Canada Nurtures Creativity In A Beautiful Setting

Photo by Rob Stimpson

“Gray is not a color. It’s what you do to a color.”

This is one of the many phrases art instructor Greg Hindle will say during my week at the Lodge at Pine Cove’s landscape painting class, one of several art learning vacations affiliated with Ontario’s Arts in the Wild consortium, an alliance of two dozen arts and tour-ism organizations dedicated to helping people experience creativity through engaging wilderness programs.

Hindle wanders among us students, who are perched on rocks, downed tree limbs or fold-up chairs set in a forest clearing. He peers over our shoulders, giving us advice and encouragement as we attempt to re-create in oils, acry-lics or watercolors the images of On-tario’s wilderness that are before us: age-old pines stretching off the sides of jagged cliffs, a family of ducks out for a swim, a lone bird soaring through the air.

“Look for the chaos,” Hindle notes. There are nine of us. Some are experienced and even have paintings hanging in the lodge. Others, such as me and another writer, are neophytes who think in terms of words, not strokes. “Think visually, not verbally,” he ad-monishes us. “You’d never finish paint-ing if you tried to make it always literal.”

Instead of just sketching the scene before me, I take a couple structures from my left and mix them with a few in front of me. Hindle informs me this is called a composite. Discovering that there’s actually a term for what I’m doing, I feel a sense of accomplishment already. But then when I apply paint to my drawing and my canvas becomes a mishmash of colors, all pride disintegrates. I suggest I need a paint-by-number. Hindle dispenses another aphorism: “Nothing worse for creativity than negativity.”

Through the week, with each new blank canvas, I try desperately to resem-ble Monet with my oils. One day, as we are stationed near some rapids, the wind whips my tripod and palette against me, giving the term “a painted-on face” a new meaning. One of Hindle’s dau-ghters walks by and laughs at my blue lips. “Did you eat paint?” she asks.

Hindle’s foray into the field began in high school when a teacher saw po-tential in him. “She saw something in my abilities as an artist,” he explains. He became passionate about both mu-sic (he plays the guitar) and painting. In college he spent a year studying art in Florence, Italy.

During the academic year, Hindle teaches at Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto. Getting away from the city and coming to this little camp-like resort on the French River provides Hindle with an opportunity to teach landscape painting amid nature far from civilization (it’s several hours’ drive north of Toronto). “As an artist, I think what really appeals to me about this place is it’s primal,” he notes. “It’s still very untrampled.”

Program participants stay in rustic cottages—no televisions or telephones, though there are hot showers and in-room coffee makers—and set off each day in canoes with packed lunches to stake out a new location along the river, making camp for the day to paint, lay out or jump in the river for a swim break, if so desiring. Hindle mostly works one-on-one with students, though he does provide some group instruction, such as the morning he shows us work by Canada’s famous Group of Seven. These artist pioneers traveled across Canada in the early 1900s to paint the country’s varied landscape.

In the evenings, the lodge serves cuisine, and activities range from group singing, with Hindle accompanying on the guitar, to quiet diversions such as reading in the library or putting together a puzzle. On the final day there’s a group critique of everyone’s work.

By week’s end I have three paintings to take home with me. Some of the more experienced artists have half a dozen or more. I also have started thinking like a painter, no longer able to just admire the glorious sunrise for itself alone, instead analyzing its colors and wondering, “How would I paint that?”

And that is just what instructor Hindle has hoped for.

Reprinted by permission. ©2005 Car and Travel magazine

Photos by Rob Stimpson