Saturday, January 3, 2009

Fun with Rebecca and Alanna



Rebecca and Alanna visited with us from the 28th until New Year's Day. We all had a great time. Highlights included snow tubing in Barrie. The best run was when the four of us held onto to each others tubes and we went down as a foursome! See video:
We saw two movies , both excellent: Will Smith in "Seven Pounds" and Ron Howard's "Frost/Nixon". We highly recommend both. We explored Chinatown a bit and had a great chinese dinner.




We also went to the AGO (Art Gallery of Ontario) which was under reparations for some time and just reopened recently. It is a beautiful gallery. We only saw two of the five floors, so Sam andI plan to return to explore the rest of it at some point. We went on a guided tour where we learned a little bit about Canadian art, in particular the "Group of Seven".




The Group of Seven was a group of Canadian landscape painters in the 1920s, originally consisting of Franklin Carmichael, Lawren Harris, A. Y. Jackson, Frank Johnston, Arthur Lismer, J. E. H. MacDonald, and Frederick Varley. Tom Thomson (who died in 1917) and Emily Carr were also closely associated with the Group of Seven, though neither were ever official members. The Group of Seven is most famous for its paintings of the Canadian landscape. It was succeeded by the Canadian Group of Painters in the 1930s.
The Group of Seven was strongly influenced by European Impressionism of the late nineteenth century in the Montmartre district of Paris.









2 comments:

  1. Daniel and I went there when it was still under construction, I think. They had a temporary exhibit where they had asked people (students, patrons, etc) to draw a self portrait on an index card, and the portraits covered the walls from ceiling to floor. They had a station with mirrors and colored pencils where you could do your own portrait to add to the exhibit. We thought this was terrific - but my guess is that it is no longer there now that the construction is complete.

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  2. We saw "Seven Pounds" also. I had a little trouble with the take-home message.

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