green sky. After Carmichael's ventures to Lake Superior in the mid-to-late 1920s, Bertram Brooker and other friends recognized the spiritual dimensions of his work. Besides his interest theosophy, he also studied transcendentalism, owning a copy of Ralph Waldo Emerson's Essays and Other Writings, amongst many other books. During this time, he made significant changes in style through bolder use of colour and an overall simplification in approach. This is evident in his 1930 watercolour, Snow Flurries: North Shore of Lake Superior, a painting Joan Murray describes as "an almost breathtaking achievement." The work which contrasts the dark blue-green simplified hills against the clouds above. Further comparison has been drawn between this painting and Harris' work from Lake Superior. Similarly, in the 1931 oil painting Bay of Islands From Mt. Burke, he illuminates the foreground with a burst of light. From this light, patches of green, brown, gold and orange indicate the areas of the hill where vegetation lay. From 1924 on, Carmichael painted the La Cloche Mountains, located in northern Ontario, above Lake Huron, and he expressed his admiration for the "humped contours," white quartzite rock and long stretches of water. This is seen in Lake Wabagishik, the first area he painted in the mountains in which there is no evidence of previous human presence. The painting itself depicts a storm, with rain falling on the distant hills and the wind blowing both the water and trees. In 1935, he bought five acres of land on Cranberry Lake and built a cabin there and then could paint the area at all times of day but storms and other weather phenomena remained a favourite subject of his work. One such example is Snow Clouds from 1938, which communicates a tension between the land and the snow storm approaching from the distance. Industry and the environment By the 1930s, Carmichael's work explored themes of industry in northern Ontario, particularly the mining regions. His first depiction of an industrial building is Old Lime Kilns, Rockwood, a sketch made on a 1927 trip with Casson to Rockwood, Ontario. The 1928 canvas, The Nickel Belt, depicts smoke billowing away into the clouds and a barren rocky foreground. The work juxtaposes bare nature with the ugly environmental effects caused by industry, depicting the wilderness present in his earlier canvases, but also "the billowing extrusion of smoke waste." Art historian Rosemary Donegan writes of the work, "The