Фрэнклин Кармайкл: Художник Группы Семи и канадские пейзажи

20th century Canadian artist

Franklin Carmichael (May 4, 1890 – October 24, 1945) was a Canadian artist and member of the Group of Seven. Though he was primarily famous for his use of watercolours, he also used oil paints, charcoal and other media to capture the Ontario landscapes. Besides his work as a painter, he worked as a designer and illustrator, creating promotional brochures, advertisements in newspapers and magazines, and designing books. Near the end of his life, Carmichael taught in the Graphic Design and Commercial Art Department at the Ontario College of Art (today the Ontario College of Art & Design University). The youngest original member of the Group of Seven, Carmichael often found himself socially on the outside of the group. Despite this, the art he produced was of equal measure in terms of style and approach to the other members' contributions, vividly expressing his spiritual views through his art. The next youngest member was A. J. Casson with whom he was friendly.

Franklin Carmichael was born in 1890 in Orillia, Ontario, the son of David Graham and Susannah Eleanor (Smith) Carmichael. Because his artistic talents were already apparent at a very young age, his mother enrolled him in both music and art lessons. As a teenager, Carmichael worked in his father's carriage making shop as a striper. In decorating the carriages he practiced his design, drawing, and colouring skills. By 1911, he began working as an apprentice at Grip Ltd. making $2.50 a week. Late in the year, Lawren Harris and J. E. H. MacDonald began sketching together, soon to be joined by Carmichael and his coworkers at Grip, including Arthur Lismer, Tom Thomson and Frank Johnston. By 1913, the excursions also included Frederick Varley and A. Y. Jackson. Carmichael moved to Antwerp, Belgium in 1913 to study painting at Académie Royale des Beaux Arts. Due to the outbreak of World War I, he cut his studies short and returned to his native Ontario in September 1914, rejoining Thomson, Macdonald, Lismer, Varley and Johnston. Staying in Toronto during the war, they struggled in the depressed wartime economy. During the fall of 1914, he moved into the Studio Building and shared a space with Thomson over the winter. Carmichael and the members of the group were frustrated by their initial attempts to capture the untouched "savage" land of Canada, with the particular characteristics of the land difficult to represent in the European tradition. Jackson would write that, "after painting in Europe where everything was mellowed by time and human associations, I found it a problem to paint a country in outward appearance pretty much as it had been when Champlain passed through its thousands of rock islands three hundred years before." It would be only after the group discovered the paintings of Scandinavian landscapes that they would begin to move in a coherent direction. According to MacDonald, the Scandinavian painters "seemed to be a lot of men not trying to express themselves so much as trying to express something that took hold of themselves. The painters began with nature rather than with art." Thomson invited Carmichael on a sketching trip to Algonquin Park in the fall of 1915. Carmichael could not go because of his September 15 marriage to Ada Lillian Went.

In April 1920, the Group of Seven was established by Jackson, Harris, MacDonald, Lismer, Varley, Johnston and Carmichael. The group held its first exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto from May 7 to 27, 1920. In 1922, Carmichael joined the Sampson Matthews firm, a printmaking business. He likely worked as head designer under the art directorship of J. E. Sampson. In 1925, Carmichael, Harris and Jackson ventured to the northern shore of Lake Superior. On the trip, Carmichael opted to use watercolour rather than his usual oil paints. He used watercolour consistently from this point onward, painting some of his most famous works with the medium. After this initial experience, he would return several more times to the lake, including in 1926 and 1928.

Carmichael's artistic breakthrough came after his return to Canada in 1914, once he took up residence with Thomson in the Studio Building. In the winter of that year, he recorded outdoor sketches and produced one of his first major works, A Muskoka Road. The scene depicted in the painting is that of a snowy road, illustrating his broad handling and bold brushwork. Art historian Joan Murray wrote that "Thomson's way of painting strongly influenced Carmichael." The influence of Thomson can be seen in Carmichael's initial attempts at capturing clouds and snow; his early efforts show he did not yet understand structure and colour on the same level as Thomson. Carmichael eventually came to favour landscape art, and many of his pieces display an effort to achieve rich colour and design. Besides a few studies in his notes, he produced only a single portrait in oil on canvas in his entire career: Woman in Black Hat, a rendering of an unidentified subject from 1939. Art historian David Silcox praised the painting, writing that it "makes one wish that [Carmichael] had tackled more." Carmichael's final painting, Gambit No. 1, was painted in 1945 and was his only abstract piece. It was his first major canvas since 1942. Art historian Joyce Zemans thought the painting indicated Carmichael was moving in a new direction, though given the timing of the work at the end of his life it is difficult to know whether he would have continued. Early works like the 1920 painting Autumn Hillside display pictorial motifs that became common to his later work. For example, he utilizes effects of distant weather and a partially shadowed foreground. Carmichael's developing maturity is seen in perhaps his most famous work, The Upper Ottawa, Near Mattawa. The painting shows an understanding of the distinct, massive geometric surfaces of rocks, and is also presented from a viewpoint that would come to characterize much of his later work, utilizing height to emphasize time and weather. Beyond simple representation of picturesque views, Carmichael attempted to capture contrast. This is seen in his early work Autumn Foliage Against Grey Rock which compares the rocky landscape to a bright autumnal tree along with a pink and green sky. After Carmichael's ventures to Lake Superior in the mid to late 1920s, Bertram Brooker and other friends recognized the spiritual dimensions of his work. Besides his interest theosophy, he also studied transcendentalism, owning a copy of Ralph Waldo Emerson's Essays and Other Writings, amongst many other books. During this time, he made significant changes in style through bolder use of colour and an overall simplification in approach. This is evident in his 1930 watercolour, Snow Flurries: North Shore of Lake Superior,</blockquote>

By the 1930s, Carmichael's work explored themes of industry in northern Ontario, particularly the mining regions. In 1952, Dr. Ann Curtin and Carmichael's widow founded the Franklin Carmichael Art Group, located at 34 Riverdale Drive in Toronto. In 1990, Carmichael's granddaughter, Catharine Mastin, and curator Megan Bice held an exhibition of Carmichael's work at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection. In a review of the exhibition, Joan Murray was disappointed in the organizers focus on Carmichael's oil works, which she saw as "overworked and overfinished", rather than his "sublime" watercolours. Catharine Mastin has since been a curator at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary and directed the Art Gallery of Windsor and written about her grandfather's art. The 1929 watercolour Lone Lake was considered to be the highlight of a major sale of Canadian art in May 2012 at Joyner Waddington's spring art auction in Toronto, ON, selling for CAD$330,400. The subject of the painting is a small lake called Carmichael Lake in the La Cloche Mountains of Killarney Provincial Park near Sudbury, Ontario.