I picked up an interesting art book yesterday, called AY’S CANADA. Note the similarity between the photo above and the pencil sketched church on the left side of the book cover below?
AY Jackson, one of the renowned Group of Seven artists who invented Canadian modern art about a century ago, liked to roam around rural Quebec with his paints and sketchbooks. In 1921 he drew a pencil sketch that included the same church shown above, in the village of Cacouna, Quebec – on the lower south shore of the St. Lawrence River. When I grabbed the book off the shelf at my local thrift shop I had no idea that AY had ever been to Cacouna. Nor did I have any clue as to where the cover illustration was sketched.
Not until I reached pages 42 and 43 did I discover the Cacouna sketch, and realized that it was the sketch on the book cover. The reason this is so fascinating to me is that my father’s father was born there, and his middle name was Cacouna! If my great grandfather and grandmother had some reason to name their son after the village where he was born, no one in the family knows. It certainly has lasted however, and gives him some distinction in the family history, even though he died around 1925, leaving his wife and six kids in poverty. Such was life a century ago.
I’ve never even been to Cacouna, but one of my boys went there once, just to check out where his great grandfather was born. I have been to Buttle Lake here on Vancouver Island however, numerous times in fact. Last week we were camping there again and I managed to do one measly watercolour despite having nothing else to do but eat, sleep, swim, and go for walks. I am not quite so dedicated to my art as AY was, but here is my sketch.
