Jack Pine — Wilderness sublime or the erasure of the aboriginal presence from the landscape

Inaugurated by the Group of Seven, modern art in Canada is intimately and inseparably linked, unlike other modernist visual art traditions, with landscape painting and a particular, if not special, view of landscape as wilderness. The visual image might be best and simply characterized in terms of a landscape empty of human and animal presence and its apparent replacement by an organizing non-human figure, paradigmatically a single, foregrounded Northern tree, typically a Jack Pine, iconized as canonic in such celebrated paintings as Tom Thomson’s The Jack Pine and West Wind and Frederick Varley’s Stormy Weather, Georgian Bay. This study attempts to establish a theoretical problematics of the Laurentian wilderness ethos through an interpretation of the significance of that denial of human presence and its replacement by the shifting anthropomorphic form of the solitary tree. The essay demonstrates how Jack Pine came to invent the “wilderness park” as a monumental site that represented a kind of human occupancy as if it were utterly vacant of human beings. This required the erasure of aboriginal presence from wilderness as a system of representation.