Ideas - What you may have missed in this famous painter's artwork

Episode Date: July 3, 2025

For years, people have made the journey to Algonquin Park to see the landscapes that inspired Tom Thomson's famous paintings. IDEAS producer Sean Foley was one of them, exploring the great Canadian artist's muse while also examining Indigenous artists' perspectives of the same landscapes that Thomson and the Group of Seven may have overlooked. *This is the second episode in a two-part exploration of the Canadian painter. It originally aired on Dec. 18, 2018.

We're all looking for great places to visit in Canada. One of my favorites is the Stratford Festival. The theatre is truly of the highest caliber and there's so much selection. They have 11 large-scale shows on stage and trust me, whatever is on manure there will be exceptional. People always think Shakespeare when they think of Stratford, but it's so much more. Broadway musicals, family shows, classic comedy and drama. Whether it's Robert LaPage's Macbeth or Donna Fior's Annie, you will be blown away.

It's the perfect Canadian getaway. To quote William Shatner, who got his start in Stratford, every Canadian should make the pilgrimage to Stratford. Start your next adventure at StratfordFestival.ca. This is a CBC Podcast. Six decades of thought-provoking and award-winning documentaries, interviews, and discussions that crack open an idea to see how it's played out over place and time. And we'd like to know your story. So if you've ever been touched by an episode of Ideas in a way that changed the way you

look at the world or that affected your life in some deep way, we'd love to know about it. To get in touch, email us at ideas at cbc.ca with a brief outline of your story. That's ideas at cbc.ca. This episode of Ideas first aired in 2018. ["Ideas"] So here we are in the High Falls, St. Andrews High Falls Lake Portage and out of the corner of my eye I spotted this waterfall I'm looking at right now and was like hearing a song you

know, seeing this waterfall and just being so sure that it's the inspiration for Woodland Waterfall by Tom Thompson. I'm Nala Ayad and this is Ideas About Tom Thompson. I scrambled down into the bush, perched on the side of the river here and took some shots and Adam being the responsible young man he is thought maybe I had gone for a tumble and Came back to help me out Yeah, what do you think? Yeah, what do you think? It's certainly amazing.

Yeah, like a song you heard before, just, and that you love coming on the radio. There's no way to describe it other than just pure tranquility and ecstasy all in one. Tom Thompson is a legendary Canadian painter. He died mysteriously more than a century ago at the height of his powers. His pieces are considered national icons. Two of them, the West Wind and the Jack Pine, feature the lone evergreen tree standing against and within a rugged landscape. It's an image often held up as symbolic of Canada

and Canadians themselves. But the nation we call Canada is undergoing fundamental change, both socially and environmentally. So is there something in what Tom Thompson saw and lived that we can take with us into an uncertain but likely dynamic future? In this installment of ideas about Tom Thompson, we turn to his life and to ours. Here's part two of Sean Foley's documentary, Tom Thompson, 100 Years From Now. How about this? Nay, the very colours of caterpillars are,

as one has observed, very elegant and beautiful. I shall, for a taste of the rest, describe one of them. My brother Adam and I are standing on the banks of the Barren River in Algonquin Park. I'm holding forth from a book called The Complete Angler. His lips and mouth somewhat yellow, his eyes black as jet, his forehead purple, his feet and hinder parts green, his tail too forked and black. It was written more than 350 years ago, and we know that Tom Thompson had a copy of it with him when he was in Algonquin in 1912. He'd read it on rainy days and clean his smoking pipes. The whole body stained with a kind of red spots which run along the neck and the shoulder

blade, not unlike the form of St. Andrew's Cross, and a white line drawn down his back to his tail, all which add much beauty to his whole body. The complete angler isn't just a fishing how-to. It blends nature writing with spiritual verse, philosophy, and recipes, all framed by the conversations of a motley fishing party traveling the English countryside. And as others of several kinds turn to be several kinds of flies and vermin the spring following.

