“As a child, I would visit the McMichael Gallery and admire the paintings of the Group of Seven, dreaming of travelling to the Arctic one day, but never imagining that this dream would come true. In 2002, many artists had an opportunity to travel to the High Arctic with Doris McCarthy, and many artists, including myself, were able to live this dream for the first time. This trip was the first footstep in my Arctic journey.”
Linda Mackey

“A painting tells a story. What story do you want to tell?” This is one of the first things Doris McCarthy taught Linda Mackey about art. The two were on a trip back in 2002 to paint Canada’s Arctic. An aspiring artist at the time, Mackey had no way of knowing those words from one of Canada’s foremost landscape painters would be the start of the story of her artwork and career. “I had no idea what the full story was going to be,” said Mackey, during the Polar Artists Group exhibition, “Alliston to the Arctic and Back” at the Gibson Centre in January. The Tottenham artist is founder and president of the Polar Artists Group, a not-for-profit international society of artists dedicated to promoting awareness of the polar regions. Since 2002 Mackey has visited the region three more times, has made countless presentations and conducted workshops on her Arctic travels. Her most recent trip was last year with the education team aboard the Students on Ice Arctic Expedition.

Mackey’s award-winning canvasses, many of which are in collections in North America and England, show the influence of Group of Seven artist Lawren Harris, who often painted the Arctic in pure form, as well as landscape modernists Emily Carr of B.C. and U.S. artist Georgia O’Keefe. Her trips to the Arctic, she says, are what inspired her to simplify light and form. One could argue that if it wasn’t for the Arctic, Mackey may not have become the prolific artist she is today. Formerly from the Bond Head area, she was a student of popular Tottenham artist Alice Forestell. She credits Forestell for teaching her about mixing colours, technique and composition. She says she also inspired her to teach children. After a brief period of fi ne art study at York University, Mackey found further inspiration as a studio assistant for Doris McCarthy. When she learned McCarthy, still spry in her 90s, was going to travel up to the Arctic to paint in 2002, Mackey started working longer hours and saving her pennies. “To be able to travel to the Arctic with a world-renowned artist…” Mackey recalls with a smile. There was no way she was going to miss out on the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Soon it became a team effort to get her there, with family and friends pitching in. Her parents even insisted on paying for a new roof for Mackey’s house when it started to fall apart around the same time - just so she wouldn’t have to forfeit her trip. Mackey’s goal was simple enough: to take in the beauty of the Arctic and paint it. Although at the time she believed this would be her one and only trip to the top of the world, she fell in the love with the area and wanted to spread the word to other artists. “I thought, this is an amazing secret that has to be shared,” Mackey recalls.
She wrote about the landscape that inspired her and her mentor in her journal: “One of the highlights of my 2002 trip to the High Arctic was taking a helicopter to the top of the icefields. The pilot landed on the edge of a cliff and we explored the landscape overlooking the icefields. The tips of the icebergs looked like fortresses and sculptures. When we returned to the ship, we took a Zodiac ride to the base of the icefields to see where the icebergs calve. At the end of this day, I remember Doris McCarthy saying, ‘This is the most exciting day in my 92 years.’”

Mackey returned to her place of inspiration in July 2004, co-leading an artists’ expedition with independent art curator Carol Heppenstall, to share her newfound passion for the Arctic. “I asked a tourism company for the most inspiring place for artists to go.” The answer was Pangnirtung in Baffin Island, a cultural mecca for artists and home of the renowned Pangnirtung Print Shop.

Arctic Quest beginnings

During the 2004 trip, one of the artists suggested they should form a group. “I actually didn’t want to be in a group,” says Mackey. But the more she and artist friend Kathy Haycock spoke about it, the more it made sense. Haycock’s father was Canadian geologist and artist Maurice Haycock who spent many years in the Arctic, especially in Pangnirtung (or “Pang” as it’s often referred) where he had a small house. He even travelled with Group of Seven artist A.Y. Jackson and Alliston’s own historic figure, Sir Frederick Banting, aboard the ship “Beothic” back in 1927, during a mapping and painting expedition of the Arctic coastline. As she sat with Kathy on a skid behind her father’s now dilapidated house in Pangnirtung (“the oceanview deck” as they like to call it) a discussion ensued. “Kathy realized her dad was an important part of the oral history of Pangnirtung, therefore we decided to get the north and the south artists together,” explains Mackey. And why not go through the Northwest Passage, like her father and so many artists before?

