Tom Thomson’s Islands, Canoe Lake, 1916: a rock as the head of a bear
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John M. Kennedy
Abstract
Tom Thomson is a doyen of Canadian art. Here, I argue one of his well-known pictures contains a hidden figure. In Thomson’s Islands, Canoe Lake, 1916, a blue-gray picture primitive richly affords a rock and a bear, a long-overlooked ambiguity, one that Thomson did not tell us he intended. Its picture primitives are contours and patches. They offer a limited set of scene primitives. A likelihood ratio of less than 1 in 100 supports the contention that the bear is a hidden figure.
Acknowledgments
For comments on a draft of this article, I would like to thank Selene Carboni, Marta Wnuczko (who also helped with the triangle figure) and Victor Kennedy. Artwork in this paper is in the public domain.
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editor’s Introduction
- Article
- Memorial speech delivered by Line Brandt, Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, France, 18 November, 2021
- Obituary
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- Articles
- The semiotic scoubidou – a short intellectual biography of Per Aage Brandt
- Pronouns, metonymy, and identity
- Who’s talking? Cognitive semiotics in the (new media) wild
- Tom Thomson’s Islands, Canoe Lake, 1916: a rock as the head of a bear
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editor’s Introduction
- Article
- Memorial speech delivered by Line Brandt, Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, France, 18 November, 2021
- Obituary
- From the blue waters of the Baltic and Kattegat to the Red Sands of Burgundy. Per Aage Brandt (April 26, 1944 – November 10, 2021)
- Articles
- The semiotic scoubidou – a short intellectual biography of Per Aage Brandt
- Pronouns, metonymy, and identity
- Who’s talking? Cognitive semiotics in the (new media) wild
- Tom Thomson’s Islands, Canoe Lake, 1916: a rock as the head of a bear
- The morphogenesis of religion and religious self-organization (with a focus on polytheism and Christianism)
- Germand Gladensvend and the monster
- The Band’s The Weight – a semio-cognitive narratological adventure
- Enunciation – some psychosemiotic reflections
- Rhythm in verse