So this caterpillar then turns to be a painted butterfly. But this is like just flip it open to whatever page and it's golden. The author, Isaac Walton, is in nature's thrall. He also prizes eloquence as a grace in itself. Hey, how about this one? Gesner prefers the perch and pike above the trout or any freshwater fish. He says the Germans have this proverb,

more wholesome than a perch of rine. And he says the river perch is so wholesome that physicians allow him to be eaten by wounded men or by men in fevers or by women in childbed. More wholesome than a perch of rhine. That's how I think of you. Adam and I are in the northeast corner of Algonquin Park, sniffing around for signs of Tom Thompson, the living man, in the midst of being born as an artist. He was working in this area as a fire ranger in the summer of 1916,

a year before his death. a year before his death. It's incredible. The degree to which the this canyon fills the eyes, it's impossible to replicate with a camera. It just completely fills your what you have to take in a way. Just so much to represent on a panel. But I mean he did

it, he did it many times over and he waited all summer to get down here to spend some time and do this. In the very few letters he wrote that summer, he was keen to get back to the painting. And why not? In 1916, his brush was coaxing the best from him and from his surroundings. When we're out or we're watching a sunset or even a storm coming or going, things are fleeting and that seems to be something that he was able to master and it almost seems to be within your soul. It's not that you've seen that spot with exactly that cloud, but there's enough of a connection

to it that you make the link to that piece. David Hough is the curator of collections at the Tom Thompson Memorial Art Gallery in Owen Sound. He and I are looking at four panels from 1915. Each one is only about 8 by 10 inches and in them Thompson has caught the sky. The land and the water are relegated to the bottom quarter of each board. The better to make room for virtuoso performances. Atmospheric variations on a theme in purple, white, pink,

clear blue with grey billowing thunderheads and brooding purple haze. A lot of it I think has to do with his brush stroke and the way the colors are put together and how our eye mixes those colors and interprets the brush strokes to see that movement because they all are alive. I mean they're not they're not static. These works would have been done relatively quick, on-site, under the atmospheric conditions that he would have been working on, whether the storm was coming or whether there was mosquitoes biting or whatever it was, but certainly that immediacy and that quickness

and that comes across in these artworks as well. We turn our attention from the quartet of sketches to a photo display. The photograph of Thompson is new probably from 1912 and so a little bit of a city slicker who's come up he's camping and you know having photographed taken with all of his gear in his tent and then that's juxtaposed to Thompson at Teelake Dam which is a few years later and certainly much more somebody who is now part of the park and so he's fly fishing in this particular photograph but he's got his toque on and seems to be much more integrated as somebody in the park as opposed to somebody visiting the park.

There's another photo, a group of adults and a little child having a snack outdoors. Tom Thompson is a spectral presence, taking a drag off of a cigarette in the background. The rest of the names are familiar to Canadian art enthusiasts. Thompson and Varley and Jackson, Arthur and Marjorie Lismar and Esther. In that fall of 1914, it seemed like it was an amazing few weeks

that people were were up there and the colours were incredible at that time and certainly it's right before the First World War breaks out. It was the last time that most of them were all together with Thompson being included. Painting, comparing, talking, experiencing the Northland. And that would continue after Thompson passes away and after the First World War is over. It's one of the reasons that these people still continue to get together and would go on beyond the Group of Seven. After Thompson died in 1917, A.Y. Jackson, Lauren Harris, Arthur Lismar,

and J.E.H. MacDonald, all future members of the Group of Seven, paid eloquent tributes to Tom Thompson. They held him up as a natural genius, even as a kind of patron saint. Historians have since examined the actual amount of time Thompson spent with them and it seems like well not a whole lot but when you're out in the backcountry in good company you can cover a lot of territory in just a few days. Our own journey to Algonquin became something of a gateway to eternity. I couldn't remember the last time Adam and I

did anything together on our own for five days. That time, out of time, made for pretty deep communion. And I'm certain that this deep communion was felt and shared by these artists on their trips. hopes. Like look at the color on that rock over there. You can almost see the old water line. Yeah. And like a pink or rust colored strip there right across it. And then the light blue algae or whatever, lichen.

You got a beaver dam over there. algae or whatever lichen. As we paddled along I thought gee this is nice I'm just holding a microphone and Adams doing all the work. I'm Katherine Loughnan, Senior Curator Emeritus at the Art Gallery of Ontario and Adjunct Professor Regis College at the University of Toronto. And it would seem to me that with Tom Thompson, you have a young artist who was a member of a Presbyterian parish, who was schooled in the Calvinist tradition, and who would have seen nature, as Calvinists did, as the second book of God. And Van Gogh was in the same tradition and would have seen the divine in every twig and flower and leaf.

