Landscapes of Canada

An artistic and scientific exploration

Canada is the second largest country in the world and its immense geography is both diverse and stunningly beautiful. Canada is blessed with thousands of truly inspirational land, sky and seascapes and these have served as the subject matter for countless artists over the past three centuries.

Some of their interpretations of our landscape have become iconic images of our land, and are recognized instantly, both at home and abroad, as Canadian.
These same landscapes have also undergone the scrutiny of geoscientists, and although the nature of the inquiry may have been more pragmatic, it has been no less profound. Both endeavors have sought to understand landscape and its relationship and value to Canadians.

The purpose of this website, jointly sponsored by the Canadian Federation of Earth Sciences and the Glenbow Museum, is to provide the public with insights into the geological processes that have shaped some of our most familiar, and archetypical, landscapes.

For the most part this familiarity may be more subconscious than experiential, more visceral than real, and comes courtesy of our exposure, however brief, to the works and styles of the artistic tradition in Canada over the last 300 years.

We have assembled a compelling collection of images that represent a wide variety of geographic locales, artistic styles, historic periods and of course, geological settings. The pictures by themselves, we hope you will agree, are worthy of attention and response.

But behind (beneath) each landscape there are other stories to be told. There are the very human stories of the artists and the geologists and their attempts to capture their observations of the Canadian landscape, albeit in different ways.

Our artists and geologists often are, or have been, truly large-than-life figures with fascinating life stories – Canadian legends worth knowing and celebrating.

In particular with our website, we hope the public will gain an appreciation of the immense, indeed at times heroic effort that has gone into the bedrock mapping of our nation, generally done at public expense for the common good.

Then there are the stories of the rocks themselves. There are almost unfathomable forces at work within the Earth’s crust. The ponderous but irresistible theatre of colliding and splitting plates, and the continuous global rearrangement of continent-sized jig-saw pieces, are important chapters in this story. But so are the much more dramatic (on the human scale) and much smaller phenomena of volcanoes, earthquakes and tsunami.

Whether the tempo is slow as with the build-ing of mountains and the evolution of the biosphere, or as instantaneous as a rockfall, the geological narrative is fascinating and complex, set to a temporal score that is billions of years old. We hope we have captured some of this drama for you.

One last hope is that we have illustrated the inextricable link between art and science, two worlds that have perhaps drifted apart since the days of the natural philosopher who was as well versed in the most recent scientific theory as the lat-est developments in poetry or painting.

These landscapes that help define us as Canadians inspired the artists who in turn inspire us and enrich our relationship with our natural surroundings. They are also the result of scientific phenomena that we are still discovering today and which affect our daily lives.

This intersection between science and art, where knowledge meets passion, discovery meets possibility, and beauty meets insight is a place we should all visit more often.