Acadian Island

It is very hard when you are standing out on les aboiteaux of the Tantramar marshes not to think about the original Acadian settlers who’s labour created the lush farmland that became Sackville. This slightly raised land is one of the three original Acadian settlements in the area. It was an island before the Tantramar [...]

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Tantramar Marshes

On Tuesday I also met a man who had moved to Sackville 40 years ago to work for Wildlife Services. He stopped and talked to me for a while about the land in the paintings I had made. We talked about the change in land use over the last hundred years away from agriculture and about the history of the different settler groups in the area. He told me that once you get out on the marshes there are big skies – you can see 360 degrees…

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Paintings in their ‘spare’ time

In the 18th and 19th century Canada, and in the United States, much of art was seen as ‘women’s work’ . Men it seems, were much too busy with business or making a mark on the new land to bother with culture… By the end of the 19th century cities in eastern North America enjoyed [...]

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The myths that got us here

This fall, Pictorial Propaganda will retrace the history of the New Brunswick Museum and the Owens Art Gallery from Saint John to Sackville. As they both can claim to be the “oldest”  – the oldest continuing museum in the case of the former, and the oldest university art gallery for the latter, I am interested [...]

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Montreal-St Helene (Panorama 56-57)

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The Colonial Project

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Relations des Jésuites

Ce lieu-là surpasse encore tous les autres en beauté : car les isles qui se rencontrent dans l’emboucheure de ces deux fleuves (le St-Laurent et la Rivière des Prairie), sont autant de grandes et de belles prairies, les unes en long, les autres en rond, ou autant de jardins faits à plaisir, tant pour les [...]

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Les cahiers d’esquisse de Elizabeth Simcoe

Cahiers d’esquisse de Elizabeth Simcoe, 1792-1796. Bibliothèque David M Stewart. Fonds Simcoe. J’ai visité la bibliothèque David M. Stewart au musée Stewart situé sur l’Ile St-Hélène. Les éléments de la collection de cette bibliothèque privée ont été rassemblés afin de refléter les intérêts littéraires du gentilhomme typique du XVIIIe siècle. La collection inclue quelques journaux [...]

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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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L’arrivée de l’évêque

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Permissions

I was sketching at the pier on my day off from the Symposium. From afar I noticed a landscape painter with her easel set up facing towards Baie-Saint-Paul. I thought it might be interesting to reverse roles and to talk with her. She was an artist from Ottawa who has visited the region regularly for [...]

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Des oeufs frais de la fèrme

Pendant mon séjour à Baie Saint-Paul, je demeure sur le Rang Saint-Antoine Nord dans une petite maison de fermier de 200 ans. Certains matins, je me promène le long de ce beau rang. Aujourd’hui, j’ai fait une visite à une de mes voisines. Je l’avais rencontré au cours de mon projet et elle m’avait invité [...]

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S’engager dans l’art

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Cette nouvelle condition territoriale

L’histoire des paysages en Occident illustre bien la dynamique opérant entre lieux et non-lieux. Cette histoire pourrait en effet être abordée comme une conquête sensible des non-lieux, conquête d’espaces réputés « affreux » ou inhabitables, qui seront progressivement approivisés, investis de valorisations culturelles, transformés en lieux et en paysages. L’art a joué et joue toujours [...]

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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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En plein air

The artist with his easel set up in the countryside, painting the scene before his eys, is one of our stock cultural stereotypes. Most people would be surprised to learn how recently this conception has developed – the major movement to outdoor painting having come only with the impressionists at the end of the nineteenth [...]

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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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Early Moonrise in September

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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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