Latest news with #AlgonquinPark
CTV News
21-07-2025
- CTV News
OPP investigating suspicious death in Bonfield, asks residents to stay alert
An Ontario Provincial Police patch is seen in Ottawa, on Sunday, Sept. 29, 2024. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Spencer Colby Ontario Provincial Police are investigating a suspicious death in a town north of Algonquin Provincial Park. Police say officers were called to a residence on Saturday morning on Trunk Road in Bonfield, Ont., where they found one person dead. Officers say they haven't confirmed the cause of death. But they are urging the public to remain on alert and report any recent or ongoing suspicious activity to police. They say residents can expect to see an increased police presence as the investigation continues in the community east of North Bay. Police say further information will be released when it becomes available. This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 19, 2025.
CBC
17-07-2025
- Climate
- CBC
Severe thunderstorm warning for Deep River, parts of Algonquin Park
A severe thunderstorm is making its way east across Algonquin Park Thursday morning. Environment Canada has a severe thunderstorm warning for the eastern part of the park and western Renfrew County, such as Deep River. Wind gusts up to 90 kilometres an hour, rain and lightning are risks from this storm, it said. Around 9:20 a.m. the storm was near Lake Traverse, south of Bissett Creek, and moving east. There is a severe thunderstorm watch across western Quebec Thursday. Some local heat warnings remain, but they are expected to be in their final hours. Environment Canada recommends staying indoors and take cover in a basement where possible during threatening weather, and notes strong winds can damage trees or buildings and overturn vehicles. Environment Canada issues a severe thunderstorm watch when conditions are favourable for a storm to develop. A warning is issued when there is evidence that a thunderstorm is imminent or occurring that will produce damaging hail, wind or rain.
CBC
12-07-2025
- CBC
Behind the eyes and in the land: What Tom Thomson saw, and what he may have missed
** Originally published on December 14, 2018. By Sean Foley Many of us just can't resist a good pilgrimage, whether it's a religious one or not. The soul desires a deeper connection with whatever truly moves us. The late Canadian painter Tom Thomson has inspired many such pilgrimages. People often travel to where he's thought to be buried, in the family plot at Leith, Ont., or in a tiny cemetery beside Canoe Lake, in Algonquin Park, where he died under mysterious circumstances in 1917. What strikes a deeper chord in me, though, is discovering the places he painted: the sites that made him set down his things and open his painting box. In the fall of 2018, while my brother Adam and I were portaging between two small lakes in the northeastern reaches of Algonquin Park, I heard rushing water way back in the woods. I stopped to take a look, making my way through the undergrowth, holding on to tree trunks. What I found was almost certainly the subject of a canvas painted during his last winter, in his shack in Toronto: Woodland Waterfall. It was exhilarating to discover something that Thomson himself laid eyes on and was moved to paint. Left: Tom Thomson | Woodland Waterfall, 1916-1917 | oil on canvas | 121.9 x 132.5 cm | Purchased 1977 with Funds Donated by The W. Garfield Weston Foundation. Right: CBC's Sean Foley came across this waterfall in Algonquin Park, Ont., that may have been the inspiration for Woodland Waterfall. Others have spent lots of time and effort tracking these sites down and documenting them, including Jim and Sue Waddington and the McElroys of Point Alexander. I'm just another pilgrim with a yearning to walk in Thomson's footsteps. The essence of the place There were occasions of even deeper connection: I wasn't just "matching" sites and paintings. I was seeing and feeling those dynamics of weather, terrain, and sheer serendipity that must have struck Thomson. These were the experiences of just being alive in that place. It occurs to me all the time, standing in front of a little sketch, or even a finished painting by Tom Thomson. You feel you're behind the eyes; so there is that personal identification with him, too. Here's what I mean. One evening, Adam and I camped on a peninsula jutting out into a small lake called Opalescent. We felt — and heard — the west wind, moving trees for miles around in a great chorus of branches and leaves and needles rustling against one another. A light rain blew in, and moved on, and a rainbow appeared. Then, as the sun went down, the cloud patterns and the dappled water spoke for hours in a familiar voice. We weren't "in" a specific Thomson work; I have no idea what paintings he might have done on this lake, but we were immersed in the same phenomena that moved him. Reading the landscape On the first day of our Algonquin pilgrimage, Adam and I went the wrong way. We couldn't see the inlet where the portage was, and we were paddling into a headwind, taunted by whitecaps. Eventually we got across the lake into a narrows, and things calmed down enough for us to