All nations are artificial constructions in that it was a series of deliberate events that went into each of their creations. Great Britain was created after many a battle, including those to unify Mercia, Wessex and Northumbria, these battles not ceasing until the Battle of Culloden, in 1745, and the question of Scottish independence still looms for a post-Brexit Great Britain. The United States assumed its now “natural” shape after a period of self declared Manifest Destiny which enabled it to create a continental sized nation, its parts, whether the dividing line is drawn between North and South or coastal and interior, still not having found ways to overcome their differences. Nations may claim to be united by a language or an ethnicity or a point of view, but their nationhood never ceases to be a hard sell. Ask the Yugoslavians.
So it is no surprise to think that Canada is an artificial nation, pieced together from French and British colonies, ninety percent of its population living within a hundred miles of the American border, very culturally and economically dependant on the United States, and bound to have become part of the American Union if Benedict Arnold had had some better luck. There are many explanations for why Canada was able to forge a distinctive identity for itself, one that was not a part of the American identity. Some say it was because of the building of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, which tied the country together east to west and so avoided the pull across the border, though that is hard to say because Alberta cowboys have more in common with the Wild West than with their Toronto co-citizens. Some would say it is because of the distinctive institutions Canadians set up, such as a cabinet system responsible to Parliament, or a national health insurance plan, even though these institutions are shared by all or most Western societies. It is also difficult to explain a Canadian identity because the settlement pattern of immigrant ethnic groups from Western and then Eastern Europe (Scots and Irish and Brits and then Italians and Slavs and Jews) was the same in Canada and in the United States; it was just that more Europeans went to the United States, and Canadians still just can’t believe that they did so because the weather was better further south.
Whatever the reasons, the fact remains that the Canadians did deliberately forge a common identity and the evidence for that is available in Canadian culture. Here is an easy bit of cultural evidence for deciding that Canada has decided to be its own nation. There is a mall in Victoria, British Columbia that has a compass etched on the stones of its inner courtyard. On the edges of the compass are the names of and the distances to various cities of the world, their direction given by their position on the compass. It does the same thing as is done by those army bases in remote parts of the world where soldiers put up sign posts to point out the distances to various famous places, including home. Here is the list of the places named in the Victoria compass, proceeding clockwise from west to east to south and then west again: Kowloon (which is part of Hong Kong), London, Halifax, Johannesburg, Santiago, Brisbane, Tokyo, Mumbai, and then you are back at Kowloon.
Notice what cities are not on the list? There are no American cities, though you would think there might be room for Dallas or Los Angeles, even if it were difficult to fit in New York between Halifax and Johannesburg. The obvious reason is that this is Canada, after all, which is all too aware of the big country immediately to its south, and so wants to reach beyond that to a more global picture that is heavy on cities in the British Commonwealth. That is its cultural milieu, not the North American continent, though I bet more Canadians have been to the States than to Santiago, Chile. It is the image of independence, however, that needs to be protected. Culture does that. It proclaims what places it is right to hold in the mind as reference points. Culture is different from social structure, which is the way things interconnect with one another in fact. Canadian culture protects a separation from the United States, allows a leap frog over the United States, that does not occur in fact, even should Canadians desire that, and such separateness is not to be taken for granted. Perhaps most Canadians who see the Victoria Compass just see it as an honorary kind of thing, a tribute to an idea that they think they should hold that doesn’t really mean very much, but it does. Meghan and Harry are moving to Victoria, British Columbia, not to Los Angeles, so as to maintain their English identity.
National distinctiveness is also established in the arts, and that is certainly true in the case of Canadian art. Canadian art is distinctive in that it combines the theme of loneliness with a very distinctive color pattern, its color palette dispensing with glistening or bright or pastel shades in favor of shades that are not all dark but not at all luminescent. There are patches of pure and downscale colors, such as browns, dark greens and dark yellows, colors not meant to be ravishing but rather enjoyed for the color patterns they set up and for the colors themselves.
