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CANADIAN LANDSCAPES/ PAYSAGES CANADIENS paintings, which they planned to house permanently in a custom-built memorial in Ottawa. In 1919 these were displayed in a series of exhibitions in the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada, where they drew very large, and for the most part admiring, crowds; the income from them enabled most of the costs of what was a private undertaking to be recovered. But the very title of the Canadian War Records initiative indicates an important concern of those behind this later initiative, and to ensure as complete a record as possible, in good bureaucrat fashion they also collected the artists’ sketches and preliminary versions of the finished works.’ Thanks to this, we have a much clearer idea of the artists’ creative processes, and it comes as no surprise to learn that the final versions of the works often differ considerably from the original scenes and incidents. Details have been added or eliminated, perspectives shifted, two or more sketches combined, and so on. In other words, the artists were drawing on their own experience and creative instincts to produce works that reflected the styles that they had been working in, that they continued to develop or that they acquired by the sheer force of circumstances, styles that enabled them to convey the emotional force of what they were witnessing. In this, they went through a process of development and change that was similar to that of the First World War artists, for whom their time in the Canadian War Memorials Fund programme had also been a steep learning curve. As Jackson had explained, “The old type of factual painting had been superseded by good photography” (Jackson 48), forcing the artists to find new ways of capturing their subjects on canvas, and the new realities of World War II shaped the artists in a similar fashion. If the artists shared a similar need to take account of the omnipresence of the new military technology in their landscapes, when it came to the ways in which they did so — that is, the styles they employed in treating their subject matter — there was great variety. Of course, many still worked in an essentially realistic fashion, tempered by what was by then the Canadian landscape norm. But a number of artists in the whole body of their work, or at least in the most interesting pieces they created, showed very clearly the influence of new styles. For example, many of Lawrence P. Harris’s paintings are structured around a seemingly random juxtaposition of simplified forms — see, for example, his Battleground Near Ortona, with its pale dead horse in the foreground, billowing cloud of dark smoke at the back, a tank and some mechanical debris in between, and poking in from the left a few palm fronds. This, and many other paintings like it, clearly derive from an interest in Surrealism. Or Miller Brittain’s Night Target, Germany, a pattern of colours and shapes that does 5 This despite the passage in the Operational Instructions stating that “Cartoons and sketches” were only useful “for the re-creation of atmosphere, topography, and details of arms, vehicles, equipment, clothing, participants and terrain, of aircraft and ships” (“Dispatches”). + 182 +
