Homer Watson: Native Son

On the Grand River at Doon, c. 1880
Homer Watson, Canadian, 1855 - 1936
Oil on canvas
24 x 36 in
Purchased 1952
National Gallery of Canada (no. 5900)

Last year, I attended a panel discussion on the exhibition Beyond the Pines: Homer Watson and the Contemporary Canadian Landscape at the Art Gallery Mississauga. I had visited the exhibition numerous times, going through Watson's work one by one, to study his technique, his evolution as an artist, his views, his concerns, and his Canada.

The exhibition also displayed works by contemporary Canadian artists to bring this pine "narrative" to the fore. Some were reasonably good, but none reached the overall skill and beauty of Watson's paintings.

Watson's talent as a painter was recognized by a friend who initially advised him:

...to quit the nonsense of going in for art in a country like Canada. "Quit it and come into the office and become a businessman.”

Watson continues with the story:

...on nearing home [some weeks after he had submitted the painting [The Pioneer Mill] to the Canadian Academy exhibition] I saw this gentleman on the road in front of his establishment reading the Toronto Globe. Seeing me he advanced waving the paper and putting out his hand he exclaimed, “I take it all back. Go ahead and paint. Look here,” and there it was in flaming headlines in the Globe, “Country boy paints picture bought by Princess Louise.” So that was that...

Homer Watson was born in 1855 in Doon, Ontario (now Kitchener). He started to paint as a young child encouraged by his father and his aunt. He never received any formal art training, but acquired his skill and artistic sense through various artist mentors he sought as he developed his talent.

Watson was called "the Canadian Constable," and “the man who first saw Canada as Canada, rather than as dreamy blurred pastiches of European painting.” While he holds this noble acclamation, he has nonetheless been overshadowed by the more forceful Group of Seven artists.

The AGM’s exhibition showed us Watson’s southern Canadian landscapes, amidst its farms and homesteads, as civilized and vibrant, and as separate from America. He is the first nationalist Canadian painter, earlier even than the much touted Group of Seven painters.

But the exhibitors of Beyond the Pines had a subtle agenda, which was was to place Watson in the background of Canadian art as an artist who no longer represents contemporary Canada, and reflects only the past, colonial English heritage which they believe has little relevance in current Canadian art.

The much described regions of impenetrable wilderness and inhospitable glaciers is not the Canada that most Canadians know and live in, including Homer Watson and the Group of Seven. Their Canada of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was already a nation of defined European, and mostly British, communities with houses, gardens, farmland, and forests.

And that is the other narrative the AGM curators were presenting: the pre-colonial Canada of the aboriginal tribes.

The AGM’s website tells us:

First. New. Next.

The AGM provides platforms for exhibitions, collections and experimentation in contemporary culture with a recent focus on artists and cultural producers from Indigenous, newcomer and youth communities. Through a broad range of educational programs, artist projects and other forms of critical dialogue, the AGM seeks to transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries, foster community, and provide spaces where alternative modes of thought are supported and activated in tangible ways.

The one piece by Natives ("Native" being the commonly used word for Aboriginal) artists in Beyond the Pines is a film (later transferred to video) by Brian Jungen and Duane Linklater titled Modest Livelihood, who document their hunting expedition and challenge Canadian gun laws and restrictions.

Here is Canadian Firearms Act as it pertains to Native Canadians:

Under Canada's Firearms Act, everyone who possesses or acquires a firearm must have a firearms licence, and all restricted and prohibited firearms must be registered. While the Firearms Act applies to everyone in Canada, some provisions of the Act and of the Firearms Licences Regulations have been adapted for Aboriginal people who meet all three of the following criteria:

1.They must be a member of one of the Aboriginal Peoples of Canada (Indian, Inuit and Métis) or a beneficiary under a treaty referred to in section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982.
2. They must be a member of an Aboriginal community.
3. They must engage in the traditional hunting practices of their community.

These adaptations facilitate the licensing process for Aboriginal people under unique circumstances while maintaining all the safety requirements of the Firearms Act.

We are hard pressed to believe that Brian Jungen and Duane Linklater are indeed hunting for their livelihood, in this age when hunting has become a sport and food for nourishment is abundant. But Jungen’s and Linklater’s purpose is to show us that they have a right to this land as had their aboriginal ancestors, with which the AGM curators fully agree.

A group of eight contemporary Canadian artists were also part of this exhibition. None made any explicit references to Watson or his era, rather focussing on the exhibition's general themes of the natural and the spiritual. But it was Jennifer Carvalho and Reinhard Reitzenstein who combined these natural and spiritual worlds most skillfully in their pieces.

Carvalho’s fir are impenetrable and dense, as though mysterious and macabre forces are hiding behind them. In Unexpected Connections, her trees spiral skyward to a grey zenith, reminiscent of Emily Carr’s west coast giant pines (Carvalho studied in Vancouver’s Emily Carr University of Art and Design), but without the hopeful sky blue of Carr’s heaven-reaching trees.