Like many events in Mackey’s Arctic story, the trip through the Northwest Passage fell into place like the next move in a game of chess. The year Mackey and Haycock decided to make the trip in 2006, just happened to be the 100th anniversary of the year the first ship travelled through the Passage. A group of 25 artists was formed, who shared a passion for the Arctic and were ready to commit to the $7,000-per-person price tag for making the trip. The journey would include stops at historic sites visited by the Group of Seven and other artists. Calling themselves Arctic Quest, their goal was to document in paint what the High Arctic meant to them. They lined up corporate and government sponsors including the Governor General’s office, and their motto became “Celebrating Canada’s Sovereignty and Recognizing our Circumpolar Partners.” Circumpolar partners included Canada, Norway, United States, Russia, Iceland, Denmark, Finland and Sweden.

While climate change and talk of global warming had already been going on for several years by then, Arctic Quest started bringing the issues to the forefront in their own way even before they set out on their Northwest Passage journey. A message in their first newsletter stated, “The Arctic belongs to the world, but as Arctic neighbours, we are custodians of this vast and fragile pole.” And at the kick-off for Arctic Quest in Toronto, guest speaker Roberta Bondar, Canada’s first female astronaut, shared a photo she took back in 1999 of the Ward Island Ice Shelf. She spoke of how in the last 100 years 90 per cent of the shelf has melted. She happened to take her photo when the ice shelf broke in half. “We didn’t know the extent (of global warming) until our Quest trip of 2006 through the Northwest Passage,” explains Mackey. “I told everyone – remember to bring your long johns and dress up really warm.”

She was shocked at what she saw upon arrival. While newcomers to the Arctic marveled at the beauty of the landscape, Mackey felt disheartened at the changes that had taken place since her previous two trips in 2002 and 2004. “We were wearing t-shirts on the ship,” she says. And instead of finding pathways to forge through the ice with satellites and icebreakers, the ice pilot’s new job had become to actually find the ice. Mackey says it’s even worse when you consider that in 1927 the ice pilot for the Beothic had to make a path by blowing up ice floes with dynamite.

This past summer she was the only artist on a trip to the Arctic for an Ice Climate Change Expedition. “I came back with a heavy heart this summer,” she says. “Looking down the fjord on the ship, I started to cry. I couldn’t believe the drastic changes. On the last day of the trip they finally found the ice.” Speaking with Inuit in the community, Mackey was told “snow that’s been there for hundreds of years has melted in five years.” Indeed, a painting of Mackey’s called “Glaciers Go Green” is of an area that in Inuktitut means “land that never melts.” (Baffin Island’s Auyuittuq National Park).

Climate of Hope

Last year, as the art liaison for International Polar Year, Mackey was invited to sit in on the Inuit-lead Circumpolar Round Table Conference at the United Nations headquarters in Geneva. She learned that Inuit leaders, concerned about preserving their heritage, wanted more educational opportunities for their youth, and more opportunities for them to communicate with the rest of the world. With those concerns in mind, the goal for the Polar Artists Group became finding the best way to work with Inuit artists to help meet those objectives.

“The north would like peer support with southern students and for their youth to be proud of their culture and hang on to it,” says Mackey, who plans to return to Pangnirtung this summer to continue her talks with the Inuit people, and to work on a new series of paintings she would like to call “Climate of Hope.”

She admits there is still so much more to learn, about global warming; the retreat of the polar bears; the Inuits’ shortened hunting season among others. Perhaps the most telling of all the signs the Arctic region is facing a crisis is told once again by paint. Just six years ago, Mackey didn’t have to pack any other colours than white and shades of blue for her treks, now her palette must allow for shades of green. “This year coming up, every painting that I do, they really need to tell the story,” she says.

***

Linda Mackey teaches art from her home in Tottenham and runs workshops at the Gibson Centre, where she has a working studio on the third floor.

*** 

She can be reached at 905-936-2301 or at www.lindamackey.com.

*** 

To see more work from Arctic Quest and the Polar Artists Group check www.nwp100.com.