realize we had to turn around. Only later did I see a note on the map that we had paddled past some petroglyphs — twice. Petroglyphs — drawings on rock made by the Anishinaabe, the Indigenous people of this land — point us to an even more profound way of seeing and experiencing, one quite apart from the western school of landscape art of Thomson and the Group of Seven. Left: Tom Thomson | Sumac in Autumn (alternative title: Red Sumac), 1916 | oil on composite wood-pulp board | 21.6 x 26.8 cm | Collection of the Tom Thomson Art Gallery. Right: A bright red shock of maple leaves seen in Algonquin Park, Ont. Gerald McMaster is a professor of Indigenous visual culture and curatorial practice at the Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto. He was part of the team that reinstalled the Canadian collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2008. He juxtaposed Thomson's West Wind with two quillwork bags made by Anishinaabe artists in the late 18th century. These bags depicted the Thunderbird and the Mishipeshu, forces that he saw at work in Thomson's painting. I asked McMaster what he might hang with The Pointers, one of my favourite Thomson canvases, painted during the winter of 1916-1917. He thought immediately of the great Anishinaabe painter Norval Morrisseau. "He studied his elders. He studied perhaps some of the pictographs that you'd see on the rock surfaces in Northern Ontario, Midewiwin scrolls that are often studied by religious leaders ... and created his own peculiar style ... quite colourful like Thomson," he said. "But he's not creating a landscape like a landscape painter. [He's] rather reading the landscape, what's in the landscape: the spirits, the animals, the fish below and the interrelation of everything." In 1979, Morrisseau was invited by the McMichael Canadian Collection to take up residence in Thomson's shack, on the gallery's grounds in Kleinburg, Ontario. Morrisseau created some stunning paintings during that time; one of the most famous ones is called Shaman and Disciples. It communicates a powerful message of vision and wisdom almost immediately. McMaster points to a deep and illuminating expression of land and spirituality being expressed by a whole new generation of Indigenous artists, like Christi Belcourt, Lisa Myers and Michael Belmore. "It goes back to that Indigenous knowledge of the land," said McMaster. "They're studying the land so remarkably and intellectually and in an articulate way … I could see that kind of artist juxtaposed together with Thomson ... because again it's a Northern Ontario landscape. "We're just looking at it differently. Artists are looking at the same thing in a different way." Download the IDEAS podcast to listen to this series. Guests in this episode:
CBC
12-07-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Demystifying the mysterious death of great Canadian painter, Tom Thomson
* Originally published on November 9, 2018. Tom Thomson's paintings are among the most famous and beloved artworks in Canada. Thomson himself is one of the most mythologized Canadians of his time — and ours. Now, 100 years after his mysterious death on Canoe Lake in Algonquin Park, when he was at the peak of his powers, IDEAS producer Sean Foley asks one central question: does the mortal and material fascination with Tom Thomson leave us with something enduring — something to carry us through the next century, and beyond? Finding beauty in the void Tom Thomson didn't — couldn't — leave behind the same detailed traces that we do now. He may not have wanted to. He didn't seem like an 'Instagram your supper' kind of guy. But then, that's just projection on my part. When he died suddenly in 1917, he left a few letters, a relatively small number of major paintings, and — the real treasure — hundreds of oil sketches done on boards in one corner or another of Algonquin Park. As for us, we're captured on CCTV cameras everywhere we go. We want to show the whole world where we are and what our ideal selves look like. These days, it's not so hard to distract ourselves from the unknowable. So when we confront the unknowable, how do we react? In this two-part series, I explore what we think we know about Tom Thomson, what distracts us from knowing, and what connects us to the deeper gifts of his life and work. We'll look at the historical record, and how it's been spun out over the past century. We'll also explore the poetry of Robert Kroetsch, Joyce Wieland's film The Far Shore, and, most powerfully, the paintings Tom left us, many of which he simply gave away to acquaintances, friends, and family. Gregory Klages is a historian and author of The Many Deaths of Tom Thomson: Separating Fact from Fiction. He has traced the stories about Thomson's life and death back to as many primary sources as he could find. And it's fascinating to see how little factual evidence underpins many of the most popular Thomson tales. "All sorts of aspects of his life and death and artwork became good hooks or interesting things for us to talk about and speculate on. And sometimes to make an interesting story, to make a provocative story — to insert something a little bit salacious or juicy or to to riff on an idea that