It was the last full day of summer and the usually busy waterways were already a portrait of the Massasauga’s autumn serenity.
As the shiny aluminum pontoon boat was moored at the Wreck Island (MNR) dock, eager artists, Alan Stein, Peter Buwalda, Bev Easton, Laurie Muirhead and Jane Gray scrambled onto shore, looking more like campers or hikers carrying large packs laden with portable easels, and paint kits; and filled with sketchpads, pens, nibs and cameras. Anxious to capture the park’s splendour now magnified by exceptional morning sunlight, they dispersed quickly.
Like the chipmunks seen scurrying across paths of newly fallen leaves, transporting acorns to winter stores, the artists too, were gathering visual nuggets. Macro images of flora, lichen-swathed rock, gnarled bark, algae pools, and a feast of other delights collected on sketchpads, canvas, and in photographs, would nourish creative furnaces throughout the impending long winter and spring.
It’s all part of an annual fall ritual that culminates with a summer exhibition called Impressions of the Massasauga, a public unveiling of the park, as seen through the eyes of the artists.
Last summer’s Impressions of the Massasauga – a collection of 35 pieces of art – graced the walls of the Charles W. Stockey Centre for the Performing Arts, during the Festival of the Sound’s season, from July 18 to Aug. 10.
“It just seemed to be a great combination of performing and visual arts – I think you have the same audience for both,” explains Stein, a member of the Festival of the Sound board and the chair of its fine arts committee.
Stein was also one of eight area artists participating in the 2008 Impressions of the Massasauga exhibition, along with Frances Thomas and Muirhead, both from Parry Sound, Easton of Huntsville, David Dawson of Gravenhurst, David Raithby of Bracebridge, Buwalda of Baysville, and Doris McCarthy, who cottages in Carling.
Easton has been drawn to the provincial park annually – with the exception of one fall – since the first Massasauga visual study retreat in September 2009.
“It’s like no place I’ve seen in Ontario, with its primal, rugged nature and sophisticated ecosystems,” says the Lake of Bays landscape painter. “It’s ever changing. Every time I’m there, it’s different and the experience with the artists is different. It’s a privilege to document my experiences with them at the park.”
“The bulk of the work of the Group of Seven was done this way,” Easton comments as she struggles to secure the legs of her portable easel between warped bands of Wreck Island rock.
The idea of inviting a group of contemporary artists to document the Massasauga Provincial Park originated with a local not-for-profit group called the Research Heritage Education Advisory Team (RHEAT) that is financed through proceeds from maps, clothing and other items sold in the park.
“We were having scientists, and science students in the park doing research, so having a slant towards being interested in art, I thought we could have artists in the park doing artistic research,” recalls Jim Hanna, who serves on RHEAT along with Bev Kettle and Jim Beatty.
Hanna contacted acquaintance Dwayne Harty, a world-class naturalist painter, who along with a circle of artistic friends, combined with others in the region to form the first group of about a dozen, to document the park through the RHEAT program.
Initially, the focus was on portraying both Massasauga wildlife and landscape, but over time, this shifted to purely landscape painting. Two years ago, the exhibit assumed the name Impressions of the Massasauga, reflecting this change. A mix of new media was integrated and more recently, participants have tended to hail from the Muskoka/Parry Sound region, rather than farther afield in Ontario.
The group of five to eight artists stays in nearby cabins and each day, park staff act as guides taking them to a natural environment of uninterrupted documentation and exploration. For the past five years, Massasauga Park Superintendent Mike Foley, has worked with RHEAT members to co-ordinate the visual study. Ontario Park’s commitment, he says, is to provide one weekend of three days in the fall, usually the third weekend in September. Occasionally a spring trip is planned to accommodate artists unable to attend the earlier park study. Where they go is often decided based on what artists want to paint, and what locations park staff deems safe to navigate, based on weather forecasts.
“We are the mode of transportation because it’s a water access park, and we are their host,” explains Foley. “Usually the site is an outer island. We don’t usually do too much mainland work. And, logistically, we can’t always get out as far as they might want to.”
Moon Island was chosen for the most recent visual study, along with the constant favourite, Wreck Island.
Stein, back for his fourth or fifth trip to Wreck, sits enchanted by sunlight dancing on the water.
“I just love that mirage thing that’s happening out there,” he says, clipping drawing paper onto a lap-sized board and choosing a piece of conte compressed charcoal. “I sketch on site, because you can make decisions about the composition. You can decide what to leave out, what to leave in, and what to focus on, whether it’s the shapes or the patterns or whatever you’re interested in that day.”
A painter and print maker, who works out of his studio in Parry Sound and a makeshift seasonal workspace at his Bayfield cottage, Stein returns to the annual study of the Massasauga for the shared camaraderie and a love of Georgian Bay.
