COLUMN: Local, northern landscapes inspired Orillia-born artist

COLUMN: Local, northern landscapes inspired Orillia-born artist

Vaseline

Elizabeth Wyn Wood’s honeymoon sparked a ‘lifelong love affair with the landscape of Northern Ontario as an inspiration for her artistic practice’

Submitted by the staff of the Orillia Museum of Art & History (OMAH)

Elizabeth Winnifred (Wyn) Wood was born on Cedar Island in Orillia, the second youngest of five children.

Her parents, Edward Alfred Wood and Sarah Elizabeth Weafer, owned a textile and fabric store at 21 Mississaga St. E., now home to Lahay’s Hobby & Crafts.

As a child, Elizabeth was often sick with rheumatic fever and confined to bed. To stave off boredom, Wood’s mother gave her homemade clay modeling compound made from cracker crumbs and books to read about classical sculpture, which reportedly fueled her desire to become an artist.

Wood studied at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto (now Ontario College of Art and Design University) from 1921 to 1926.

There she studied drawing, painting and composition with Arthur Lismer, commercial design and calligraphy with JEH MacDonald (both members of the Group of Seven), and modeling with Emanuel Hahn, a renowned sculptor whom she would marry after graduating.

During their honeymoon, Hahn took Wood to Hahn Island, his cottage on the Pickerel River in the Parry Sound District. A visit to Hahn Island began Wood’s lifelong love affair with the Northern Ontario landscape as a source of inspiration for her artistic practice.

Wood returned to the Georgian Bay area summer after summer, making sketches of the rocks and trees in this landscape. She made sketches for her sculptures and later, during the depression of the 1930s, as works of art that she could produce and exhibit more easily than sculptures.

Whether she captured the landscape through drawings or sculpted her impressions of the landscape from tin or marble, Wood always developed her own modernist style.

With her landscape drawings like this one, she pushed the boundaries of contemporary sculpture and cemented her position as one of Canada’s leading artists, both in her time and today.

Next week we will present another object from the OMAH collection that illustrates our local history.