Late August frost tinges the Yukon air with desperation, especially after a rainy summer. Winter will be long. Any fragment left of summer becomes poignantly beautiful.
Labour Day long weekend at the Tombstones Territorial Park is famous for its fall colours. Sites fill fast. This year, the colours peaked 10 days early. However, the sun shone all weekend, as if to make up for the hills coloured russet rather than red. I spoke with three artists in the park.
John Boivin fished his half-cooked foil wrapped potatoes from last night’s campfire. He cut them up for hashbrowns. His wife, Julie Robinson, whisked instant potato pancakes because their eggs had frozen solid in their van the night before. They were expecting company for breakfast.
“That’s one reason we like to come up here – to socialize and hang out with other artists. We never get a chance to do that back home,” mused John Boivin, as he added tomatoes and salsa to his frying pan.
Boivin stresses that the pair are “still newbies” to coming up to the Tombstones. For years they had heard about it, but made the trip for the first time last fall. “It’s more beautiful than people describe,” says Robinson.
Without the distractions of TV or the corner store, Boivin roughs in a painting a day. For him, plein air painting is about seizing an opportunity rather than planning, responding spontaneously to his environment. He finishes his paintings in the studio.
Boivin finds the Tombstones landscape “more sinuous” than that around Whitehorse. “It’s hard to get exactly right – it still stumps me quite a bit.”
He enjoys that “you can be on top of a mountain one day, and painting it from below the next. That does a lot to inform the painting when you’re tackling it later.”
Boivin and Robinson climbed Goldensides, the peak across from the campground. On their Way down they waved at people dressed in outdoorsy gear. It turned out to be photographer Marten Berkman.
Berkman taught a photography course in the Tombstones that weekend called “Reflecting the Numinous North.” The workshop drew five participants, one from as far away as Edmonton.
He planned the course with Jill Pangman of Sila Sojourns. The course included guided hiking and a camp cook so that participants could immerse themselves in their creative process.
The local photographer taught them the technical side of taking digital photographs, but “ultimately the course was about how we see the land, how we’re present in it and how to use photography to reflect and share that experience.”
Berkman and Pangman chose the Labour Day weekend for the course because people often have a bit of extra time. Also, the colours in the Tombstones are usually splendid.
No one in the course was disappointed by the past-prime colours. They found what they needed in the incredibly sunny weather.
Janet Webster, from Lake Laberge, describes herself as a “happy camper” beside the fire the last night. She appreciated the way Berkman respectfully facilitates the students’ own artistic process. This weekend she gained “a vast appreciation of what’s on our doorstep as Yukoners.”
Sue Langevin, another workshop participant, had never stopped to hike along the Dempster. She would have hesitated to camp on her own, as she has a cast on her arm. The guided experience gave her the support and confidence she needed. “I wouldn’t hesitate to do it again.”
Jill Pangman of Sila Sojourns was “astounded by the weather”. She had considered cancelling when the rain seemed like it would never let up. Her company aims to bring a creative and spiritual element to being out on the land, and Berkman’s workshop was a perfect fit.
Clay portraitist Harreson Tanner and his wife Pat Fortier have made their annual pilgrimage to the Tombstones every Labour Day weekend for the past four years. They brought their friend Lucille Therien along for the last three years, as well as Tanner’s niece, Mary Ellen Guttridge.
Fortier is Métis. She feels that her ancestors had a special connection to the land and, as a result, “a little part of my soul comes alive up here.”
Tanner’s commissioned bronze portraits of Annie and Joe Henry, longtime residents of the region, look out from a granite boulder in Black City, a traditional First Nations gathering site about 40 kilometres north of the campground.
Tanner finds that inspiration comes to him from the ridges and folds of the Tombstones landscape. They remind him of the shapes in the old people’s faces he love to sculpt.
He also takes as many photos as possible and sends them away to his artist friends who can’t be in the park. His sister, Carolyn Ann Guttridge (Mary Ellen’s Mom), paints abstracts in acrylic, sometimes using Tanner’s photos as inspiration.
He’s considering bringing clay up next year to sculpt on site.
Tanner and Fortier tucked into hashbrowns, potato pancakes and steak at Boivin and Robinson’s site, by the source of the North Klondike River, in the sunlight, among the yellow leaves.
You can expect to find Boivin’s paintings from the Tombstones at the Yukon Artists @ Work Cooperative Gallery and the Yukon Gallery by October.
