569 Farm on the 19th

Mid morning, I revisited the "Farm in the Snow". The sun was shining and the effect was entirely different from the other day with strong shadows across the snow and good visibility. I parked in exactly the same place and let the paint fly. I shrunk the barn a bit to make everything fit on the canvas.
The old car was still in the same place and I enjoyed trying to make it come alive with just a few rather crude strokes. There was a mixed herd of Holsteins and Herefords to the east of the barn and I put many of them in the painting. There was also a manure spreader parked in the field in front of the house so I put that in too. Around noon, it clouded in for good and the lighting changed. I had already laid in all of the values so it was still OK. I took the painting home and signed it on my studio easel.
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568 Bill's Barns

Midday on Saturday, I checked in to see Bill Perry who lives on the north side of 17th Sideroad just to the east of the 12 Concession of King Township. I set up my easel overlooking his barnyard. The yard was a mixture of snow, ice, mud and manure and it was too much to put it but I hoped I caught the effect. His barns are in pretty good shape. Some beef cattle were poking their noses around the corner of the barn but none hung around long enough for me to be satisfied with the way they looked. The barn cats that prowled by were the same way.

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567 The Neighbour's

In the late afternoon, I was set up my easel just to the east of the abandoned farm house across the 12th Concession from the farm. I laid in the drawing quick enough but found myself tangled in the trees. The farmhouse has been abandoned for as long as we could remember. It's too bad as well as it is a beautiful piece of land and would make a great homestead. The house, however, is too far-gone to be recovered.
The story is well known who owned this home prior to the 1970's. They had no kids and sold to a pair of lawyers. The land was sold again and an estate home of probably 60,000 square feet occupies the land. It is quite the estate on a beautiful piece of land.
I was standing right in a deer runway and there were numerous very large deer tracks in the patchy snow. I haven't seen it but it is probably a large buck with hooves like that of a calf.
The canvas had been primed with a dark coat of raw sienna.
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1470 Whitefish River Cottages

The sun was starting to emerge from behind the turbulent stratocumulus streets. It felt good on my hands so I decided to paint from the Charlton Lake Camp waterfront. This is the view looking just a bit south toward the boat launch. The cottage is tucked onto a narrow slice of land at the base of a steep quartzite cliff. The green metal roof of the cottage sparkled when the sun was out.
Oils on medium burnt sienna oil tinted foundation.

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1457 Lily Pads and Lilacs

I was accosted by juvenile mallard ducks as soon as I got out of my Subaru-Paint-Mobile to paint from Douglas Fluhrer Park. They had obviously had great success mooching in the past. They were not so lucky today. I didn't have any suitable food even if I had been so inclined.
The rain held off for a while as I laid the sketch in. The tower of St Mark's Church us kept near the intersection of the top-left thirds. The southerly winds where shaping the cumulus clouds that were embedded in the streets. It gradually started to rain harder and harder, I had to grind the paint into the weave of the canvas. I had the colours laid in by noon at which time I was drenched. I called it a day.
The ducks and a few Canada geese were dabbling in the lily pads and duckweed along the shoreline. The distant shore of Barriefield was covered in lilac bushes along with trees and houses. This explains the title which came to me as I scratched my name in the paint. The canvas was wet too.

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1493 Rockport Roofs

I was painting with Bob Heddens art group in Rockport. Bob formed the Plein Air Painters Thousand Islands Region (PAPTIR) group in April 2009 to promote Plein Air Painting in the region. From May through October Bob organizes an event every second Wednesday and generally have four to seven artists. Events were sponsored by the Thousand Island Bridge Authourity-Boldt Castle (Alexandria Bay NY) in 2009 and 2011. On this particular Wednesday a band of heavy rain was approaching along a cold front so I figured that we would get soaked by 11 am.