They were evidence of the Creator and the creation. So primary evidence that there is a God. And the beauty of nature provided a state of spiritual consolation. And von Hoch writes about, we need more paintings of consolation. And consolation is a term that describes a spiritual state in which one feels close to the divine. I've been looking at books that were available to parishioners at the back of Leith Church at that time. And there is one which I have here that is called Bible Looking Glass. And if you open it, you see a pictographic map of the journey of life,

in which you have youth, manhood, and old age depicted as a life led on water and it was published in 1875 illustrating the diversities of human character and the qualities of the human heart. Now this book was perfect for Sunday school and the little pictures must have intrigued those who saw them and inspired maybe some of Tom Thompson's early interest in illustration, which was very important to him as he developed book and magazine illustration. But these religious emblems would have also stayed with him

for life. There were other texts that stuck with him. The footpath of peace. To be glad of life because it gives you a chance to love, and to work, and to play, and to look up at the stars. To be satisfied with your possessions, but not contented with yourself until you have made the best use of them, to despise nothing in the world except falsehood and meanness, and to fear nothing except cowardice,

to be governed by your admirations rather than by your disgust, to covet nothing that is your neighbor's except his kindness of heart and gentleness of manners, to think seldom of your enemies, often of your friends, and every day of Christ, and to spend as much time as you can with body and with spirit in God's out of doors. These are little guideposts on the footpath of peace. That passage by the American writer, diplomat, and Presbyterian minister Henry Van Dyke, Jr. graces a decorative piece done by Tom Thompson in 1914-1915. He gave it to his parents for Christmas. It's now part of the McMichael Canadian collection, but it wasn't his first crack at it.

He used the same passage ten years earlier while living in an Ottawa boarding house, but he made a small error in the spacing of the text. He threw it in the garbage, a fellow boarder pulled it out, and today it's at the Canadian War Museum. Thomson's illuminated text pieces are explicitly spiritual and philosophical, but paintings are another matter. Well, it's hard to find out about an artist's

spiritual odyssey, their pictures do tend to reveal a certain amount of their state and they reference other pictures. And Thomson later in life references the work of the Nabi Gauguin and his circle, who were indeed attempting to create a new type of religious art in their circle at Pont-Aven in France. A new type of religious art. True, there was a modern spiritual sensibility in the air, in Europe and in the Northeast United States. But after 1914, his artist friends were nearly all caught up in the Great War.

So how did these currents continue to flow into his shack? [♪ soft music playing in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in background, piano playing softly in And we find that another person has entered his life, and it's a woman of all things. Her name is Florence McGilvery. And Florence undoubtedly knew about Thompson, may have known him personally before the winter of 1916 because the families, the Thompson and the Gilvery families had come from St. Fergus in Scotland and settled close to each other. However they came to know each other during the winter of 1916 she came to visit him in his shack behind the studio building.

And in his shack behind the studio building. And her reputation by that time as a teacher and as a professional artist was so great that Thompson felt as if, you know, he'd had kind of royal visit. I mean he was ecstatic. He said he was delighted and pleased by her visit. I mean, he was ecstatic. He said he was delighted and pleased by her visit. He confided in a friend that he felt favoured and honoured over the interest of such a renowned artist. And he said that she was the first of the artists to recognise instantly what he was trying to do. The others didn't see it at first. And that's pretty impressive. During that winter, he started to paint

with much more confidence and much more structure. And he began to juxtapose certain rather acerbic colors, which were not really ones that he was closely associated with and he began to use very strong black contour lines. By the time she visited Tom Thompson at the Shack, Florence McGilvery had personally witnessed some of the most exciting artistic movements in Europe. She'd immersed herself in the work of Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin and a group called the Nabi, as well as Henri Matisse,

who taught her for a time. She also spent time in Brittany, in Pont-Aven, with a group of upstart post-impressionists called La Bande Noire. She escaped from Europe in 1914, on the eve of the Great War. And she learned how to construct a abbey landscape using a screen of trees to create what we call in art historical lingo a repoussoir, something that pushes things back and the compositions are quite flat they're inspired largely by Japanese prints.

