Untitled (Landscape, La Cloche, Ontario)

La Cloche, a mining town south of Sudbury, is located close to Killarney Provincial Park, home to Ontario’s highest peaks. Captivated by the beauty of the area, with the luminous white of its quartz rock mountains and green needles of its Jack Pines remaining unchanging throughout the seasons, the members of the Group of Seven exerted pressure to have it turned into a provincial park. Carmichael provides us with two landscapes of azure blue lakes and silver-capped, perpetually snow-covered mountains. The artist made preparatory drawings in graphite or charcoal for both his watercolours and oil paintings, and the traces of pencil outlining the mountains can be made out in these works. His handling of the sky shows that he used the dry white surface of the paper to create the play of light.