by Tom Thomson
MAIN PAGE ⎔ SECTION PAGE ⎔ SITE MAP ⎔ GLOSSARY
ART OF THE LOBBY
COLORADO POSTERS ⎔ GERMAN POLITICAL CARTOONS ⎔ LOG HUT ON THE ST. MAURICE ⎔ MT. HOOD POSTCARDS ⎔ MYSTERIES ⎔ NORTHERN RIVER ⎔ PAYSAGE D’HIVER ⎔ SOLEMN LAND ⎔ STORMY WEATHER ⎔ TOWER OF BABEL
APPEARANCE
Seen left of reception, behind the receptionist’s shoulder, greeting Jack, before sending him to Ullman.
Later behind Wendy as she walks between radio rooms, and behind Jack on his way to kill the radio.
ARTISTIC SIGNIFICANCE
David Milne, the Canadian painter, said of it “Just plain impossible, but he has done it, it stirs you. Any painter who has ever worked on this overlying pattern motive will realize at once that this is tackling a complication beyond reason. A great point in Thomson’s favour this, and his lack of perfection. I am wary of craftsmanship. It is nothing in itself, neither emotion nor creation. […] I rather think it would have been wiser to have taken your ten most prominent Canadians and sunk them in Canoe Lake—and saved Tom Thomson.”
James MacCallum, and “important patron” of the Group of Seven, said of it, “Drawing was to [Thomson] the expression of form, and form might be expressed by any method, so long as the form is true. One would have expected that with his intimate knowledge of trees he would have loved to paint all their traceries. In the Northern River alone did he lavish detail on his trees and here only because it helped the pattern. In one in whom the sense of design, of decoration was so developed that is the more striking, for in his sketches and in his larger pictures he always treated trees as masses. In his painting of them he gives form structure and colour by dragging paint in bold strokes over an underlying tone. Like many other painters he felt the limitations of paint, the impossibility of expressing on a flat surface the solidity and thickness of a tree, and in some canvasses almost modelled them in paint, while in others he got the same effect by expressing them by deep grooves in the paint.”
I especially like Milne’s impressed exasperation over what would motivate Thomson to try something so impossible and layered. I think that speaks well to Kubrick’s mentality in making The Shining. You don’t necessarily do it to impress audiences, but to see if you can, to see if you can pull it off.
SYMBOLIC SIGNIFICANCE
It features a tree that does this S-shape through most of the painting, dividing the action into left-and-right almost perfectly. In fact, it almost becomes a kind of yin-yang, curving in the sky, then hugging the river’s reflection of the sky at its base. It’s not a perfect division of any part of the image, but maybe that’s the point in including it: the river is not the sky–simply a mirror for its light.
People have gone looking for this river, and couldn’t find anything like it. It’s thought to be an amalgam of the sorts of things you’d see in northern Ontario. Similarly, the Overlook is based on several real places, and is not one.
There’s also the Tom-son-of-Tom quality to Thomson’s name, which I think fits nicely with the concept of twins and repetition, but also to the similar element in the Bruegel.
I like how Northern River is on the north side of the lobby. That seems to match well with my Four Directions thoughts, and my Treachery of Images thoughts.
Lastly, during my hundreds of hours spent pouring through art databases trying to ID everything, the artist I’ve most confused for pieces in the film is Thomson. So I’ve wondered if Kubrick picked pieces by other artists that looked like Thomson works to suggest the incredible breadth and dynamism of Thomson’s compositional style and the major stylistic watershed he represents in his field. Almost like his ghost was overseeing an entire art movement.
Next art piece: Stormy Weather, Georgian Bay
MAIN PAGE ⎔ SECTION PAGE ⎔ SITE MAP ⎔ GLOSSARY
OTHER MAIN PAGES FOR SHINING ANALYSIS
THE MIRRORFORM ⎔ THE BEATLES ⎔ THE RUM AND THE RED
BACKGROUND ART ⎔ OVERLOOK PHOTOGRAPHS ⎔ GOLDEN SPIRALS
PHI GRIDS ⎔ PATTERNS ⎔ VIOLENCE AND INDIGENA ⎔ ABSURDITIES
THE STORY ROOM ⎔ ANIMAL SYMBOLS ⎔ THE ANNOTATED SHINING
EYE SCREAM 