ODDS ‘N’ SODS — Eldorado the beautiful, Part 2

Between early February and late June of 1939, Canadian artist and Group of Seven member Franz Johnston completed more than 100 paintings and dozens of pencil and pastel sketches at the Eldorado mine, near Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories.

He also ventured farther north, to Coronation Gulf, an operation of Eldorado Gold Mines. Adverse weather conditions there forced him to spend a week at an outpost of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police on the Coppermine River.

During his 5-Month odyssey to the north, Johnston faithfully chronicled life in the Canadian Arctic and sub-Arctic, creating a near-priceless record of the last days of traditional life for the Indians and Inuit.

With respect to the paintings he created during that period, Johnston liked to tell the story of a city dweller who, standing before a painting with a big sky, exclaimed, “I have never seen a blue like that.”

“Yes, but wouldn’t you like to?” was Johnston’s supposed reply.

Another story concerned a mine owner who paused before a painting of a dog team and exclaimed, “It stinks! That team’s so real I can smell it!” The man paid $1,000 for that painting.

The colors in the paintings Johnston created while at Eldorado were so vivid and accurate that it was popularly believed that mineralogists could visually identify ore-bearing rocks in them.

Upon his return from Eldorado, Johnston himself remarked that “some of the colors are so vivid that even many of the northerners would not believe [them], but I am backed up by color films taken by Dr. Losier, the mine doctor.”

Johnston was lionized when he returned to Toronto. A story in the July 15 edition of The Toronto Telegram read: “Franz Johnston arrived in town yesterday . . . bringing with him 100 sketches, mostly finished, a lot of subject material, a very complete diary, silver fox skins for the feminine members of his family, a pelt of a nasty-Tempered Barrens grizzly, some photographs, and a lively bag of anecdotes of Eskimo life.”

The reporter noted that Johnston said he found southern Ontario very strange — “an unbelievably green, flat land” — after spending so long in such a beautiful but hostile climate. The artist was pleasantly surprised that the change was not difficult to become accustomed to “after five months tramping about in moccasins.”

In the same edition, another reporter noted that “the chubby artist” was no longer “the volatile Franz Johnston who had gone forth to conquer the Arctic in paint, but a placid, peaceful individual.”

Johnston explained: “That’s what the North does to you. It slows down your thinking, and it’s a land where you have plenty of time to think . . . I felt as if I were in another world.

You can’t understand what living in that peculiarly fascinating Northland does to you. Since April, I have hardly experienced darkness. I have not seen the stars. And the people and the crowds here, they seem so strange to me.” Thanking Gilbert LaBine, president and founder of Eldorado Gold Mines, for his part in financing the great adventure, Johnston noted that it cost $700 to fly in and out of Great Bear Lake. “I couldn’t have done it [without LaBine’s help],” he said.

The artist even appeared to have a greater appreciation for the rest of Canada. “After the Arctic,” he noted, “the prairies were the most glorious things I have ever seen. You get pretty tired of rock with sparse trees hanging on like grim death.”

Looking back on the experience 18 months later, Johnston told the Toronto Daily Star on Dec. 3, 1940, “I’ll never be sorry I caught the Eldorado scene when I did. It was a glorious adventure; but for everyday magic as varied as Santa Claus’ pack, give me always grand old Ontario.”

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