Chickanishing Creek - An Update

After a few days of painting, I have made progress on the larger canvas. Cliches keep going through my mind as I paint. "Less is more"; "Don't overwork it"; "Relax and the let the paint flow" and even "May the force be with you" from Star Wars. Anyway, it has been fun with the tunes on and the wind howling outside while I have the wood stove cracking inside. I am not done yet but ... maybe I should be... There is glare in the photo but you get the idea. 

Chickanishing Creek

I guess the two 4x6 footers that I painted for the 50th Anniversary of the Canadian Flag burnt me out. It was a huge job and only fellow artists who have walked those paths will understand. That's OK. Since then my studio works have all been tiny hunks of canvas and wood as small as 4x4 inches. I have had lots of fun during this very long and very cold winter - which is a direct result of Global Warming by the way. My plein air work is always 11x14 plus or minus with the plus getting to 16x20 inches.
In any event I picked up a 3x4 footer, gallery mount canvas today determined to breath more life into #0843 "Chickanishing Creek Meets Georgian Bay". That was a special day in 2006 and I think the painting deserves a larger format if I can pull it off. There are still some studio days to come with the wind, cold, snow and rain. The first day on this canvas went well. By the way, Singleton Phil was right about the long range forecast :>))

In the Footsteps of the Group of Seven at Charlton Lake Camp

My friends Jim and Sue Waddington, the authors of "In the Footsteps of the Group of Seven" will be at the Charlton Lake Camp September 19, 20 and 21, 2014. I will be there as well participating in the planned events and presenting "Tom Thomson Was A Weatherman" and maybe more. As a coincidence, my friends Keith and Helen of the Wilson Street Studio will also be at Charlton September 12 to 17 with an Art Retreat. It will be a busy place in the best time of the year. For more information contact Mark and Lori at Charlton Lake Camp, P.O. Box 118, Whitefish Falls, Ontario P0P 2H0, +1 877-587-3474, http://www.charltonlakecamp.com/
I am currently taking one of my Killarney sketches and turning it into a 3x4 footer - let's hope it doesn't loose anything in the translation.

Red Horse Cirrus

Wispy cirrus ice crystals of the west side of a ridge of high pressure can be challenging to capture. I needed my three key colours of blue to match the subtle hues of the cirrus. This is the view looking northeasterly from the the entrance to the west basin of Red Horse Lake after paddling through the Narrows. I wanted to create a rhythm in the clouds and to maintain that tempo in the flagged trees and the choppy water as well.

Sunset Deformation

The colours of a sunset only last a few minutes and they are always changing. The stable layer under the subsidence ridge in the lower atmosphere was creating gravity waves in the deck of stratocumulus. The bands of cloud were perpendicular to the southeasterly winds at cloud level - just like waves on the water. The edge of this layer of moisture was as sharp as a knife on the western horizon and clearly had to be a deformation zone. As a meteorological approximation, streamlines are very closely approximated by isobars in a slowly changing pressure pattern. I do not have access to streamlines at every level anymore - in fact, I never did. This approximation allowed me to analyze the low level deformation zone responsible for the moisture edge and one can see that the correlation is pretty close. Singleton is northeast of Lake Ontario and just eastward and on the cloudy side of the green, double-headed deformation zone line. There is a good reason for every line and pattern in the atmosphere. Careful science can reveal that reason and yield a better understanding of the atmosphere in the process.
The colours were gone in ten minutes along with the setting sun.

Wilson Street Studio Art Retreats for 2014

Keith and Helen from the Wilson Street Studios have really picked a great line up of places to paint. These are some of my favourites! I encourage you to visit their website to find out more at www.wilsonstreetstudios.com
There are five retreats and I am painting on the third in the Kawartha Highlands. It should be fun! I understand that there are still some spots available.
By the way, spring is around the corner now - although I have personally loved this real Canadian winter.

Gull Rock

This hunk of marble in the west basin of Singleton Lake is a favourite perch for the gulls. They do quite a good job of white washing it. Some of the white wash is rather large and I wonder whether those spots could be from the great blue herons.
The water is quite shallow with lots of opportunities to scrape the hull of your canoe. East of this the water deepens to 45 feet or more. The lines on the rock edges chronicles the changing levels of Singleton Lake. Apparently we are at low ebb now.
The hand stretched canvas on a stretcher frame built by my Dad was different than the canvas used in #1406 "Moon Set". This canvas did not have a lot of tooth. It may have been because I put another coat or two of gesso on the canvas but I truly forget. In any event the oil slipped around quite a bit on the canvas.
I will take better images of these paintings when they are dry and I upgrade my 10 year old camera :-))

Singleton Moon Set

Has anyone been awake to watch the setting moon? It is not nearly as popular a pastime as watching the sun set - but the setting of the full moon can be spectacular. The sun was soon to rise from the opposite direction. The full moon on March 16th was quite remarkable. This is the view westward across Singleton Lake.
The hand stretched canvas on a stretcher frame built by my Dad had a lot of tooth. The canvas really grabbed the paint so I used a lot of it. As always, it was fun. 

Chip's Elbow

My friend Chip and his wife own this pretty point that pokes into the Long Reach separating Singleton from Red Horse Lake. I do not know if there is an official name for this point but I suspect it has many - all different. This is the name that I use. The view is looking northwestward across the shallow waters of the point. I found the rocks with my canoe. Even a very light carbon canoe has some draft and will not clear all of the hidden obstacles. The sound of Canadian Shield scratching the bottom of my craft always makes me grimace.
I like the way that the red cedars and white pine thrust into the sky. I keep inventing new ways to capture the effect of the back lighting while keeping my colours clean. These techniques may not always be successful but they are always fun. This small canvas has a lot of tooth and it grabbed the thick paint and held on tight.