It is instructive and sometimes amusing to read through a selection of artists’ quotes regarding the relationship of art to nature. There is certainly a significant portion of that population who feels no affinity with the natural world; Woody Allen’s comment “I am at two with nature” encapsulates some urbanites’ distaste for natural environments in favour of human social relationships and intellectual pursuits. Indeed, no European artist much before the 1600s would think to depict a natural scene without some indication of a human presence. (Other traditions, notably those of China, Japan, and many aboriginal cultures, differed in this respect.) It was only with the Romantic movement that landscape painting came into its own in the west, expressing in it the artist’s philosophical and emotional devotion to nature. Pierre Bonnard’s statement that “Art will never be able to exist without nature” and Paul Cezanne’s remark that “Art is a harmony parallel with nature” exemplify this devotion. As well, the scientific world was increasingly interested in natural processes for their own sake, rather than thinking of them as mere backdrops for the activities of humans.

The zenith of European landscape painting occurred between about 1850 and 1920. (The term “European” is meant to include those countries, like Canada, which by virtue of colonialism acquired similar value and social systems.) The advent of the modern movement in the early- to mid-1900s changed the subject matter and painting styles of many artists, but nature did not retreat from the artist’s psyche. In some cases, nature acquired a more elemental quality, one which led artists to experiment with physical fundamentals like colour, form and texture at the expense of representational work. For other artists, humanity’s often adversarial relationship with nature became the focus of their work. Still others gained inspiration from rural and wild places while continuing to address specifically human concerns. Finally, many artists found the political, ethical, philosophical or spiritual aspects of the nature/human matrix to be most worthy of exploration. Paul Gaugin’s advice, for instance, was “. . .don’t copy nature too closely. Art is an abstraction; as you dream amid nature, extrapolate art from it and concentrate on what you will create as a result.”

Though it is dangerous to generalize, it can be fairly said that those artists who deliberately make their homes in rural locations feel a greater affinity with nature than their urban counterparts. The artists of the Escarpment Studio Tour are no exception to this general rule, though some feel more directly inspired by their surroundings than others. All of them, however, feel they benefit by living in the hills of the Bighead Valley, not least because of the sense of peace they experience. Before becoming acquainted with some of the artists and their relationship with their environment, a little information about the Escarpment Studio Tour area might be helpful.

The Escarpment Studio Tour’s focal points are the three rural communities of Bognor, Massie and Walters Falls. These villages are situated in the rolling hills around the Bighead River, whose headwaters rise around Highway 10 between Chatsworth and Holland Centre, and which runs northeast through Massie and a deepening, widening valley to finally empty into Georgian Bay at Meaford. The hills in the area are a glacier-formed drumlin field which covers most of the region. This topography results in an area of dramatic beauty, a beauty which is intensified by the autumn colours quilting the hills

at Thanksgiving, when the Studio Tour is held. The visitor to the Studio Tour enjoys a leisurely drive along picturesque country roads, surrounded by farms, old homesteads, one-room schoolhouses, woods, creeks, scenic vistas and appealing rural villages, and is only a half-hour away from any one of five vibrant larger centres: Owen Sound, Markdale, Meaford, Thornbury/Clarksburg and Collingwood.

For some time after the area was settled, residents were too busy wresting subsistence from the wilderness to think much about art. But as the countryside was slowly gentled, it started to attract those who did not need to make a living from the land, and among those were a few artists. Two of the more well-known artists of recent decades were the wildlife painter George McLean and the illustrator/artist William (Garnet) Hazard, whose work in the form of an autumn backdrop mural still graces the stage in the Walters Falls Community Hall. Many artists from Owen Sound made day painting trips to the Bighead Valley area, notably the various members of the Johnson and Thomson families. The Hall is also home to the Walters Falls Group of Artists, some of whose members are also on the Escarpment tour.

So what does it mean to be an artist living and working in this environment? What draws an artist to such a place, and how does it inform his or her work? As a member of the Escarpment Studio Tour, I took the opportunity to ask my fellow artists those questions, and the responses that came back have some commonalities as well as some unique perspectives.

Barbara Hotson, an accomplished watercolourist, splits her time between Toronto and a farm just outside of Walters Falls which she and her family bought in 1987. She says, “I truly believe that spending time here over the past 21 years has infused my paintings with a sense of time and place.” Not only is this true of her personal history, but the history of the area. She has a keen sense of “the transient nature of the farm buildings which are rapidly disappearing” and has depicted many old barns which are no longer standing. Time, too, plays a part in her love of the changing of the seasons, and yet there is continuity here, too – her children, who spent time growing up here, now “love to share the farm with their friends.”

An awareness of the passage of time plays a part in Peter Wakely’s work, as well. A worker of wood, he reproduces old-style shore-bird and duck hunting decoys based on the work of early American carvers. His affection for birds realizes itself in wood carvings, and he has more than enough live action to work from – fourteen feeders flutter with a bustling avian population, and he looks out upon the birds and the woods they inhabit from his studio window. “I fed 35 turkeys last year,” he says wryly, “no doubt there were some hunters out there who caught themselves some good, corn-fed birds.” Peter moved up to the area on spec with his wife about thirty years ago, but his roots go back further – his dad built a cottage at Sunnyside near Meaford back in the mid-50s. Peter’s work also includes toys, reproduction antique chequerboards, and puzzles.

For several artists on the tour, the expansive views from their homes seem to open their imaginations, as well. Watercolourist Pie Atkinson and photographer and retired architect Ralph Bergman experience the pleasure of shifting seasons and weather over their surrounding hills through almost all the colours of the spectrum, from the yellows and pale greens of spring, the smoky greens, purples and blues of mid-summer, the fiery crimson and orange swatches of autumn and the elegant winter palette of black, grey, white, dark conifer green and robin’s egg blue. Pie’s sense of colour is sure and true, and her luminous paintings hang among those of her Kierstead family members in her lovely gallery space near Bognor. Ralph, too, takes his inspiration from the views around his Massie Road home, and the results are dramatic images which showcase his feeling for form, balance, structure and shape.

In my own case, one of my visual interests is texture, and I try to impart to my pastels the shifting textural feel of sky, rock, foliage and water. Living a rural life is often a physically taxing one, and I am reminded of the hard lives of the pioneers when I weed, haul rocks, plants, gravel and topsoil, plant trees, or help build our home. I try to honour those pioneers as well as respect the forces of nature when I paint old barns, fences and roads returning to the soil.

Susan Reeve’s artistic attachment to her rural environment is even closer – she works in felt, a cloth product derived directly from the Dorset Rambouillet sheep on her farm. The animals themselves inspire her work, and she “likes the idea of raising the material” that she works with. She fell in love with sheep and became inspired to work with wool while on a tour of Scotland, and the property she lives on now reminds her of that Scottish landscape. “My grandfather was born and raised in Shallow Lake,” she says, which is how she was familiar with Grey County even before she moved here in 1982. Susan has the wool washed and carded elsewhere, then processes it into felt via “hot water and pressure in the