What I find really fascinating about the view from the beach at Acre here, which is recognizable as the background of the Jack Pine, is the depth perspective. You're in this kind of curved panorama that's actually not apparent on the canvas because the canvas is a flattened rendering of these hills. This provides an illusion of recession without it being a kind of one-point recession. Like the old road going into the distance. Yes, exactly, exactly. So she became very adept at constructing a whole range of types of landscape and she was known for mentoring young people. She was famous for this and so I think what she did was she thought, this is such a brilliant young artist. Maybe I can help him a little bit to bring out that

artistic voice. And so I think what she did was she gave him private lessons in that shack. Catherine Locknan also happens to be the great, great niece of Florence McGilvery. Catherine's preparing an exhibition of McGilvery's work and over the years she's come across some interesting items. I do have a painting that was for many years consigned to the basement of my aunt's house with a screen of trees of exactly the kind that we find in Thomson's paintings, painted at I think about exactly that time, and the screen of birch trees acts as the repoussoir for a view of what appears to be melting ice and water.

And on the back of this canvas, there's a sketch in And on the back of this canvas, there's a sketch in probably charcoal. It has to me the ring of a picture used as a demonstration piece by a teacher to a student, as if to say, and this is how you construct these sorts of landscapes, and this is how you build them up using a palette knife. And it's just the kind of thing she could have done on the brink of his departure for Canoe Lake in the spring of 17. ["The Star-Spangled Banner"]

Some have even raised the possibility that Florence visited Tom in Algonquin Park sometime during that last spring. Whether or not she did, she wasn't far from his mind. An invitation to one of her Toronto exhibitions was found in his paint box after his death. It must have hit her very, very hard. She did run a bit of a risk as a single woman by spending what appears to have been long hours alone with him in this shack.

In those days that might have raised eyebrows and probably did, but obviously she was quite prepared to live with that. Had there been a close relationship, and there certainly was in the sense of mentor and pupil, it must have been really tragic for her because she would have seen the incredible genius that he had. genius that he had. She looks very sympathetic from the photographs.

I have one of her in which she's looking very wistful and wearing a pearl ring on her engagement finger. We don't know whether she had a bow. We don't know whether that could have been Thompson, but there seems to have been a perhaps a time when she was sufficiently enamored of someone to wear a modest ring on her engagement finger. CURATOR AND ART HISTORIAN KATHERINE LOCHNEN This is Ideas on CBC Radio 1 across Canada, around the world at cbc.ca and via podcast. We're all looking for great places to visit in Canada. One of my favorites is the Stratford Festival. The theater is truly of the highest caliber and there's

so much selection. They have 11 large-scale shows on stage and trust me, whatever is on when you're there will be exceptional. People always think Shakespeare when they think of Stratford, but it's so much more. Broadway musicals, family shows, classic comedy and drama. Whether it's Robert LaPage's Macbeth or Donna Fior's Annie, you will be blown away. It's the perfect Canadian getaway. To quote William Shatner, who got his start in Stratford, every Canadian should make the pilgrimage to Stratford.

Start your next adventure at StratfordFestival.ca. Book club on Monday. Gym on Tuesday. Date night on Wednesday. Out on the town on Thursday. Quiet night in on Friday. It's good to have a routine. And it's good for your eyes too. Because with regular comprehensive eye exams at Specsavers, you'll know just how healthy they are. Visit Specsavers.ca to book your next eye exam. Eye exams provided by independent optometrists.

I'm Nala Ayat and you're listening to episode 2 of Tom Thompson 100 Years From Now produced by Sean Foley. Tom Thompson left us very few explicit details about his interior life. Where his spirit and ours meet, there are his paintings, brimming with energy, color, and technique. But as we come to terms with our history, what role can Thomson's vision play in our future? Here's the conclusion of Tom Thomson 100 years from now. It seems to me that the natural patterns you'd see around you if you were an artist would reinforce adventurous brush strokes and the resolution at a distance of various impressionist techniques like the various lichens and mosses and the colors of fall would naturally reinforce what Thompson was learning as he was exposed to various trends in painting over time.

There's a thisness of this that is inspiring him. It isn't like dull realism. You know, this is an emotional realism. And if I get very much, I get excited by it, obviously. Peter Larisee is an art historian, Jesuit priest, and the author of Light for a Cold Land. He says that Lauren Harris always wanted to be able to paint like his friend Tom Thompson, but

simply couldn't, and he knew it. Larissy is drawn to the first signs of Thompson's artistic revolution in 1912 and 1913. Just look at the color. I mean that is a sophisticated color. He would have mixed that and gotten it just right. I mean this is, and it's not according to rules that he mixed it. You know he had to get work and to get that right. The tree against the sky, he did that better than Harris could do it at the time. He didn't have a concept of beauty, whereas those trained European painters or people like Harris trained in

Europe, they had concepts of beauty. And I don't think Thompson did. His brush stroke does change, and that's due to the group of seven the the other people in the group who were who had seen van Gogh Who had seen you know in his brick like strokes? But what he did with what he learned from them surpassed them immediately in my opinion Well, I don't know that you I don't think you're alone in that opinion. What do you think and what would you attribute that to? Innate talent and freedom. We could use what he learned, but it didn't dominate him.

