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MEL WATKINS Reflections on Being Born in a Group of Seven Canvas That Is Magically Transformed into a Sensuous Eleanor Bond Painting Unbeknownst to me as a child, I was born in Group ofSeven country. (Colleagues who know me as a political economist rather than as an art critic, 'please note that I am not talking about Canada's membership in the socalled Group of 7 a.k.a. the G-7 that is presently running the world if anyone is, where Canada is allowed in, the cynics say, to make sure that a U.S. motion always has a seconder.) At the time, growing up on a farm near Parry Sound on Georgian Bay, it simply seemed like a place where there was too much rock and too much wind. Trees were nice to look at, and fun to climb when your parents weren't watching, but my father and his father before him made such living as they could by cutting them down. Rocks were for skinning your knees. Water was avoided, since few could swim. The only people who really seemed to get off on the scenery were the tourists, and their patronizing ways with the loca]s - sonny, are we on the right road to see those lovely quints?l - were, to say the least, off-putting. I grew up to appreciate the story about the anthropologist who, when asked how tourism could help the people who lived there, said 'Send the money and stay at home.' At the time, one could hardly help noting that the tourists were nowhere in sight when the air was bitterly cold, and the snow banks were above your head, and the hard part of living was happening. I do not remember at what point in my schooling I firstbecame aware of the Group ofSeven, but it was not a minor moment. Last summer (1996) I went to Montreal to see the Rene Magritte exhibition with its magnificent skies of blue and billowing clouds, and ever 'since I have looked more longingly at the sky and have been conscious of how much we are cut off from it in cities bathed in electric light. Similarly, to see even a bad reproduction of the Group of Seven landscapes was to realize the beauty that abounded in scrabbly rock and scrub pine. The first time I saw the real thing (art that is), when I came to the University of Toronto as a student and whiled away the hours studying in Hart House with its well-hung walls, I was deeply impressed by the texture of the oils and the vividness 1 We lived on the road to Callandar, where the Dionne quintuplets drew tourists each summer like flies. UNfVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 66, NUMBER 2, SPRING 1997 412 MEL WATKINS Eleanor Bond, Canadian (1948-) Development ofa Fishing Village as aHoneymoon Resoit, 1985-88 oil on canvas, 243.8 x 365.7 cm Faculty Club, on loan to Robarts Library of the colours, and I began to appreciate the beauty of the countryside which I had so gladly fled. All of which fits with the central argument of Simon Schama's magnificent book Landscape and Memory: 'Landscapes are culture before they are nature; constructs of the imagination projected onto wood and water and rock' (61) - the holy trinity for Schama and for the Group of Seven. (And I agree with Schama that any easy linking of democracy and the forest is problematic. The only time that Parry Sound kicked up its heels and went CCF/NDP was in the 19405 when war plant jobs had pulled people off theĀ· land. Paint the prairie wheat fields and the grain elevators if you want to celebrate the roots of deep democracy in this country.) But I could never quite shake my sense of the absurd that seemed to inhere in the difference between the Group of Seven's take and mine. The locals, understandably, tire of stories about city slickers roughing it out in the bush when the locals did it to keep alive. Like others, I came to wonder why there were never any people.in the Group's pictures. Vegetable and...

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