I painted on the wharf with Bob and Cheryl. I selected a rather complex view of roofs and wharfs/ The gray sky gradually darkened over the following two hours. The Canadian flag stood out against the darkening skies - as did the brilliant fall colours. Bands of light showers swung across Rockport with a few spits of liquid but the heavier rain arrived by 11:15 am. I bailed in order to buy groceries in Brockville.
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1491 Franklin at Church

There was a beautiful garden of sunflowers on the southeast corner of this intersection. This has nothing to do with the Franklin Expedition ... although Franklin probably did go to church.
Oils on burnt sienna oil tinted foundation on commercial canvas - 11 x 14 (inches) Started 3:00 pm Sunday September 28th, 2014.

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1490 George Street

This is the first demo for the “Special Workshop- Classes with Phil Chadwick”. I wanted to keep it simple to illustrate that one does not have to include every detail to do an acceptable interpretation of even a complex looking subject matter. This is George Street looking southwesterly.Art is all about having fun in the moment. Everyday is a fresh chance to experiment and learn something.

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1489 Wilson Street Dawn

I stood outside the Wilson Street Studio in Markham waiting for the participants to arrive for the “Special Workshop- Master Classes with Phil Chadwick”. It was a beautiful sunrise and I figured that I had time to at least get a sketch laid in and warm up for the busy day ahead. The light was streaming over the buildings of Main Street at 7:30 am. The light and shadows were changing quickly so I had to work fast. I pretty much had it completed by the time participants arrived after 9:30 am. I was actually happier with this sketch about 30 or 40 strokes before the participants arrived. I wish they had arrived a bit sooner and stopped me from overworking this.

The following is what Keith Thirgood wrote in support of this Special Workshop which he organized. “September 28, Phil Chadwick is coming to Toronto to do a master class on his approach to landscape painting. Phil's style is much like a mature Tom Thomson. In this seven hour workshop, Phil will show you how to get the effects he achieves. How to deal with brushes. Why to choose certain colors. How he makes the decisions he makes. As this is a master class, it's assumed you understand about lights and shadows, values, color mixing, finding the big shapes in a scene, etc.. This session is entirely on Phil's technique.”

I actually kept painting until the last people got tired at 6:30 pm. It was a fun day and the weather was great.

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1488 Charlton Lake Camp Sunrise

The fog was nearly as thick this morning. I did not have much time to paint and the sun was rising fast! I set up on the north side of the Charlton Lake Camp dock and painted looking north. Lori Murton saw the painting and referred to the obvious red maple as Laura's tree.
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1487 Afternoon at Frood Lake Outlet

I spent some time investigating the area by car over the lunch hour. The high sun angles are not conducive to painting. There was no place better than where I had spent the morning. So I returned to the Outlet of Frood Lake and spent a wonderful afternoon painting the rocks and the way the wind played with the colours of the lake. There were no biting insects and the weather was almost too perfect - if that is possible.

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1486 Proud Home

This has to be the home of someone important. The view would have been overlooking the turbulent pool beneath the first rapids of the outlet from Frood Lake. The two storey home had a basement and was made of the finest materials for the day. The exterior was red brick but I did not paint in all of the grout lines... I am not a mason. Without proper maintenance, the home was returning to nature. A downburst nearly pushed some tall trees down on its bones. Someone had chain-sawed the debris of the trees away. The roof still had better shingles than many homes that I have seen in the area. It would have been a great place to raise a family.

I was told later by a local resident that the downburst had been the Thursday August 2nd, 2006 event - the record outbreak that I had worked. Power was out at this home for eight days and the wife of the home was getting very irritable. They were on a different hydro service in Willisville and was only out of power for two days.

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1485 Foggy Whitefish Rapids

I wanted to step outside my burnt sienna tinted comfort zone. Green is complementary to red so I gave this unusual choice a try to see what might happen. The fog was in the process of lifting and I had to concentrate on not including more detail that was shrouded in fog when I started. The roar of the current was the constant while the fog was torn asunder by the sun.
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1484 Fog Birches on the Edge

This row of birch trees was on the very edge of the rapids and pool below the outlet of Frood Lake. The thick fog behind the birches provided the backdrop because there was nothing but a thirty foot drop into a cauldron of current behind the trees. I was attracted by the fall colour of the birch trees. The roar of the rapids drummed out all of the other sounds of sunrise. The fog was starting to dissipate rapidly as I finished the last few strokes. The few rays of sunlight turned the birches on like a light switch.