Again, the way he accepts what he sees, it doesn't have to be conformed to something else. Genuine, he's genuine. One of the things about modernism is authenticity. And I think on authenticity, these are 100%. But that is him and the work that he's painting, the stuff in front of him, and that's what matters. He isn't pleasing someone else. Well it's a question of feeling, what you feel with Thompson.

And these early ones as well as his later ones is this authenticity. I'm here and you're there, landscape, and this is what's happening between us sort of thing. I was criticized way back in the 70s by another Jesuit about my spirituality and my modernism. And the thing that popped into my head before I knew that it was a modernist word was authenticity. I like this painting because it has authenticity to it. And I like myself because I'm seeking authenticity. That was something like that. It happened at that moment.

Way back then, somebody was criticizing me for my attitudes, which were... Well, I wanted to be free from his attitudes, I guess, and he had a lot of control. Something like that was going on, yes. Authenticity, yes, that's what I'm attracted to. That's what I want to see and how I want to live. But it's elusive.

It must be sought out, often at a cost, to ourselves as individuals and collectively as a society, as a nation. What we've received from these generations of artists and up until today makes us appreciate the moment but at the same time, got to be careful. What was that moment really about? And for Indigenous peoples, it was a scary time. It was the most brutal time, you know. As Tom Thompson was unwittingly forging a Canadian myth, the theft of lands and destruction

of Indigenous families was in full swing. Gerald McMaster teaches Indigenous visual culture and curatorial practice at Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto, and is a member of the Siksika First Nation. So I think that kind of narrative of this period, when we think of this moment in time, First World War, that's what was going on. And it was very brutal, the beginning of residential schools, all that what we know today.

But sometimes it's clouded in other narratives, and I think we just have to be wary that indeed there are other narratives that are going at play during this time. Gerald and I are hunkered down on two wooden chairs at the University of Toronto Arts Centre and there's a third party with us perched on an easel. It's a dazzling Tom Thompson canvas called The Pointers from his last winter. His broken brush strokes and use of color absolutely tickled the optic nerve. You can join us and have a look at cbc.ca slash ideas.

As we talk, our eyes wander over to the painting and rest on the giant hill, the kaleidoscopic lake, the mottled clouds on parade, or the tiny figures on the water. I think the first thing that I noticed in this work were the people. Because quite often, whether it's Thompson or the later Grouper VII,

the landscape was devoid of folks, indigenous or non-indigenous or even animals. So it was a different kind of qualitative view of the landscape, because it wasn't all inclusive, it wasn't that all my relations kind of approach, but rather someone who's keenly interested perhaps in the forms, the colours, in the land and in the sky as well, I should say.

The land, the sky, the land, the water, all of that combines together in this really interesting whole. So there are three boats, these pointures, if you will. They're used primarily by loggers and that. There are three boats, these pointers, if you will. They're used primarily by loggers and that, so they're full of men rowing in one direction. And it appears there's this kind of, not a raft, but it's a ferry of some kind, ferrying a team of horses, which are pointed in the opposite direction. And on the ferry, you can see this one man in the orange shirt just kind of leaning there, you know.

And it's just very simple the way that he, the angle of repose that he's got these in and it's it's not stiff and the water is moving quite quickly like this and dazzling in that light and you can see these men just pulling their boats, you know. And it's hard to say who these men are. They could be indigenous and non-indigenous together, you know? They're loggers, you know, they're extracting from the land. Yeah, actually, I'm glad you pointed out the guy in the orange because the first guy I saw when I saw it in person the first time was this fellow in the yellow here.

And I've just noticed today that he's got his own little reflection. Yeah. He's got his own little chip there. He does, doesn't he? It's quite remarkable. But the landscape, as Professor Tim Engel would suggest,

landscape and land are two different things. Land has a sense of weight and space. You know, you can't weigh it. It's so vast. Whereas landscape starts to differentiate itself in the qualitativeness that it has. So when you think of Thompson and others going into the northern part of Ontario, they were seeing it obviously from the Western tradition of landscape painting, from that just the view of representing it.

