“When you look at Autumn’s Garland by Tom Thomson, you see the sweeping gestures of the leaves and the layering effect of the landscape; its bright, vibrant, and warm colours. I tried to create those same feelings of imagination, perspective, and construction in a paper cutting executed with an x-acto blade. My work is tinted with the wavering emotions of youth and adolescence: optimism and pessimism—the sense of losing one’s head within a land of dreams while still being connected to one’s roots.”

–Persephone Wangen (Grade 9, Sir Winston Churchill Secondary School, Vancouver, British Columbia)

Though Tom Thomson’s (1877–1917) promising career as an artist was cut short, he has left an indelible mark on Canada’s landscape tradition. His bold and expressive paintings of vistas in Ontario’s Algonquin Park have come to define a visual identity considered to be distinctly Canadian.