Fabulous paintings of trees and woodlands are currently on display at Dulwich Picture Gallery where there is an exhibition of the work of Emily Carr (1871 - 1945) They typically depict the native trees of the Pacific coast of Canada where Carr grew up and later settled, having first studied art in London, San Francisco and France. She used broad brush strokes and vivid colours in a style heavily influenced by her time spend in Europe in 1910/11 studying the post impressionists. Emily Carr was working shortly after the Canadian epidemics of the 1860s which killed half the indigenous population. As a result local people developed both an awareness of the fragility of life and a heightened concern for the natural environment. As Carr said, "it is wonderful to feel the grandest of Canada in the raw." Of course one has to remember, too, that people at that time were very much closer to nature in their daily lives: for example travel for Emily Carr would have been mostly by horse, food would have been more seasonal and without air conditioning the weather would have been much more immediate. Read more...

Relatively recently I experienced "Painting Canada" which was an exhibition of seven landscape painting pioneers who were active in Canada in the 1920s. The paintings are an extraordinary glimpse into the wildness and wilderness of Canada at a time when humans had made very little damaging impact, but actually much of the beauty and wildness that they put onto canvas still exists today in many places. The group of seven artists are sometimes known as the Algonquin School because they painted some of their best works in the Algonquin national park. They should really have been a group of eight artists except that the artist who most inspired them, Tom Thomson, went missing in a mysterious incident with a canoe by a lake, Read more...