Bill Mason, Wilderness Artist: From Heart to Hand

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University. She is the author of several books, including The
Mountain Is Moving: Japanese Women’s Lives, Kurlek and Margaret
Laurence: The Long Journey Home.

Ken Buck’s portrait of Canadian painter Bill Mason is beautifully
illustrated, well written, and meticulously documented. The unusual
format pulls together photographs, cartoons, paintings, and text to
create an impressive biography of an active life lived between 1929 and
1988.

In his film Waterwalker, Mason explains that he failed Grade 1 because
all he could do was draw canoes, but now he makes his living “as a
canoeist and an artist.” Born in Winnipeg in 1929, Mason honed his
wilderness skills at Manitoba Pioneer Camp, where, as a teenager, he
learned how to paddle a canoe and camp under a tarpaulin. In 1959, he
married Joyce Ferguson, who shared his love of the wilderness. For three
decades, they lived together in a cabin, then in a log house on Meech
Lake near Ottawa, while Mason was establishing himself with the National
Film Board as one of Canada’s premier filmmakers. This led to three
canoe films in the late 1970s and early 1980s: Song of the Paddle, Path
of the Paddle, and Waterwalker.

Mason’s films and books greatly helped Canadians appreciate the value
of their wilderness terrain. Now the work of his biographer enriches
that heritage with scores of photographs of Mason’s sketches and
paintings. Buck’s combining of colour photographs with Mason’s art
is a clever and inspired way to tell the story of a life spent largely
in the wilderness and devoted to its protection.