Tom Thomson

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Tom Thomson Life & Work by David P. Silcox What is remarkable about The Pointers is that the great red autumn hill, except for a few low evergreens, is reflected in both the sky and the water. The paint application is slightly different in each area, but viewers are not confused by the repeating colours. The clouds, in puffy clusters and two sweeping bands, help them instantly to read the painting as intended, just as the loggers’ boats make identification of the lake surface easy. Thomson has produced an enclosed space, a northern Eden, where his devices convince viewers to suspend disbelief and accept his idealization of a world they would like to visit or live in. The Pointers is a studio work, not an on-site sketch. So far as is known, it was not based on a sketch, yet like others of Thomson’s large works, it has a stately, formal quality, despite the plushness of the colours. The debt Thomson owed to other strains of historical Western painting traditions has been subsumed into his own sensibility and allembracing observation. The West Wind 1916–17 Georges Seurat, Study for “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte,” 1884, oil on canvas, 70.5 x 104.1 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Seurat knew that, from a distance, the human eye perceives contrasting dots of colour applied in tiny brush strokes as one brilliant hue 46
Tom Thomson Life & Work by David P. Silcox The West Wind 1916–17 Tom Thomson, The West Wind, 1916–17 Oil on canvas, 120.7 x 137.9 cm Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto Painted in the winter of 1916–17, this lone pine tree demonstrates that Thomson’s formation as an artist was both erratic and original. He takes the sinuous forms of Art Nouveau (a decorative style he had used as a commercial artist and in images such as Northern River, 1914–15), and the brash and vivid colours of the early Expressionists (especially in the ribbons of red in the foreground, outlining boulder-shaped areas), and uses them to create his own composition. The image, based on a landscape he knew well, contains imaginary elements too. 47
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Tom Thomson

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