A capacity Nature Guelph audience collectively gasped throughout an intriguing presentation Thursday night based on a 30-year artistic detective mission.
Jim and Sue Waddington, six-decade canoeing partners, and co-discoverers of Group of Seven painting sites, wowed about 100 people who gathered for Nature Guelph’s February meeting. The chilly night could not dissuade the nature lovers from attending.
The event included a fundraising raffle and a rundown of club events in this, the 50th anniversary year of a local organization that promotes nature loving.
For 30 years the Waddingtons have shared the hobby of researching, mapping, finding and chronicling the actual wilderness settings painted by the fabled Group of Seven members. Most of their discoveries have been made by canoe.
Jim Waddington, a retired McMaster University physics professor freely admitted to the Arboretum Centre audience that he is not the artistic one in the partnership. But he can carry a canoe on his shoulders.
Sue, a retired nurse, is an award-winning traditional rug hooker. In the late 70s she did a painstaking tapestry that reproduced an A.Y. Jackson painting of a La Cloche Mountains scene. The couple later discovered, to their astonishment, the exact spot while canoeing in the Killarney Provincial Park. Their shared hobby was born.
The well-crafted and highly entertaining presentation relied on images of extraordinary landscape paintings juxtaposed with photographs of the actual landscapes, images capture by the Waddingtons on their site-hunting trips.
It was plain to see that what drew the legendary painters to their natural subjects was the awe-inspiring beauty of them.
Jim Waddington began the presentation with a local-angle, showing some of the small town scenes near Guelph that group member A.J. Casson had painted. Waddington’s humour was apparent from the outset when he showed a Casson painting of rustic buildings in downtown Elora. A contemporary photograph of the same scene shows one of those buildings repurposed as a Shoppers Drug Mart.
What wowed the audience most throughout the presentation was the degree to which the historic paintings accurately captured the rugged, immense beauty of the landscape they were based on. That the Waddington’s photographs so closely resemble the paintings, even some 80 years after the paintings were done, evoked many gasps throughout the presentation.
The audience appeared encouraged by the fact that landscape upon which A.Y. Jackson’s painting of Nellie Lake was based is now essentially the same topographically, but has a much fuller forest. It was heavily logged in Jackson’s time.
Jenn Bock, president of Nature Guelph, encouraged members of the group to spread the word about upcoming group happenings. The public is welcome to attend all activities. New members are sought.
In March, the group will host a presentation by Todd Morris on the subject of vanishing freshwater mussels. An April presentation by Bridget Stutchbury is dedicated to birding, and specifically to song bird migrations.
The group is raising funds to make the windows of the Arboretum Centre bird-friendly. Visit Nature Guelph at http://natureguelph.ca to donate to the anti-collision window project, and to learn more about activities and programs.
