Library session............ I'll be honest with you. I didn't go. In the past 3 years at Mount A, and indeed in my entire education history, I have been required to go to far to many library sessions. I just don't find them useful at all and they are really just so so so so so boring. If you are in your third or fourth year of university and you still don't know how to use a library, well then in all honesty you should probably just go home now. At least if you are in a B.A. program. When I think of going to another never ending library lecture all I can think of is how I wish I could pull a Guy Laramee and destroy all the books by turning them into something much MUCH more exciting.
As a statement on his website, Laramee says:

"“Our love for mountains will heal us”. Heal us of what? Of over thinking? Of our obsession with knowledge? Of greed? In fact it doesn’t matter. When you recover health, the only thing you can say is “sickness is over”. Health is like love. Try to describe it and you’re out of it. "

I don't know what it is about mountains, but I do know that every fiber of my being agrees with the first statement... being from British Columbia, every time I go home from the very flat maritime's and see the mountains I honestly just feel one hundred and thirty percent better, like they just filled a hole that had been missing.

Guy Laramee - Detail of Browns Bible

Guy Laramee - El Amor por las Montana nos Curara

You can see more of his amazing work here: www.guylaramee.com .
That would be a way better library to have a class at! Just saying..

We've seen alot of landscape painting and have been discusing if Landscape is the paradigm to being Canadian.
Are these, canadian and a wild landscape, terms interchangable? In developing a sense of national pride, why is it always the landscape that we look to first? There are all these images like David Fowler's "A Woodland Wanderer" that represent Canada as this great undeveloped space. Fowler was even an immigrant to Canada, so his sense of nationhood would really be created by his experiences and not by a pre-conceived notion bred into us.... I think that this will be something to think more on in the coming classes.

John Hammond, Bay of Fundy Fishing Boats

We talked about many of the original "Canadian Artists".. such as William Notman and those that were in his studios. One that stood out for me was John Hammond and his semi-impressionistic, semi-tonalist style. One thing I find really cool about taking a Canadian Art class is that we get a chance to study the works of the artists who have taught and been taught at Mount Allison, such as Hammond who was the head of the fine arts departments many years back. His "On the Marsh" is even used as promotional material for the Owen's, but up until today I knew not a thing about him.

Joseph Légaré "Burning of the Parliament Building in Montreal" 1849

We spent a good amount of time in class discussing Joseph Légaré. His artwork is all very well done, though he copies the bases of it for the most part from an original print or sketch. What I found most interesting is that he was one of the earlier Canadian artists to paint in oils... When you think of the big time painters and really all European based artists of the time, the assumption is that they work in oils, not watercolors, and definitely not acrylics. At this early time in a new nation, however, taking a small water color kit for documenting landscapes was much more realistic that a big kit of oils. Légaré was a financially stable individual, and so this enabled him, apparently, to paint without the worry of saleability. Perhaps this is why he chose to branch away from watercolors, or maybe it was just because he was wealthy enough to afford them. Either way, it must have been a pretty exciting time - being one of the first "new world" Canadian artists, really setting the trail for where we now are.