordinary journey he will introduce you to Tom Thomson, Canadian landscape painter, and the members of the Group of Seven, their paintings and something of their individual characters, as he visits and photographs the sites of paintings loaned to the exhibition coming this autumn to Dulwich Picture Gallery.

• Coast to Coast with Tom Thomson and The Group of Seven: Halifax to Montreal via Charlevoix County
• Coast to Coast with Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven: Southern Ontario – Toronto and Georgian Bay
• Coast to Coast with Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven: Algonquin Park
• Coast to Coast with Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven: Northern Ontario (east)

The exhibition is also going on tour to the following locations:

• National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo, Norway 29 January – 13 May 2012
• The Groninger Museum, Groningen, the Netherlands 3 / 6 June – 28 October 2012

There is also an iPhone app associated with the Exhibition - priced at $1.99 from the iTunes store.  It's compatible with iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.  It's especially useful for visitors to the Gallery.  However it's NOT available from the iMac Store and there doesn't seem to be an Android application.

A unique, interactive exploration of Painting Canada: Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven. Featuring over 70 works and using landmark technology developed by ArtFinder, visitors to the exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery (19 October 2011 – 8 January) can use image recognition “snap” technology to use their app to identify the works in front of them and listen to audio commentaries accompanied by text and a room by room guide to the exhibition. Alternatively simply explore the exhibition by room and location to take a virtual tour of the show.

Painting Canada: Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven, 
Exhibition dates:  19 October 2011 – 8 January 2012 
Exhibition Opening hours:

• Tue - Fri 10am–5pm 
• Weekends & Bank Holiday Mondays 11am– 5pm
• Closed Mondays except Bank Holidays 

Exhibition entry: £9, £8 Concessions Free entry for children and Friends of Dulwich Picture Gallery

For those interested in Canadian art 
you might like Canadian Art Calendars 2012

Places to Paint: Charlene Brown's Rockies

Rim of the Opabin Above Lake O’Hara
Watercolour and crayon
©2009 Charlene Brown

I associate Charlene Brown's blog 1150 words with paintings of the Rockies.  Not surprisingly the Rockies are also Charlene's favourite place to paint. 

In her post My favourite place to paint she explains that she tried to pin it down to just one place but then decided she needed to plump for the whole of the Rockies!

...until I was about eight, I was only vaguely aware that anybody painted anything but the Canadian Rockies.

You may think Charlene has maybe always painted the Rockies and nothing but the Rockies - but you'd be wrong as her bio tells us.  As you can see Charlene is choosing the Rockies after having seen and painted a great many other places

Charlene Brown is a Canadian painter who started writing about painting trips during the ten years she and her husband lived in Dubai. The Gulf Weekly began publishing her accounts of painting trips in that part of the Arabian peninsula -- then said they might consider other countries, even such exotic locations as Canada! She had written about painting trips in over twenty countries by the time her husband retired and they returned to Canada to live.

The image at the top is the painting from her blog a year ago this week.

Note: If you'd like to participate in this series, please read the preamble in Places to Paint