Indigenous peoples on the other hand probably would see it but rather vastly different. And that's the kind of display I tried to present when I was at the Art Gallery of Ontario when we redid the Canadian galleries in 2008 to show, to juxtapose Thompson's West Wind, along with a couple bags that were done by Anishinaabe individuals back in the 18th century. In the Thomson's West Wind painting, it's a brooding storm. You can see the whitecaps and the tree is just bent over, right? That's the famous, it's bent over from the wind. And so to me just reading that landscape reminded me that an indigenous view would say, ah, it's the struggle between the Thunderbird and the Mishapishu is about

to happen. So that's why I took these two bags that depicted the Mishapishu and the Mishapishu is about to happen. So that's why I took these two bags that depicted the Mishapishu and the Thunderbird and put them together alongside the West Wind. I couldn't believe we had actually found these works from the 18th century. Yeah, they were very, very old. So you have this Western painters and indigenous artists both looking at the same thing, but representing it in different ways. So the

indigenous artists, they saw the land full of spirits, thunderbirds in the sky, the Mishapishu in the lakes. They had stories, ancient stories that were passed down to them through the storyteller and hero trickster Nana Bush, Nana Booju. The landscape was implicated with all these stories, you know. That's how Northern Ontario is. On one hand, this is what we've inherited was the kind of what we're looking at here is the Thompson view of the world. We don't see the indigenous view of the world. The same thing, same landscape,

the qualitativeness of that landscape, to me is what was so vital. And I hope that viewers were getting a sense of that. We don't know if Tom Thompson had a formal set of ideas about Canada and its art, but Lauren Harris sure did. And there's evidence on film of his lack of interest in painting a populated land. Art historian Peter Laracy describes an Arctic expedition undertaken by Harris. He went up to the Ardic, hoping to be inspired, you know.

But what he found in the landscape of the North was a wall. He could not get through this wall. It's a wall. He could not get through this wall. It's a wall. He didn't get beyond it. The sketches and all that were done while he was on the boat. And Harris had a movie camera with him.

You came into some of the places where the ship docked. The native people just poured onto the ship. It was all over, full of people. But not one of them occurs in any of the Harrah's paintings of the Arctic. There is one painting where he has a hut or something that the Native people would live in, but that's as close as he got. He didn't paint the persons at all. Even though they were part of what he filmed,

they weren't part of what he was interested in painting at all. I have no doubt that Thompson would find his way into whatever nook or cranny he could to find a good vista to paint or a good little scene to paint. I'm portaging along a little rapids on the barren river here and we're way up above the rapids but I can see how if you had a painting box and a real predilection for a particular kind of beauty you might figure a way to clamber

down in there and set yourself up to capture a beautiful scene like the one I'm looking down upon right now. From about 20 feet up, maybe 30 feet. What are your hopes that we can develop that understanding of these narratives that are in tension with one another. We talk about a settler narrative today. That's that sense that Canadians, I think, will always have a struggle to be a part of this land. And really, will they ever know it? And I think that that's what indigenous peoples,

to some degree, have the leg up. And we must understand what that narrative of when we hear Indigenous peoples talk in a particular kind of it, but because their cultures were created out of this land and almost obliterated for the last, in the early part of the 20th century, it was indeed obliterated, but now that recovery is coming back. And so I think the beginnings and the connections with the stories and understanding of those narratives,

I think are critical for Indigenous peoples. They're critical for you and other Canadians to understand and connect with these mainstream narratives as Tom Thompson. Thompson is a mainstream narrative, but how do we connect it with those other narratives, I think is your question, you know, and how do we as Canadians begin to connect that realizing that this is in the history of our land is a drop in the bucket, you know, of that history in this land. So I don't know, I hope that we have more opportunity to, you know, not just look at this painting, but head out into the land and be on the land, live the land, see the

land differently, not just aestheticizing it, but realizing that there's more to it. There's a synesthesia that happens in that appreciation of the landscape when you are there. And I think that's how these ancient indigenous artists were articulating that in their artwork, that is quite separate from a landscape painter, such as Thompson and his contemporaries. Now we've descended a bit down closer to water level, down deep on this portage and the fragrance is like an incense. incense that you could easily become hooked on and one that would change probably from month to month throughout the year. some beautiful sights up that way like there's no question Tom Thompson would have done anything he could to just get