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1483 Frood Fog

Now for something completely different!
I couldn’t even see the far side of the narrow Whitefish River when I headed out at 7:00 am. The fog was very thick indeed. I arrived at the Outlet of Frood Lake and proceeded to paint the easterly view as the sun struggled to burn through the thick fog. Similar to Tom Thomson’s “A Day with Sunlight” this is not an abstract piece of art. It is simply an observation of thick radiational fog which is common within a ridge of high pressure in September. There was no fear of UV radiation in this thick fog. I had to hurry to get it done before the strong sun burnt the fog away.
The faint outline of a lone canoeist was intentional. Like any good ghost, the suggested outline does not cast a shadow or a reflection. You might guess who the ghost could be.

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1482 Frood Quartzite

The sun was high and I had to move out of the heat. I moved the easel into the shade of some birches and painted the north wall of the Frood Lake Outlet. The jumble of rocky shades had me confused sometimes. Perhaps I should have simplified more.
Oils on medium burnt sienna oil tinted foundation on commercial canvas - 8 x 10

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1481 Frood Lake Outlet

All of the water from Charlton, Cranberry, Grace and finally Frood Lake must come through this narrow quartzite canyon. I was painting before the sun had cleared the trees. Crepuscular rays were still evident. It was a race to capture the colours before the sun got too high. I was the only one at the outlet except for a deer and a merganser.
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1480 Howry Creek Campsite

I took a bit of an adventure up the creek. There was a lot of painting material but not a lot of places to land the canoe safely. I passed a deserted building or too and just when I thought I was in the middle of nowhere, I would paddle on to another camp or cottage. There was quite a widening of Howry Creek at one point and I found a nice campsite on the south shore which offered a great, easterly vantage of the large bay in front of me. I painted.
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1479 ... Howry Creek

This is the mouth of Howry Creek from Charlton Lake. I had just finished 1478 “Forest Waterfall” and felt that the simple view in front of me was a good as anything else that I might find. A curious toad kept me company as I stood on the home of a well established bank beaver.
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Forest Cottage

This is the Matheson cottage on the west side of the Whitefish River, opposite the Charlton Lake Camp. It is surrounded by a mature forest and appropriately flies the Canadian flag. I wonder if the cottage is owned by a relative of John Matheson, the Father of the Canadian Flag. I kept the forest to its proper height scale. I could have included some of the sky if I had reduced the height of the trees by a third.
There are a lot of ravens in the area. They seem to carry on a very intelligent conversation with varying tones of croaks and caws. I wish I could understand these “Einsteins” of the Bird World.
#1472
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Across the Cataraqui

I still had some time to paint and the fair weather cumulus were very interesting. The winds were light so the convective bubbles were pretty symmetric as they climbed through the lifted condensation level. The west shore of the Cataraqui River was becoming increasingly developed by the City of Kingston. Virginia rails used to live in the marsh here. I have not seen one for years....
http://1-phil-chadwick.artistwebsites.com/
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Green Door B And B

I crossed to the other side of the "Barriefield B and B" and stood on the waters edge looking at the main competitor. One door was white but the other door was indeed a shade of green. The cribbing supporting this boathouse had been ravaged over the years by the weather and ice. It too had a lot of character.
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B And B Flip Side

The other side of the boathouse as painted in "B and B - Barriefield Boathouse" was just as interesting. The water levels were down and any vessel located in the boathouse would have to be carried several metres to reach the water's edge. An old tire had laid in the grasses for several seasons and I was interested in the many colours apparent in the rubber. Large, old willows lined the dry banks of the Cataraqui River.
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