A. J. Casson’s “Anglican Church at Magnetawan”, from 1933, which is housed at the National Gallery of Art in Ottawa, is a good example of the Canadian style in art. The striking church is off-white and yellow and is set off against pillowy green trees in the background, they beyond a dark blue river. While below the church are patches of rock and lawn in sombre browns and greens. The sky at the top of the painting is also billowy and some clouds are gray and some are blue. So this is a study in color using shapes familiar in Canadian art. Also important is that there are no human figures in the picture, even though one could easily have been provided standing in front of the shed at the side of the church or on the staircase leading into the church. That is very different from the American practice of most of the time providing human figures within a landscape. Rather, the most prominent feature of the picture is a church window done in orange and yellow. The suggestion is either that no human is needed to fill out the picture or that the church stands alone in its setting, void of humans, however clear it is that it has the infrastructure to support a human presence. That gap does not make the church lonely because things cannot be lonely but it does make the picture look bare and so overwhelmed by its very unnatural rendering of the natural.
Casson was the youngest of the Canadian Group of Seven that dominated early Twentieth Century Canadian art. Lawren Harris was one of those that painted in this style. His “First Snow, North Shore of Lake Superior'', from 1923, shows hillsides in patches of snow separated by borders of brownish earth, the whole of it set behind some bare limbed trees and stylized trees. Again, no people, just swatches of color, whatever may be the subject matter. One of the better known paintings from this school is Tom Thomson’s “The Jack Pine”, from 1916. It looks at only one tree, that overlooking a body of water with hills in the background. The thing about this tree is how unappealing it is. Most branches don’t have leaves, only buds. The branches droop, bent down by moss like growth. The colors of the tree are an off putting red and a deep blackish green. There is one other tree of the same sort nearby but the tree that is the subject of the picture is not at all pretty and looks lonely, as if its ugliness made it feel even more isolated, which is to read feelings into things, though the picture does seem to license such speculation, as do other Canadian works of art.
Lest one think what I have called the Canadian take on art is restricted only to that one school of art, the Group of Seven, the fact is that the characteristic color palette and the painting of items in isolation, whether they are things or souls, is available throughout Canadian history. The color palette is already there in Plamondon’s “Still Life with Apples and Oranges”, from 1870, where the colors meld and contrast with one another in interesting ways without departing from a sombre and ochre hued take on things, and so a still life is very different from what it is with the Impressionists. Cezanne sees contrasts between dark and bright colors while Plamondon harmonizes his colors. Also, further back, from 1854, is Cornelius Krieghoff’s “The Passing Storm, Saint Ferreol”, where the landscape is made distinctive because of its subdued colors. The picture is a lively one in that water breaking over rocks adds liveliness to a picture of trees bending with the wind. The color palette, however, is brown and green, and there are no human or even animal figures, though the trees are not billowy, as would be the case with the Group of Seven.
That this is a basic Canadian perception is supported by going back to the beginning of Canadian art which is found in the fragments of Beaucourt’s “Mary, Help of Christ”, from 1793, which are also available at the Ottawa gallery, it sharing the sobre hues of the later painting tradition, applying that to peasants as well as to the subject of its title, a composition very different in many ways, including its muted color scheme, from the many other representations that have been made of Mary in all her glory. Moreover, the figures seem isolated from one another, and so it is not just objects that are subject to this treatment. Nations therefore each have a vision or a wisdom entwined in their identities, the Canadian one wrapped up in isolation and desolate colors, and so share a perception of life that is also to be found in literary Canadians such as Alice Munro, even if we are loath to think anything so deep as an identity can be expressed in painting. Ethnic groups and class groups and occupational groups also establish distinctive identities or cultures, each of them therefore deserving of the precious distinctiveness offered up to them by anthropologists, each of these cultures speaking in its own inimitable voice and so making it possible for all of us to attend to what each of them offer, even if only through the vehicle of art, which tells us how things look, that in itself an invaluable perspective.