“Earth Herself Singing”: Beverly Glenn-Copeland on Pic Island

This fall marks the  fortieth anniversary of the release of Keyboard Fantasies, an iconic, singular, and genre-bending album by the singer and composer Beverly Glenn-Copeland. The album was reissued in 2017 and enjoyed renewed acclaim, particularly among younger generations. To celebrate this milestone, the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto is exhibiting Light of the Heavens, c. 1986, a newly discovered song recorded in and around Keyboard Fantasies, as a part of their South Stairwell Sound Series. Glenn-Copeland has also announced a three-stop Canadian tour this winter, with shows in Ottawa, Toronto, and Vancouver.  

In recognition of his successes both past and present, the McMichael is pleased to share an excerpt from Glenn-Copeland’s contribution to the catalogue for our exhibition A Like Vision: The Group of Seven & Tom Thomson. As a longtime admirer of the work of Lawren S. Harris, Glenn-Copeland writes about the painter’s iconic Pic Island, drawing on their shared interests in enlightenment, spirituality, and the affective potential of style and form in landscape painting.  

For years, I journeyed to Lake Superior whenever possible, and eventually I bought a house in Sault Ste. Marie so I could visit its shoreline at any time of the year. Occasionally I ventured out in a canoe. Superior is a freshwater inland sea, deep, treacherous. Its mood can change suddenly. It is fickle. The sky is clear and sunny.  

Within seconds the sky is dark, menacing, the water choppy. You know you must get to land as quickly as possible. I made it a habit to stay within a few paddling minutes of the shore. Large ships lie on its bottom, sunk by towering storm waves.  

Harris’s Pic Island is powerful. It is gentle. It is complex, yet simple. It is light and dark at the same time. It is stark without being alarming. It is brooding. It conveys the peacefulness and danger that is Lake Superior.  

The painting is architectural. The shapes are strong, and the colour palette shows them to advantage. The brown inverted arc of the shoreline is repeated in the various blue hues of the inverted arcs in the sky. The island shape is echoed in the clouds, and in the shadows that the sun and clouds cast on the water. The overall energy moves upward but is still firmly rooted in the brown earth tones of the island and the rocks along the shoreline.  

I have read about Harris’s desire to embody his spiritual quest in his nature paintings. This quest seems especially evident in his canvases of the 1920s, culminating in the works he produced between 1924 and 1932. I experience them as a quest for light. Or for the Light. As a child, I was raised in the tradition of the Religious Society of Friends, a.k.a. the Quakers, where one sits in silence to make contact with the “Inner Light.” As a forty-seven-year practitioner of Buddhism, I have come to understand that the state of enlightenment is our fundamental nature. So I relate deeply to Harris’s quest. It has been my own. My musical compositions reflect this. 

Pic Island does not go to the heavenly heights that Harris achieved following his trip to the Canadian Rockies in 1924. It does, however, feel spirit-infused. Harris has captured Earth herself singing a song of love, of warning, of what changes and what is fundamentally unchanging about life on this planet and beyond.  

The child that I was and still am, roaming through the woods day after day, hears her singing, watches her dancing, listens for her whisperings in the wind. He stands in awe of the majestic power of her crashing waves. He weeps with joy, recognizing all these things in the paintings of Lawren Harris. For his painting of Pic Island, this child and this adult are both eternally grateful.