Artful Explorations
Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, Banff, AB - To Oct 20
What does this conservator do at the close of multi-year mega heritage projects? Escape to explore J.E.H. MacDonald: The O’Hara Era, an exhibition in Banff that presents a unique opportunity to visit a collection of over 100 rarely seen MacDonald artworks.
MacDonald, a founding member of the Group of Seven, traveled by rail, horseback and foot into areas around Lake O’Hara over the years 1924 to 1932, often revisiting favourite camps and painting locations at different times of day and in varying weather conditions. Climbing mountains, paddling lakes, and scrambling over rocks and rough terrain to reach sketching sites, he also pencilled diaries, wrote poetry, conferred with other artists, studied and contemplated. MacDonald created many drawings and paintings, archiving his personal and creative explorations.
More than one story of exploration is presented at the Whyte Museum’s exhibition. Another quest, by the geologists the late Stanley Munn and his wife Patricia Cucman, spanned nearly 20 years. Trekking over trails to distant areas, they searched to link MacDonald’s painted scenes with their remote locations. Munn, an accomplished photographer, documented the sites, and the pair co-authored the recently released book To See What He Saw (review p. 61).
The Whyte exhibition pairs Munn’s photographs with the artist’s paintings and sketches, along with the couple’s discoveries of artifact evidence: paint smeared on rock surfaces and twigs, rusted billy cans used to boil tea water cached under outcrops, and cups long ago stashed away for the artists’ next painting visit.
Other explorations related to the exhibition are the Canadian Conservation Institute’s investi-gations of the recovered paint remnants. Kate Helwig and Alison Douglas’ extensive research and testing of MacDonald’s materials and techniques has also resulted in an invaluable re-source publication, J.E.H. MacDonald Up Close.
Over the years, my conservation projects included many of MacDonald’s paintings. Each art-work added to my knowledge of this artist’s processes and admiration for his emotive explorations into landscape painting. My visit to Banff found me seeking distance from now busy places towards quieter paths, to refl ect on the remote nature of the land in MacDonald’s time and the strenuous travel required to explore it.
