"Tom Thomson" poem by George Whipple

Before his paintings fared out of his brush
the accidental grandeur of burnt woods
turned him aside. Behind
the thick dark cedar screen
of Time where all that changes, stilled
and verified by art, unchanging lives,
in birch-white solitudes he made a pledge
to something on some always distant shore
that beckoned his canoe beyond the lampit edge
of crowded cities, towns.

The charcoal hush
of evening, deep Muskoka rivers, lakes
where deer come down to drink the lapping moon
he caught on canvas -- with a sense of things unseen.

He took the meausre of the tallest tree.
In you, beleagured Jackpine, native Harp,
the wind's gnarled language learned to reproduce;
spread-eagled, straining arms against the sky,
your thunder-shaped, deep-throated silent Cry
he captured -- rooted fast in shouts of paint.

When maples kindled south of Mattawa
and burnded boughed heaven's arching dome:
when autumn flamed through shadow-crafted aisles
of branching latticeworkd more brilliantly designed
than Chartres' rhetoric of stony lace -- he saw
how everything breathed truth, and felt at home
for the first time as sight and insight merged
-- Algonquin's solitary soul with his entwined
as he poured out his self-commissioned praise
grandiloquent as warpaint on the world.

The undeflected compass of his dreams
led far beyond Algoma Central's farthest rail
to reach those treasures hidden in plain sight --
silken cobwebs chandeliered with rain,
the sould within a rock, the whirling pool
solidified in whorls of knotted maple grain,
the Spirit's thereness everywhere intact:
each nothing stone the cosmos held in place,
no smallest insect moved except by grace.
-- Some inner map of innocence and awe
had led him deep within himself to find
our land's rich emptiness.

He struck it big.
In motherlodes of feeling still underminded,
a flash of certitude, a radiant strange Force
awakened him while others lay asleep.
Impervious to critics' yelping tomahawks,
nostalgia for the future made more clear
what's never missed until it's found -- most near,
most far -- the earth entrusted to our keep,
the native soil where freedom has its source.

The many scattered fragments of Perhaps
(a dance of dappled mirros on a twig
where spinning leaves collect the wind)
he salvaged -- showing us a world unseen
until intrepid distances explored his eyes
with new perspectives, forms fresh as that lake
compacted to a 10-inch square of beaverboard
where tamarack at tamarack still-gaze
across a resinous black pool ablaze
with sunset's burning flames -- a scene
to call for celebration in whatever room
it glows.

So one enduring masterpiece --
homemade -- familiar friend to all, in hearts
too long aggresively indifferent, wakes
some latent feeling -- half-asleep -- to sing.
Our future was the past too long assigned
to others. Now we have a voice that sees
cantata-clear white hemlock tapestries,
blue shadows on white arioso snow.

Not what he saw but what he knew ws there
he fleshed upon nude canvas -- lavish, spare,
lovingly unveiled in unpremeditated art.

In contemplation all remembrance dies.
The field of vision's narrowed to a cloud
is ointments on a stick. Both humbe/proud
the artist/shaman heals, and witless/wise
unknowing, knows. He sees by going blind
invisible bright objects silent/loud
as crimson on a leaf.

Sometimes we find
the future's passed before the present dawns
-- yet how his yellow/blues melt into green,
an always-present mixing in our eyes
an endless spring.

***
One cloudy day
he took his fishing tackle, lit his pipe,
shoved off from shore and paddled far away
-- into his pictures. Clutching the last straw
of light, hands slipping from the cold
ascending surface of the lake
he disappeared.

In rough unsettled solitudes
of tamarack and maple, lake and stream,
our country's northern soul forever broods:
its solemn, sweet, sad joy, its many moods
remote and reticent he caught as in a dream
still haunting us -- the woods within the woods.

Two New Exhibitions Open at the Varley Art Gallery

Release date: May 14, 2010

Two New Exhibitions Open at the Varley Art Gallery

June 3, 2010 - September 6, 2010

Cultural Floe: Modern and Inuit Traditions
Curated by Anna Hudson

A Tribute to Norman Bethune: the mural and political cartoons of Avrom Yanovsky
Curated by Anna Hudson

Varley in Unionville
Selections from the Permanent Collection

Unionville, Ontario - The Varley Art Gallery of Markham opens two new exhibitions on June 3, 2010 along with an exhibition of works by F.H. Varley selected from the galleries permanent collection.

Cultural Floe: Modern and Inuit Traditions
The exhibition juxtaposes sculpture and drawing produced at the beginning and end of the ethnically defined field of Inuit modern art. During the 1950's an international market developed for carving produced in the regions now known as Nunavut and Nunavik. Sixty years later, following significant attainments in Aboriginal self-governance, current Inuit art now flows into an expansive international contemporary art practice. In this new context, individual artists are celebrated as witnesses to a new global reality. Inuit traditional knowledge privileges the expression of personal experience over received information. The subjective views of life captured in these sculptures and drawings advance the continuity of an Inuit way of being in the world and offer a template of cultural influence on contemporary culture.

Featuring the works of: Davidialuk Alasua Amittu, Adam Alorut, Abraham Anghik, Shuvinai Ashoona, Maria Connolly, Osuitok Ipeelee, Naulaq Michael, Idris Moss-Davies, William Noah, Sheokjuk Okutaq, Silas Qayaqjuak, Tim Pitsiulak and Oviloo Tunnille.

A Tribute to Norman Bethune: the mural and political cartoons of Avrom Yanovsky
The exhibition features Avrom Yanovsky's mural tribute to Dr. Norman Bethune who remains best known as a hero in the People's Republic of China. He is remembered in Canada as a surgeon and inventor who developed a mobile blood-transfusion service, a political activist and an early proponent of a universal health care system. The mural was painted for the Communist Party of Canada and covered an entire wall at the Norman Bethune-Tim Buck Educational Centre in Toronto. The mural, completed in 1963-65, has never been exhibited since being removed from its original location.

Over sixty political cartoons by Yanovsky published between 1950 and 1972 are included in the exhibition. The ink drawings, with their collaged and corrected compositions, are the original cartoons published in newspapers nationally, most commonly in The Worker and The Canadian Tribune, and internationally through World News Services. All are animated by a cast of easily recognizable characters: the money bag, the banker, the capitalist, and the politician - with his sidekick, the police or military. Yanovsky saved the leading role for the worker: an idealized representation of labour who endured the endless greed and buffoonery of capital and political power.

Varley in Unionville is an exhibition curated from the Varley Art Gallery's permanent collection with much of the work being part of the original bequest from Kathleen McKay.
A friend of Donald and Kathleen McKay, Varley became their boarder and followed them on their move from Toronto to Unionville in the mid-1950's. In Unionville, Varley would produce numerous paintings and sketches of Kathleen McKay, his muse. She also accompanied him on painting trips throughout Ontario and British Columbia.

Opening Reception Photo Gallery