“I guess I could come out on my own somehow in a canoe, but I think it’s a nice opportunity to work with other people,” he says. “You’re not working with them directly, but you produce this exhibit together. You’re out working on the same landscape, talking about your approach and your materials, and then you talk about other things you’ve done.”
He’s fascinated by the “graphicness of the stripes and the shadows” in the twisted rock formations found on Wreck Island.
“I’ve used those in a lot of pictures, and the rocks themselves have become a focus that I concentrate on,” says the local artist. “So my pictures have all the rocks in the foreground, and I’ve pushed the horizon line up near the top, so it’s almost like the horizon is the very top of the picture. All the rest of it – more than three-quarters – is all the striations and the movements in the rocks.”
“Coming out in the park in the fall, for me, is like the beginning of the work I do that winter, so it gets me started,” he explains.
Art show deadlines push him into his studio every day all winter, to follow creative energy embedded in sketches made at the Massasauga. One by one, he plays with the images, adjusting shapes and colours. Finally, with artistic license, he’ll combine choice elements from his flurry of creativity and will occasionally find images of similar rocky shorelines near Stein’s Bayfield cottage, merging with those from Wreck Island.
“I create a landscape that is not necessarily based on the reality that was there,” he says. “It has become a bit more imagined.”
As much as Stein is captivated by the rocks, Buwalda is fixed on documenting the plants of the Massasauga. The Haliburton artist who also has a native plants nursery at Lake of Bays, was back in the park for his third visual study, and says he enjoys revisiting the many living organisms depicted in his growing collection of Massasauga sketchbooks “just to see what they’re up to.”
He loves the park’s biodiversity. His favourite Massasauga impression was a giant white oak nestled beside a stone.
“I thought this tree had worked so hard, and it was only because of this relationship, this symbiosis with this rock, that it grew into this stunted, yet older tree.”
In last year’s Impressions in the Massasauga show, featuring 11 of Buwalda’s pieces, he captured an eastern red cedar in that same struggle to find its niche.
On site, he’s always brainstorming how to best describe the park this time, and will visualize five or six major ideas for his next show.
“I hope that I can produce something that is really beautiful, but I want to offer something that is slightly educational too, as to what different native species of plants are here,” he explains. “As an artist, I try to create something that inspires people to just step a little bit lighter in nature, something that would inspire them to get out to this park, and see it for themselves.”
“I really like those rocks that look like black leather sofas,” he says, settling into a new sketching spot, after mosquitoes at his last site turned his hands into a mass of tiny welts.
“I love Wreck. I think it’s mind blowing and it really energizes me as an artist to come out here at this time of year. I get super-charged and I’m ready to make art all winter. There’s no shortage of material.”
He’ll take a few photographs, but typically works mainly from his sketches. Often images from past Wreck Island studies are mixed into current pieces. Sometimes, for inspiration, he’ll watch a digital show he’s made of this park.
“So in the middle of winter, I can bring back that feeling of being out here – a sense of what I felt that day,” he explains. “Then I’ll shut that down, open up my sketch books and get to work.”
He describes himself as a drawing major who does some painting. His tools are nibs, paintbrushes, raw ink and brushes. He even creates with toothbrushes and uses tubes to blow or spray ink.
“Anything I can do to add some chaos and to make it difficult for myself,” Buwalda explains. “I let my drawing or painting get out of control at the half way point, which my wife hates, and then I reel it back in with the strength of line again. What I hope I get is a painting that always seems to be in some state of flux. There is a motion to it”
Like Buwalda, Muirhead is also presenting impressions of the Massasauga for her third year. She welcomes the opportunity to have two days to concentrate and soak up the atmosphere of the Massasauga: that sense of the “open”, the huge sky and far-off horizon where it meets the water, the mirage of far-off floating islands, the incredible rock formations on Wreck Island, and the sense of history.
“This year we saw the wreck of the Waubuno in the water off Wreck Island,” she says. “It was an eerie, haunting sight, that I’m sure will find its way into my work this year.”
The park trip stokes the artist’s creative fires. Frequently she reflects on the experience, plays with different ideas, reviews all the photographs and considers whether she will use paint or mixed media and collage. Then, as she feels the deadline looming, Muirhead begins working.
“Having the show to look forward to and prepare for, helps keep the creative inspiration alive,” she finds.
Park Superintendent Foley marvels at how each artist interprets the landscape of his workplace.
“They certainly see things in a different context than what we do,” he says. “They take a rock and turn it into art.”
Each summer, he looks forward to viewing new impressions of the Massasauga.
“It’s the completion of the process. They’ll be out there on a Saturday morning in the fall, sketching rocks and trees and water, and then nine months later, it’s an exhibition, actual pieces of artwork on the wall.”
Impressions of the Massasauga
Date: Feb 05, 2010
Peter Buwalda walks around Wreck Island.
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