#2125 "Superior Katherine Cove"

I was headed back to Agawa Bay Campground along the Superior East shore after spending the day at Gargantua Harbour. I decided to stop and paint a late afternoon water and rock scene. I did not want to waste a moment of my exploration just in case I don't make it back up here again.

A.Y. Jackson wrote, "I always think of Algoma as J.E.H. MacDonald's country. He was a quiet, unadventurous person who could not swim or paddle or swing an axe or find his way in the bush. He was awed and thrilled by the landscape of Algoma and he got the feel of it in his painting." I always felt that Jackson might have been a bit harsh in these words. There has been speculation that MacDonald might have suffered a minor stroke while helping to build Tom Thomson's Cairn on Canoe Lake. It was hard work carrying rocks up that steep slope and mixing cement in the fall of 1917. MacDonald did suffer a significant stroke in 1931. He spent the following summer recovering in Barbados but died that autumn in Toronto on November 26, 1932 at the age of 59. He was buried at Prospect Cemetery in Toronto. Much too young.

The autumn of 1918 was the first visit to Algoma by MacDonald, Harris, and other artists. They used a specially outfitted Algoma Central Railway box car that functioned as a mobile artist studio. The group would hitch their car to trains travelling through the area. They would unhitch again when they found a scenic location where they would explore and paint that local wilderness. MacDonald returned to Algoma every autumn until 1923. These trips would produce some of his most acclaimed paintings, including Mist Fantasy, Sand River, Algoma (1920) and The Solemn Land (1921).

I was painting the same landscapes almost a century after that first box car trip. Those autumn paint escapes between 1918 and 1923 included Lawren Harris, A.Y. Jackson, Frank Johnston, J.E.H. MacDonald and Arthur Lismer. In some ways I think the railway got them closer to the scenes than I got to by road. I did a lot of hiking.

I started at 4:45 pm when I stopped at Katherine Cove. It was windy but the weather had really cleared. The altocumulus gravity waves were very interesting. There was a band of cirrostratus on the southern horizon - perhaps another storm but this one would miss us. The reflections of the point to the south was sometimes like a mirror but often dappled and confused when the breeze rippled the surface. Those rocks were really there on that point.