The Painted Valley: Artists along Alberta’s Bow River, 1845 – 2000 (review)

Through text and images – sixteen black-and-white illustrations, seven black-and-white photographs, and sixty-four coloured plates – the authors present their reading of the ways in which the history of the Bow River valley has been represented in art. On the basis of a study of over two hundred works by about seventy artists, Armstrong and Nelles suggest that the artists’ river allows a rethinking of the history of Western Canadian art and a recognition that ‘the pull of the picturesque,’ determined possibly by market demands, cultural influences, and regionalism, has predominated in depictions of the Bow Valley. Even though the river meanders through urban and agricultural areas, once it leaves its glacier and mountain source, artists have, for the most part, chosen to represent the ‘natural’ rather than the ‘industrial’ sublime.

The book’s survey begins with the ‘Imperial Topographers,’ those artists who recorded the expeditions – commercial, military, exploratory – through the area. They are trenchantly described as producing art ‘in the service of empire,’ especially in the rendering of Aboriginals as a subjected people. The ‘Railway Romantics’ include those painters who were, in effect, subsidized by the cpr in its attempt to draw visitors to the mountains by renditions of the Rockies as a tourist destination of unrivalled majesty. These two chapters present artists as agents of colonization and commerce, influenced in their techniques by canons of British watercolour painting.

Armstrong and Nelles then shift to early-twentieth-century depictions of the Bow Valley under the heading ‘The Long Shadow of Impressionism.’ This shadow, according to the authors, stretched from the work of Lars Haukaness to that of Peter and Catharine Whyte; even the artists of the Group of Seven, in particular A.Y. Jackson, and such students of theirs as George Pepper and Kathleen Daly, were touched by it in their attempts to meet the challenge of adapting European models of art to the western landscape.

The chapter ‘Seeing the Valley as Home’ considers the establishment of regional art schools, with three important teachers, A.C. Leighton, H.G. Glyde, and W.J. Phillips, shaping the direction of art in Alberta, particularly painting in and of the mountains. These expatriate Englishmen and others who followed them continued the tradition of British watercolour painting and the aesthetic of the picturesque, as did even their best students, such as James Nicoll and Margaret Shelton.

Still, there were mavericks in this world of primarily representational painting. Illingworth Kerr is quoted as desiring to paint ‘with eyes unprejudiced by European influences,’ and Marion McKay Nicoll moved happily away from naturalism after attending the Emma Lake Workshop in Saskatchewan and meeting New York abstractionists there. Ted Godwin, one of Kerr’s students, likewise adopted the New York model but eventually returned to representational painting and a commitment to the landscape of the lower Bow River and its valley. In ‘Modernism and After,’ Armstrong and Nelles discuss at some length Godwin’s aesthetic principles and consider as well other modernists, some contemporary painters, Two Gun (Percy Plainswoman) of the Blood reserve, and ‘folk’ artists. ‘The Power of Landscape’ concludes the textual section of the book, summarizes the preceding pages, and emphatically proclaims ‘the enduring and transcendent power of landscape’ expressed in the art of the Bow Valley.

As with any such collection and discussion of artists and their work, quibbles regarding inclusions and exclusions can be made. For instance, Two Gun’s ‘Landscape with Tipi’ (plate 59) is a painting only tangentially, if at all, associated with the Bow Valley. His admittedly ‘more accomplished’ ‘Bow Lake’ is merely described, presumably because it shows Two Gun as less a naive folk artist, the category in which the authors arbitrarily have placed him. At the other extreme, eight of the sixty-four colour plates are of the same famous view of Mt Rundle, that seen from the Vermilion Lakes, perhaps to allow comparison of various artists’ seeing of this landscape...