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New expressions for water
Writers, musicians, and artists, continue to express their love of our rivers, lakes, and streams, but today their voices can be heard through an immense range of artistic media. Photography has played a vital role as an art form in itself as well as providing models for later paintings. Landscape artistry has especially benefitted from the latter, as it makes the wilderness accessible to all artists. More than a century ago, the Montreal studio of William Notman sent photographers out across the country, accumulating a priceless collection of photographs that provided the basis for paintings by such artists as Otto Jacobi, Allan Edson, and John A. Fraser.
Every summer, adventurers in modern fibreglass canoes experience the smooth dark waters and foaming white rapids of routes traced out so long ago by Aboriginal peoples, explorers and traders. In a particularly fitting commemoration of Canada's centennial in 1967, canoes representing all the provinces and territories followed the paths of the voyageurs from the Rocky Mountains to Montreal. Further, numerous films and television documentaries have chronicled the exploits of modern voyageurs who re-enact these journeys.
River travellers of today are no longer limited to pencilled entries in an explorer's journal. Paddle to the Sea, based on the Holling Clancy Holling book  J by the same name, is a classic National Film Board production by Bill Mason that has made the system of streams, lakes and rivers from Lake Superior to the Atlantic a vivid reality for thousands of children.
When setting out from Montreal each spring, the voyageurs lost all contact with their families for months at a time. But when a young Canadian couple, Gary and Joanie McGuffin, set off to paddle their canoe 9656 kilometres from Baie-Comeau on the St. Lawrence River to Tuktoyaktuk on the Beaufort Sea, they reported their progress to a national audience on CBC radio, and published a book that recounts their journey in picturesque detail.
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