Brush with greatness
What if A.Y. Jackson’s Nellie Lake was an actual place?
And what if they packed up their two kids, Nina and Michael, and actually went there? Would they be able to find the same view A.Y. Jackson rendered on canvas in 1933?
“We looked at a map of Killarney and saw a Nellie Lake, and we didn’t know if the two would line up to be the same place,” Sue says. “So we decided to go camping there. I remember climbing up a ridge, picking wild blueberries.
“We just kept climbing. There is a dead tree in the painting. The tree had fallen down. But we found it.”
To confirm that they had, they took several photographs and compared them with A.Y. Jackson’s masterpiece. And they matched.
“We thought, this is great fun,” Jim says.
The Waddingtons have been scouring the Northern Ontario bush in search of Group of Seven painting sites ever since.