High Park is a popular location for many artists and photographers. We invite you to submit a sample of your High Park nature-inspired artistic work to post on this website. If you have a website displaying your work, please include a link to post as well.
Sarah Nemeth: High Park Story and Art Project
Sarah Nemeth is a local artist and long time enjoyer of Toronto's High Park. Sarah has created a series of paintings inspired by our stories and experiences within High Park. The paintings and stories together create a beautiful archive about who we are and how High Park has touched our lives.
See excerpts here and see the full project at .
Wendy Rothwell: Flower Database
Wendy Rothwell has created a beautiful and informative website called . Wildflowers may be searched by botanical name and by colour.
EXAMPLE: Woodland Sunflower, Helianthus divaricatus
Native to Ontario. Locally rare. Less prevalent in High Park than the pale-leaved sunflower. Perennial.
Habitat: Dry open forests and savannahs
Blooms: July to September
Height: up to 1.8 m
Leaves: Opposite, lance-shaped tapering to the tip, rough on upper surface, with little or no leaf stalk.
Flower heads: 8-15 yellow 1.5-3 cm ray florets surrounding a 1-1.5 cm disk.
David Allen: Photography
I've been taking photos in High Park since 2005, and as a photographer, remember every photo I ever take. I remember the time, the moment, the racing home to download photos, the excitement and the final printing. For scenic photos, photographers love a few rays of sunshine pouring down onto a wooded area, as happened with this photo. It doesn't happen too often in High Park, but when it does happen, living close by, I can look out of my window during the seasons, and if the timing is right, I can race out there to try and catch it all. The funny thing about this photo, and I sell literally hundreds of cards of this scene throughout the year, I've never found the spot again, and on a regular basis I continue to search through High Park's 399 acres. If you are out there with your Point & Shoot digital camera, please take a photo for me, and I'll get back there to try and recreate the scene again. It's in the east side of the park!
Frances Patella: High Park on Fire
"It is the visual change in the state of things which will reveal their essential reality". Taking artist Roy Ascott's quote as inspiration, I introduce a temporal aspect to the representation of the Oak Savannah High Park landscape during prescribed burns. I use photographs, some double exposures, taken at different intervals of time to present a multi-temporal view. I save rolls of film from one year's burn to reshoot during another time.
These layered images not only capture scenes taken at different times in the same places, they also question the conventional idea that a photograph represents just one instance and one point of view. Although each individual photo has its own distinct identity, it becomes integrated into a larger whole, but with discrepancies. Growth and death have occurred during the years; things don't quite line up.
The viewer is invited to participate in this ten year odyssey by looking closely and discovering the perceptual inconsistencies of shifting points of view, changes of scale and growth. I combine paint and photography to produce a synthesis between these diametrically opposed media and to explore their interconnections. I paint to unite the composites and add another dimension to the idea of permanence.
Photographs will eventually fade, but the painted areas will last much longer. Thus the images will change over time, like the environments themselves.
Visit Frances's website.
Warabé Aska: Book "Who Goes to the Park"
A book of poems and paintings in celebration of High Park, Toronto. Published by Tundra Books, 1984 (out-of-print, available through the Toronto Public Library).
This delightful book celebrates all the seasons of High Park in poems and illustrations. It won a City of Toronto Book Award in 1985 and an honorable mention at Leipzig’s “best designed books from all over the world” exhibition the same year.
Warabé emigrated to Canada from Japan in 1979 and lives in Toronto. He spent nearly two years studying High Park, taking thousands of photographs and making sketches. He checked when special events occurred (such as the trimming of the hedges, the Saturday weddings, the lawn bowling and the band concerts) and returned to observe them. He also studied the park through the seasons and at different times of day.
For all the precision of the art, the book is not limited to realism. Warabé was concerned about the effect of the park on its visitors, the thoughts and dreams it inspired. These he added both to the paintings in fantasy touches and to the poetic text he wrote to go with them (see the Great Oak poem below).
The High Park Walking Tour program has included a walk based on this book since 2009. In Fall 2010 Warabé joined the walk as guest artist. Participants were invited to compare the scenes from the book, past and present, and also to compare them with their own personal impressions of the park.
The great oak pictured here - to many a symbol of High Park, loved and played in by generations of children - had to be cut down in 1983 because of advanced age. But it lives on in Warabé Aska's book:
When the trees begin to sprout leaves,
Blackbirds appear in the park,
The great oak raises its arms
To hold all their songs in harmony.
Let us sing together a welcome to spring,
Great oak, great oak,
What a vigorous choirmaster you are!
Warabé Aska
Bianca Lakoseljac: Stories inspired by High Park
Bridge in the Rain, is a collection of stories linked by an inscription on a bench in Toronto’s High Park. Her latest novel, , features the sculptures of High Park and Yorkville in its heyday.
Bianca has also shared one of her poems inspired by High Park’s black oak savannah, a field of wild blue lupines, and catching sight of an elusive blue butterfly - and a runaway ball at the baseball diamond next to the field of lupins (from Memoirs of a Praying Mantis published by Turtle Moons Press, Ottawa. 2009):
Blue Lupins
Crack of skin to metal. Air still in anticipation.
Eyes drawn to the rogue ball escaping the diamond. Strike two!
A thud on grassy bed. Gentle flutter of silver wings. Blue lupins chiming silent bells as blue wings release spired host and bob through swaying meadow.
Cleated feet running through clumps of lupins. Blue wings drifting on gentle breeze through dappled shade of ancient oaks.
The boy pausing in grassy meadow. Eyes on silver-blue wings. Gliding through dappled shade of ancient oaks, sprawling crooked limbs embracing all.
Blue wings bounding through silent chimes of blue bells.
