heritage Money trouble, which plagued him throughout his life, led Varley to British Columbia. Gainfully settled in Vancouver, he rented a home with his wife and four children at Jericho Beach, living an ostensibly idyllic life for the next seven years. Certainly his work from this time reveals a rich inner stillness that moves even further beyond his growing fondness for Chinese landscape technique. The immediacy of Jericho's shoreline, seascapes and mountain vistas, with the constant interplay of cloud and vapour overhead, dramatically reconfigured his ideas of painterly composition and use o f colour. With fellow artist and teacher Jock Macdonald and photographer John that had so influenced Van Gogh C a m p , a charcoal sketch Varley made of a camping trip in Lynn Valley. Courtesy of the Vancouver Art Gallery. during his own stay in Antwerp only 15 years previous. Varley also found himself drawn increasingly toward Buddhism--the result of his essentially pantheistic nature developed while walking the Yorkshire moors in boyhood as a relief from then-grim Sheffield town. Varley emigrated at the advice of artist friend. Arthur Lismer. It was Lismer who introduced his fellow Yorkshireman to artist acquaintances at Toronto's Arts and Letters Club. With Varley and Lismer among them, these painters would come to fame as the Group of Seven. Unlike other Group members, Varley was not drawn intuitively to landscapes. He had a talent for them, but his métier was portraiture. He was drawn to the figure, and through his own spiritual longing he was impelled as an artist toward a search for harmony--and ultimately, unity-- between individual and nature. Varley gained recognition as army artist in World War I. but on demobilization he returned to the relative blandness of commercial art, teaching and portraiture in Toronto. He maintained a loose association with the Group of Seven, but not as an Algoma wilderness type. Yet on a rare painting expedition with Lismer in 1920-21. Varle_\ pummeled out a landscape all of liis n u n making. Heaving with n e w s ^Leader Sponsored in pan by: power and symbolism, the lone, windlashed pine of Stormy Weather. Georgian Vanderpant. Varley began exploring the North Shore mountains and the Garibaldi backcountry glimpsed beyond Grouse and Black Tusk peaks. The outdoors became a primal love and Varley was frequently away from Bay is still critically regarded as a pioneering Canadian work--emblematic of all that is the Group of Seven's interpretive landscape vision. IOIANTHE or T H E P E E R A N DT H E FERE A Gilbert & Sullivan Production Artistic Director: Rick Harmon Choregrapher: Carol Seitz Music Director: David Stratkauskas Producer: Janel Young SURREY ARTS CENTRE THEATRE 88th Avenue & King George Hwy