Invisible labour

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Marshlands Inn

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Erratum

This week in Sackville I am painting images of the town and of the surrounding countryside that were painted in the late 19th century by the artists John Hammond and Ethel Ogden. Ethel was quite an accomplished and innovative painter for her short life but the only recognition she received in her time was a [...]

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Louisberg Pipelines

Rob McCosh and his crew from the Louisberg Pipelines have been tearing up and replacing the sidewalk on Bridge Street since I arrived. I see them each morning on my walk into town. They suggested that I write my phone number in the wet cement and that’s how we got talking. Rob is a story [...]

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Some details of craft-technique

…arts may have an allotted span of life and may be attached as forms of self-expression to particular regions and particular types of mankind, and that therefore the total history of an art may be merely an additive compilation of separate developments, of special arts, with no bond of union save the name and some [...]

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Place de la Paix

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The Colonial Project

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View near Montreal

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View of Montreal

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Espace mobile // Mobile Space

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And if traditional tropes continue to persist…

Why did discussions around landscape in Canada before the 1960s tend to champion national difference and distinctiveness, often under the banner of exceptionalism, while more recent debates have focused on issues of colonial power and dispossession, transnational crossovers, and regional idiosyncrasy? What relevance do traditional landscape tropes have in a world of vastly altered political, [...]

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Saint-James United

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Reprise : The Bear Hunter

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The Bear Hunter

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A wordless unease

But this is not why she bought the pictures, way back then. She bought them because she wanted them. She wanted something that was in them, although she could not have said at the time what it was. It was not peace : she does not find them peaceful in the least. Looking at them [...]

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Qu’entendons-nous par l’Art?

Primo, l’expression de nos émotions, fussent-elles bonnes ou mauvaises, devient une œuvre d’art sensée ou insensée, belle ou imparfaite, selon que sa forme est parfaite ou rudimentaire. Secundo, qu’une œuvre est grande en raison du degré de Vérité, de Bonté, et de Beauté qu’elle atteint dans le jugement des gens qui pensent clairement. Tertio, que [...]

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Le choix du peuple

Canada’s Most Wanted and Most Unwanted Colours Les couleurs les plus et les moins désirées par les Canadiens Blue / Bleu 30% Green / Vert 18% Beige 8% Maroon / Bordeaux 6% Yellow / Jaune 5% Purple / Violet 5% Teal /Sarcelle 5% Peach / Pêche 4% Pink / Rose 4% Red / Rouge 3% [...]

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L’interstice est un espace de relations humaines

…il est important de réconsidérer la place des oeuvres dans le système global de l’économie, symbolique ou matérielle, qui régit la société contemporaine : pour nous, au-delà de son charactère marchand ou de sa valeur sémantique, l’oeuvre d’art représent un interstice social. Ce terme d’interstice fut utilisé par Karl Marx pour qualifier des communautés d’échanges [...]

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A deeply felt desire for trancendance

The Western idea of the autonomous ‘figure in the landscape’ is no longer accepted in critical discourse, yet it remains a pervasive myth in general culture, one that answers to a deeply felt desire for trancendance.” — Petra Halkes, Aspiring to the Landscape : On painting and the Subject of Nature (Toronto : University of [...]

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The creation of national identities

What might appear as contradictory, that is, the fact that economic globalization seems to be accompanied by an increase of cultural divisions, is only so on the surface. It is a fact that, in a world where exchanges of goods and ideas are more and more frequent on an international level, people are increasingly aware [...]

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Economic laws appear to be like natural laws

Economic laws appear “to be like natural laws, that they are not made by man to regulate free acts of exchange but are functions of the productive conditions of society as a whole where all activities are leveled down to the human body’s metabolism with nature and where no exchange exists but only consumption” — [...]

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The romantic inclination of English gentlemen

The topographical views of military officers were in fact simply one manifestation of the romantic inclination of English gentlemen of the later eighteenth century to delight in the splendours of natural scenery or anything they found in their travels that was charmingly primitive, rough, quaint, or exotic — in a word picturesque. — Dennis Reid. [...]

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La beauté des paysages de Charlevoix

A vrai dire la beauté des paysages de Charlevoix n’est perçu que par les premiers visiteurs anglophones vers le milieu du XIXe siècle… Quand, à partir de 1844, un service de vapeurs permet d’amener tous les jeudis les voyageurs de la ville de Québec… Charlevoix change de vocation. Le comté devient un haut lieu touristique, [...]

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Seeing the world in terms of ourselves

When I was a child, I knew no more about nature than a squirrel. If someone had asked me what nature was, I would probably have said that it was my family’s farm, the woods especially and the creek that flooded every spring. Nature was space and the wild things in it, like the geese [...]

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The imaginary and the symbolic

“Landscape does not exist in nature without the eye which grasps an expanse of land as a landscape. Climate’s existence is similar…

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