[3] In 1910, at the age of twenty, Carmichael arrived in Toronto and entered the Ontario College of Art, where he studied with William Cruickshank and George Reid.

Late in the year, Lawren Harris and J. E. H. MacDonald began sketching together, soon to be joined by Carmichael and his coworkers at Grip, including Arthur Lismer, Tom Thomson and Frank Johnston.

Due to the outbreak of World War I, he cut his studies short and returned to his native Ontario in September 1914, rejoining Thomson, Macdonald, Lismer, Varley and Johnston.

[19] According to writer Peter Mellen, the considerably young Carmichael and A. J. Casson "always remained slightly on the fringes of the Group" due to the age gap between them and the other members.

[20] Together with F. H. Brigden, Carmichael and Casson founded the Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour (in French: La Société Canadienne de Peintres en Aquarelle), in 1925 [7] The entire group – but Carmichael in particular – strove to give visual form to spiritual value, with some members drawing on theosophy (an offshoot of transcendentalism)[21] and the spiritualist founder of the Theosophical Society, Helena Blavatsky.

"[24] According to the doctrine of theosophy, a northern "spiritual, cultural, and aesthetic renaissance" was to take place in North America, with Canada playing a particularly special role because of its location.

[25][26] The northern emphasis provided by Theosophy appealed to the "land-based nationalism" of the Group of Seven, expressed particularly by Carmichael, Lismer and MacDonald.

[28][29] In it, Harris wrote, We (Canadians) are on the fringe of the great North and its living whiteness, its loneliness and replenishment, its resignations and release, its call and answer, its cleansing rhythms.

[31][32]The Group's views were not restricted to theosophy, however, but were also influenced by the European Symbolists, Irish nationalist George Russell (Æ)[21] and transcendentalists like Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

[37] Carmichael eventually came to favour landscape art, and many of his pieces display an effort to achieve rich colour and design.

[38] Besides a few studies in his notes, he produced only a single portrait in oil on canvas in his entire career: Woman in Black Hat, a rendering of an unidentified subject from 1939.

[45] Art historian Joyce Zemans thought the painting indicated Carmichael was moving in a new direction, though given the timing of the work at the end of his life it is difficult to know whether he would have continued.

[44] Montreal artist Kristine Moran wrote favourably of the painting, understanding "Carmichael's desire to push out from under the constraints of the Post-Impressionist landscape style for which the Group of Seven was so well known.

"[42] Joan Murray was less enthused with the work, writing, "Abstraction was not Carmichael's game and this painting, so influenced by [Lawren] Harris, is not good.

[49] The painting shows an understanding of the distinct, massive geometric surfaces of rocks, and is also presented from a viewpoint that would come to characterize much of his later work, utilizing height to emphasize time and weather.

[52] This is evident in his 1930 watercolour, Snow Flurries: North Shore of Lake Superior,[7] a painting Joan Murray describes as "an almost breathtaking achievement".

[53] 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.

[55] 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.

[59] The work juxtaposes bare nature with the ugly environmental effects caused by industry,[60] depicting the wilderness present in his earlier canvases, but also "the billowing extrusion of smoke waste".

[61] Art historian Rosemary Donegan writes of the work, "The dramatic beauty of the burnt blue-green rolling hills, seen from a bird's-eye perspective, is subverted by the distant smoke plumes and smelter stacks, which raise questions about the effect of ore smelting on the local landscape.

[62] Jackson took his government lobbying efforts further however, pleading in a letter to the minister of Lands and Forests William Finlayson to preserve what became Killarney Provincial Park and Trout Lake.

[61][64] This painting depicts the relationship of industrial town and nature, where "[t]he houses and mines seem scattered and fragile against the agitated convolutions of the hills.

[46] In commercial art, the other members of the Group of Seven typically restricted themselves to illustration work; Carmichael, however, took an active role in book design.

In one case, he produced the wood engravings, selected the paper, directed the typography and did the complete design for Grace Campbell's 1942 book, Thorn-Apple Tree.

[18] In Carmichael's early design career, he found the need to avoid meaningless ornamentation, writing These different things – repose, dignity, movement, energy, grace, rhythm – are part of our very life and make-up.

[37][69] In a review of the exhibition, Joan Murray was disappointed in the organizers focus on Carmichael's oil works, which she saw as "overworked and overfinished", rather than his "sublime" watercolours.