into a crowd a little nook or cranny or would have been bushwhacking to yeah Yeah. A trail like that. Yeah. How'd that go for you? Good. These portages feel very different from the way they did during my first canoe trip with a prestigious Algonquin summer camp. Summer of 1987 where I was sent to a boys camp. I was 12 years old, homesick and hapless. I'd never walked a wooded trail in my life. That summer was the first time I had heard the story

of Tom Thompson. July 8th there was a guy in the dining hall saying a kind of hoary old folk song. It was also the first time I witnessed a quote Indian council ring there's a lot of indigenous in the dining hall a pastiche of vaguely Aboriginal ceremony costume and mythology at the end of the session the month-long camp the camp director There was the council dressed up as high a lot a staple of Ontario summer camps over much of the 20th century. We were a bunch of rambunctious boys. Now we were told...

Our camp director wore a headdress and became Hiawatha. We all fell silent. Pull yourselves together. This is an important ceremony. But it was a charade. First became aware. In whatever clumsy sort of... A desecration of several indigenous cultures at once. And while I sat there transfixed Most of the camps have stopped doing this kind of thing, but it has taken a very long

time. But now, and now, you know, 30 years later, I want to be able to enrich my understanding. I tell this story to Gerald McMaster and to Tom's painting of the pointers, and I ask, what's the connection? There is a crossroads, I think, because this was done in 1917, I believe, this particular work. Because I think this is where this kind of narrative was beginning to play itself out during this time. And so when you think of indigenous peoples, it's been had been maybe 20, 30 years already since the remarkable policy called the Indian Act, which really was about about killing the Indian, as they said, killing the Indian, saving the man, you know. So all, you extract every vestige of that indigeneity.

And what you have are these kind of vestiges, these stories. What, the reception that you were saying when you were young, is what all Canadians were going through. You know, the songs of Hiawatha, they, you know, all of that was this kind of romance of at one period of time, but which never was, never really existed, you know, which was remarkable. And so you wonder, this is 1917, First World War period, certainly Thompson and others going into Northern Ontario, yeah, they would have seen indigenous peoples, you know, whether

he inherited that discourse of the indigenous person as other and the indigenous person as other was often very negative terms, okay? In those days it was clearly to obliterate the indigenous person. So what he would have seen is just indigenous peoples dressed in a normal everyday fashion, nothing to romanticize about. They were looking for jobs, probably as loggers and as guides and that kind of yes the indigenous the Indian was killed but the man existed he was around you know so but there was nothing romantic so you have these narratives that you inherited the songs of Hiawatha you know all of that remains and it still remains and it and it remains in these kind of nursery rhymey ways, you know. And so our vision of Indigenous peoples, you know, is so clouded in that, that we can

never, Indigenous people could never live up to that, you know, that framework, that narrative. So it's an interesting period, I think, when we see these works, because none of that is there. We don't see it at all. We know of it, but we don't see anything of it. So indeed, that kind of qualitativeness of the land does not include the Indigenous person. It's really just the trees and not even the animals, you know. It's the activity here, the loggers, and that's it. In considering Tom Thompson and his art, I've had to consider death and sexism and this

country's history and my own place in it. It's an ongoing process. I still love the paintings. They impart a sense of freedom. But to approach them with a deeper awareness is to experience an even more profound freedom. A freedom from illusion. So So often when I'm near a waterfall or a river, I think no matter what is happening, the waters The waters of the earth are flowing. And it's a source of great consolation. You've been listening to the second and final installment of Tom Thompson 100 years from now, a documentary by Sean Follin.

Special thanks to the Tom Thompson Memorial Art Gallery in Owensound, Ontario, the University of Toronto Arts Centre and the Art Gallery of Ontario. Original music by the Algonquin Ensemble. Technical production by Danielle Duval. Web production by Liz Nagy and Lisa Ayuso with help from Jonathan Ohr. The executive producer is Greg Kelly and I'm Nala Ayed. Water bottles with some kind of Kool-Aid mixture inside. Look at that pasta bottle. Yeah, I got this right by the riverbank. It actually just catches the eye, and you think,

hmm, you know, someone was here. Yeah. Someone who has no respect for nature at all. That's right. Someone who is perhaps, maybe it was a child. Still, like every child has a parent. Yeah. And the parent sets the example. And the child is the father to the man. He's the boy inside the man.

Boy inside the man. Right? Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. That's what the, that's what the good book says.