made people go 'ooh I never thought of it that way. That's interesting, that's intriguing.' And there's nothing to contradict the idea. So it 'could' be true." Just why, and how, do we speculate? Well, we seem to do it reflexively. And we do it in the form of biography and history just as often as we do in fiction and mythology — especially with an elusive character like Tom Thomson. Sherrill Grace, a professor Emerita at the University of British Columbia, explores biographies and fictions about Tom Thomson in her book Inventing Tom Thomson. She's also an accomplished biographer herself. She says we can't — and perhaps shouldn't — think we can capture the 'real person' we're writing about. The minute we start writing about somebody, or performing something about somebody else's life, we are already creating a fiction story about that person which matters to us; and if the person is dead, that person doesn't give a damn, do they? - Sherrill Grace But of course we do. Which is probably why we can't stop reading, writing, or even tweeting our own life stories, and those with whom we are fascinated. Though it has its pitfalls, the mythologizing and the storytelling and the intrigue is part of why I did this series. I had to hear about Tom Thomson to fall in love with his paintings. British art historian Ian Dejardin first heard about Tom Thomson in the library at the Royal Academy in London. Now he's running the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ontario — which has nearly 100 Thomson paintings, as well as the actual shack he worked in. For Dejardin, it's Thomson's lightning-fast mastery of paint during the last few years of his life that fascinates: "He suddenly found his language, and he found it in colour and immediacy and also that whole business of being an explorer out there in the 'wilderness' so-called with your canoe. [It] meant that you could only paint on a small scale. You had to paint on a small board that you could then carry in a box. And that fed into his genius as well. Those conversations, that liberation of colour, and the technique that was forced on him by the business of having to carry your stuff into the wilderness in a canoe... resulted in this perfect storm: an absolutely perfect marriage of genius, eyesight, and technique." And, ultimately, that's what fills the void: beauty, energy, and joy, all rendered in paint. Gregory Klages is a historian and the author of The Many Deaths of Tom Thomson: Separating Fact from Fiction (Dundurn Press, 2016). Sherrill Grace is Professor Emerita at the University of British Columbia and the author of Inventing Tom Thomson (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2004). Ian Dejardin is an art historian and the former executive director of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection.
National Post
30-06-2025
- National Post
Canadian travellers exploring 'their own backyard' this summer, Airbnb says
There's no place like our home and native land. Article content That seems to be what Canadian Airbnb users are thinking as schools close and summer vacation officially kicks off with domestic travel bookings expected to continue being a hot ticket. Article content Such bookings jumped 40% last year compared to 2019 for a total of more than 9 million domestic guest arrivals, Airbnb said, and that trend is expected to continue this summer as the home-sharing company recently offered a list of the 10 trendiest locations to visit in Canada. Article content Article content Article content Stretching from southern Alberta to just about as far east as travellers can go (St. John's), 'domestic travel continues to thrive with more Canadians seeking getaways close to home. Article content 'From national parks and quiet seaside towns to vibrant small cities, this summer's top trending domestic destinations stretch across the country,' the company said, basing its results on searches made in 2024 for travel this summer. Article content 'Whether it's a rustic cabin, a coastal cottage or a trendy tiny home, Canadians are finding meaningful ways to explore their own backyard.' Article content Article content Leading the way were two Ontario destinations that are likely well-known to travellers from the GTA: The Blue Mountain area, near Collingwood, and the hiking and camping hot spot of Algonquin Park, which is still recovering from a damaging storm earlier this month. Article content Quebec was home to three of the 10 locations, including the secluded Magdalen Islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, known for their 'wind-swept beaches, dramatic cliffs and Acadian roots;' La Haute-Gaspesie, another hiking hot spot along the St. Lawrence River; and the 'rustic' Matawinie region, north of Montreal that includes Mont-Tremblant National Park. Article content Article content Article content St. John's and Hubbards, N.S., a coastal community west of Halifax 'offering seafood shacks, beaches and laid-back charm,' were among the East Coast options, while Winnipeg's 'thriving arts scene,' the 'lakeside adventures' in nearby Falcon Lake, Man., and the Rocky Mountain 'gem' of Waterton Park, Alta., were drawing travellers to the Prairies. Article content
