Hamilton couple finds over 800 real Group of Seven landscapes
CBC
If a picture's worth a thousand words, to Jim and Sue Waddington, a painting's worth a thousand miles.
For nearly five decades, Jim and Sue Waddington have hiked, portaged and paddled rapids around Canada, all to track down and photograph over 800 landscapes that inspired the Group of Seven's works.
They've given more than 300 talks on their travels, published a best-selling book, and are now the subject of a short documentary narrated by their granddaughter Emma.
Now, in their eighties, the two are still at it.
"It keeps us busy," Sue told CBC Radio's The Current this week.
The Group of Seven were Canadian landscape painters who formed from 1920 to 1933, often depicting the country's raw, natural beauty in their works. They included A.Y. Jackson, Lawren Harris, Franklin Carmichael, Frank Johnston, Arthur Lismer, J.E.H. MacDonald and Frederick Varley.
Neither Sue nor Jim come from an art background. But like the famous painters, they love to canoe and camp, and in 1977, they set out with a specific goal in mind.
Sue says the first location they found was the subject of A.Y. Jackson's 1933 painting, "Hills Killarney, (Nellie Park)". She'd discovered the painting during a course at Mohawk College, and wondered if the place really existed.
"And we looked at the map of Killarney Park where we had been canoeing a couple of years and saw Nellie Lake and decided maybe we better go and see if it was there," she said.
After a week of portaging, they found it.
"We were quite surprised that we could actually find it and that it actually looked almost identical," Sue said.
That began a lifelong obsession.
"After we found that first place, we thought, well, there must be a lot more that we could find," said Jim.
The couple consulted art galleries, topographic maps and artist notes to narrow down where they might find the artists' original vantage points. They carried the artists' sketches on their trips, which were more realistic than the paintings the artists later produced in studio, Jim says. He says the puzzle of it has kept them going.
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