Images of Flight

by Clive Hart

While books like The Colour of Canada celebrates the diversity of Canada's landscape, William J. Wheeler's Images of A Canadian Aviation Portfolio is more interested in its airspace. Canada has a modest but secure place in aviation history, to judge by this book. Wheeler, himself an aviation artist, has collected paintings by Canadian artists that commemorate such milestones as the flight of the June Bug Silver Dart in 1908 and the Silver Dart in 1909, both of which were built by the Aerial Experiment Association founded by "Casey" Baldwin, John McCurdy, and Alexander Graham Bell. Canada was close behind the United States in exploring powered flight, with Baldwin becoming the first British subject to fly a heavier-than-air craft, and the Silver Dart made the first powered flight by a British subject in the Commonwealth.Thanks to a familiar Canadian problem—too timid governments and insufficient research funding—this country has not always been among the leaders in aviation since then. Remember the Avro Arrow? But there have been many high points both in military and civil (especially bush pilot) aviation, and the paintings in this collection generally recall them effectively. Aviation painting, as Wheeler points out, is a peculiar branch of art; its practitioners must master both a high degree of technical accuracy in representing the aircraft and a more impressionistic sense of light and space in the backgrounds. The artists in this book rise to the challenge, whether they are specialists such as Robert Bradford (who also contributed the foreword) or are better known for their efforts in other genres, such as the Group of Seven member Franz Johnston and Robert Munsch's favourite illustrator, Michael Martchenko. At $40, this book seems overpriced for its relatively small size (11" by 8 1/2"), but it should delight fliers, whether armchair or real stick-and-rudder types.John Oughton (Books in Canada) -- Books in Canada

327 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1988