Reitzenstein reduces his pine sculptures to tiny spikes atop sinewy vines. In Thrust, the vine-like pine, rather than pull us upwards as the title would suggest, drags us down into the underworld of fungi, and we are forced to contemplate the dark and amorphous fungal netherworld of a place without God, without art and without beauty.

Reitzenstein may have obtained his training and perspective from the sculptural traditions of western art, but he has neglected the often hidden but important forces of religion and God present in most of non-modern western art. He desires, and creates with, beauty without the spiritual source of his sculptural discipline.

The AGM catalogue for Beyond the Pines informs us:

Contemporary Canadian artists looking at landscape must also find a way to access the ‘truth’ of a subject that is not only strongly represented in our national artistic history, but one that is both deeply political and personal. Placing contemporary work by emerging and established artists alongside that of Watson illustrates the universality of the quest to appreciate and capture the landscape in which we live.

Beyond the Pines was an ambitious project attempting to unite several themes of Canadian art. This was partly responsible for its failure: trying to be everything to everyone, from European-influenced landscape painting, to spirit-influenced Canadian art, to Native Canadians' grievances, and with an open ended question about contemporary Canadian identity, in which, of course the non-Western immigrant, the antithesis of Homer Watson's world, looms large.

But the deliberate ideological direction the curators took produced a collection of work which was not convincing in presenting its original idea of "moving forward" from the Watson narrative to a more inclusive multicultural art. Astute observers would instead realize that there was an undeclared intention of slowly and subtly removing the legacies of Homer Watson and his artistic heritage from the fore of Canadian fine art tradition to replace it with the contemporary landscape.

We were not told what this contemporary landscape could be other than a mishmash of disparate ideas and a desire for diversity that has become a cultish, spiritual quest oblivious of its fallacies. Whose diversity are we to take on? Will the Indian artist conform to the criteria of Chinese art? Will both accept, objectively and without prejudice, the artistic superiority of Homer Watson’s paintings? Would either attend, with curiosity and interest, the exhibitions of each other’s representative artists? And perhaps to settle this confusion, in December 2016 about a year after the Watson project, the AGM undertook another ambitious mandate, and led two full-day workshops titled: Collections through the Prism of Diversity, [Day 1, and Day 2].

We were informed that through these workshops:

The AGM is engaging in a forward thinking acquisition plan reflecting the cultural diversity of the city, region, as well as the historical diversity of Canada. Public art galleries and art museums are committed to acquiring works of art from culturally diverse and Indigenous communities, however this often requires considering how their acquisition plans are aligned with their missions and mandates.

There is a carefully guarded piece of information that is missing in the public announcements by the AGM. The museum was just approved to receive $325,000 for the 2017 fiscal year by the City of Mississauga's Art and Cultural Grant Program. This is a continuation of the prior seven years of six-digit grant money, starting with $271,000 in 2011, $316,000 in 2012, and $365,000 for the years thereafter upto and including 2017. This is an investment of $2412 million over a seven year period. [Grants and funding reports by the City of Mississauga for the following years: 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017,]

The other missing information was that if indeed there are enough high calibre non-Western artists (museum worthy) living in the Mississauga region who could benefit from such large grant and sponsorship monies.

The question begs to be answered with a no. If indeed there were such artists, then neither the exorbitant public money nor the earnestly planned workshops would have been necessary.

I say “earnest” a little tongue in cheek since for these cultural reformists, western art should not be (and cannot be) the criteria with which to judge multi-ethnic cultural participants. Each community member, each ethnic identity, each hyphenated Canadian, brings unique with him unique abilities and talents. He should be judged by those equality-based criteria rather than the elitist standards of western art.

And without those standards, there would be no Art Gallery of Mississauga and no exhibitions worthy of the public’s visits. And that is the conundrum in which these art and culture leaders find themselves, and the reason why they have to demand, fascistic fashion, that there be some way to allow such art and culture to enter the doors of the gallery.

These workshops had as their primary objective to attract the multicultural, non-Western, non-white, and Native population of Mississauga, a city which, from data from the 2011 census report was 53.74% non-white (described as "visible minority" by the census report). The non-white population can only have increased by the 2016 census, which is not yet available. Yet the 2011 census visible minority report is not reflected in the museum's attendance numbers, even when "ethnic" oriented programs were scheduled. Two billion dollars is a lot of money to invest in satisfying a community's cultural biases. Minority non-white cultures are not interested in attending museums even when the exhibitions represent their ethnic and cultural identities.

The bold, unique and truthful suggestions by these government-funded exploration committees would have been to propose that art galleries continue with their exhibition of western art and culture, partly to continue with the historical role of such arts organizations as purveyors of western art, and also, more importantly, to show the excellent treasures of western art, whether archival or historical like Homer Watson, or current and waiting to be discovered artists in our contemporary society who are true disciples of Canadian artists such as Homer Watson.