After canoeing across Canada, around Lake Superior and through the wildest reaches of northern Ontario, acclaimed photojournalists Gary and Joanie McGuffin are now getting their adventure kicks closer to home. The McGuffins have partnered with Michael Burtch, the retired director of the Art Gallery of Algoma, to retrace the trails and photograph the painting sites of the Group of Seven.
“We grew up in homes and cottages with images of the Group of Seven,” says Gary McGuffin, “and now we live right in the heart of their favourite places to paint. We were working with Michael on another project and it hit us. Wouldn’t it be neat to find some of these painting sites of the Group of Seven?”
Burtch and the McGuffins piloted the project last summer with a canoe trip down the Petawawa River in Algonquin Park, in search of Tom Thomson’s Petawawa Gorges series of canvases. “Michael brought us up to speed on all the biographies of the Group of Seven painters,” says McGuffin. “It’s a great combination of art history and adventure.” The project will focus on the period between the group’s formation in 1919 and when they disbanded in 1930. When they find the exact site of a painting, McGuffin frames the scene in a photograph proportional to the artist’s original canvas.
A DREAM PROJECT AND QUEST
Currently, Burtch and the McGuffins are combing the Algoma Central Railway line, north of Sault Ste. Marie, for painters J.E.H. MacDonald, Lawren Harris and Frank Johnston’s most iconic subject matter. Since parts of the landscape have been altered by logging and hydroelectric development, a large portion of the project has involved identifying how scenes have changed over time, and poring over painters’ journals and letters for clues on directions to specific sites.
McGuffin was especially struck by MacDonald’s response to the landscape along the Agawa Canyon. “He was obviously overwhelmed,” notes McGuffin. “In his letters home he called it ‘the original site of the Garden of Eden’!”
Ultimately, McGuffin says he wants to produce a book of 100 then-and-now Group of Seven images from across Ontario. “The story would be how the painters got to these places,” he says, “and describing the investigative work we did to revisit the sites.”
A sideline project might be a “map-intensive guidebook to actually get people to find these spots on their own,” says McGuffin. “It’s turned into a quest…it’s a dream project for us.”
This article first appeared in the Spring 2010 issue of Canoeroots Magazine. For more great content, subscribe to Canoeroots’ print and digital editions here.
