Tom Thomson (1877-1917)
grew up breathing the air of southern Georgian Bay as I did a half-century
later. In Canada, Thomson is known as the Great Outdoor painter who got away,
the northern magus, the promise of a singular vision at a time when the nation
itself hadn’t fully formed. His sudden, mysterious death by drowning occurred
as the Great War was raging in Europe, when Canada was earning its stripes as
an independent country, removed from England and distinct from the United
States in the increasingly modern world.
This founding
artistic father of Canada has always been a kind of spiritual brother to me …
So, in some respects, this great is always with me. Here’s a sample meditation:
"It’s not like we
have many letters from Tom Thomson. Not like Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) a
generation before, a loner of an entirely different type, Vincent, whose shouts
and sighs and embitterments seem mixed in the thick paint itself and is why I can
stand before the paintings of his later years, or the other that started the
thrall, “The Potato Eaters,” and if I’m still enough I can shut out the
phone-snappers and loud, hard-of-hearing visitors, the ghouls who step right in
front of me.
With Tom, you
have to fill in the blanks. His paintings, say “West Wind” or “Jack Pine,” don’t
shout or even mutter. They are like the place of his birth, Owen Sound, and the
bush beyond, the bird-wing and tree-crack, the crunch of dry, hard leaves
underfoot – and when Tom could he’d seek out the muddy shores and hear the sound of the loose suck with each step of his bone-dry hunting boots, think
of the men at war.
Even in the
trenches of Passchendaele, the Canadians don’t shout or mutter or cry of their
lot. Tom didn’t go to war and at no point in his few letters and cards home and
to friends does he say why. The papers, of course, wrote of nothing else. With photos too.
So when he sought out the mud it was to pay homage to his fellow Canadians,
those who didn’t rule men but felt the pull of the factory, the farm, the mine
and, for Tom, the fishing hole. When he paints the browns, dull grays when the
scene demanded something brighter, blame the war. What drove him even deeper
into himself, brought a darkness to light."
Next: Running for Your Life: Marathons and
War
