ODDS ‘N’ SODS — Eldorado the beautiful, Part 1

Franz Johnston, one of Canada’s Group of Seven painters, had a love of the Canadian north and spent the winter of 1938-39 painting at a remote mining camp above the Arctic Circle.

In late 1938, mining magnate Gilbert LaBine, the founder and president of Eldorado Gold Mines, had the opportunity to view some of Johnston’s northern paintings at an exhibition at Malloney’s Gallery in Toronto. In conversation with the artist, Labine discovered that Johnston had an almost obsessive interest in the Arctic hinterlands and that he wanted badly to go even farther north to paint. LaBine offered to fly Johnston to the Eldorado radium mine, a remote operation on Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories.

Johnson left for Edmonton a few days later. Since he was also asked to run an informal painting school for the mine’s employees, Johnston packed an extra supply of oil colors, pastels and paper. From Edmonton, a company airplane flew him 2,800 km to Great Bear Lake.

In his book The Mysterious North, Pierre Berton describes Great Bear Lake, the world’s most northerly body of fresh water, as “an enormous biological desert a quarter the size of England . . . so cold that no plankton lives in its deepest waters, and fish never leave the shoreline. The water never rises more than a few degrees above freezing. Steep walls of Precambrian [rock], tinged with blue and pink and grey-greens tower above it. The windy bays, the fjords biting deep into the cliffs, the countless channels, the desolate bare shores, the high precipices stained with the rainbow hues of the various metallic oxides red, black, pink, white and green. In the greenstones east of McTavish Bay occur numerous interrupted stringers of calcspar, containing chalcopyrite, and the steep rocky shores which here present themselves to the lake are often stained with cobalt bloom and copper green.”

That was exactly the atmosphere Johnston wanted, and he spent five months at Eldorado plying his craft.

He painted dozens of canvases and filled sketchbooks with pictures of the landscape, trappers, Indians and Inuit, as well as the mine and its workers.

He painted in temperatures as cold as minus 40C, the frigid conditions congealing his oil paints. The climate also forced him to cover his hands with thick woolen socks, though he soon became an adroit manipulator of his brushes, pastels and pencils.

Johnston was popular in and around the mining camp, liked by everyone for his sense of humor, his willingness to endure harsh conditions without complaint, and his outgoing and friendly personality. He liked the Inuit particularly, and they liked him in return. During a stopover at a sealing camp on the Coppermine River, the Inuit he encountered built him an igloo. Subsequently, he painted pictures of several of his hosts.

Johnston revelled in the Far North’s brilliance of light, the clarity and color generated by its rarefied atmospheric conditions, and the grandeur of its awe-inspiring landscape. He later told his son-in-law, artist Franklin Arbuckle, that his Eldorado experience had been the most significant of his life.

— The preceding, the first article in a 2-part series chronicling the artist’s experiences at the Eldorado mine in the Northwest Territories, is from a forthcoming biography of Franz Johnston. The author resides in Toronto.