Swimming Hole

I swam every day of the summer of 2013 in this Jim Day Rapids swimming hole. It may not look like much but it is 18 feet deep of the dock and the swimming is terrific. The sun fish nibble on your legs while in the current it is like one of those "endless pools swimming machines". Early in the season when the water was high the current was so strong that it easily overpowered me every time. The current is slack now and I can hold my own.
This little painting is dark because of the early morning shadows. I quite liked the play of light and reflections across the water and how you can look into the depths closer to your feet. It was a fun experiment.
The water is getting cooler now as the nights lengthen....

Erigeron

These little flowers are smaller than daisies. Like daisies they have a yellowish hub and white petals but these flowers have many more petals - probably 50 or more per flower. The bees were working adjacent plants but not this daisy like flower. They were identified from the painting by my friend, expert naturalist Fred Karstad.

The most widely used common name, fleabane derived from the belief that the dried plants repelled fleas. The name Erigeron is derived from the Greek (eri = early; geron = old man), a reference to the appearance of the white hairs of the fruit soon after flowering - just like me...

I had to finish this painting in the studio with my mahl stick. My hand was not steady enough to block in the darker background after painting the foreground flowers and foliage. It was also getting quite warm after the stratus lifted.

Life continues to be very good. What will I paint today?

Twin Maples

I wanted to try to capture something that wouldn't move. Clouds had occupied too many of my canvases recently and I wanted to slow down the pace just a bit. The majestic, old maples at the entry to the Singleton Studio had character. I liked the rough texture of the bark and the old scar on the one tree. Both trees had sustained some damage from the 1998 Ice Storm but most of those twisted branches were higher and outside the view of the painting. There were a few mosquitoes buzzing around but it was still a pleasant painting experience.

Singleton Supercell

A real life supercell imitated art just a few weeks ago. The similarities with Tom Thomson's painting "Dark Thunderhead" prompted me to paint this image - as if I needed an excuse anyway. This storm had already blown down some trees and hydro lines in Lyndhurst... and across our lane. I painted the entire supercell as it looked crossing the lane to the east ... from the safety of my Singleton Studio a few weeks later. It was really wet outside anyway with frequent thunderstorms so standing outside using a metal easel was not an option. I labelled the parts of the supercell on the painting so that this knowledge might save a life. These low precipitation, low topped supercell storms are indeed dangerous.

Southampton Beach - North

I wanted to demonstrate that the landscape could be modified to fit the canvas. As well I wanted to illustrate that almost any colour could work for a tint as long as it wasn’t white. Nature is perfect but it can be distorted to fit our canvas and to obey at least a few of the very flexible “laws” of composition. The northern beach area of Southampton was scrunched into the space allotted with the following results. It was another 37 minute effort as I bounced around offering support to my fellow painters. Another fun afternoon capped off by a swim in Lake Huron. 

Beach Lake Breeze Cumulus

Ahhh... some clouds finally developed and they were not to be squandered. These were cumulus clouds with some marginal towering cumuli that developed along the lake breeze front just inland from the shore line. They moved further inland as we painted. I explained the meteorology behind the clouds but I am not sure that the information was successfully delivered. When you paint plein air, the natural world does all of the science for you and we as artists just have to hone our observational skills. It was another 37 minute effort as I bounced around offering support to my fellow painters.


We finished the painting session with a swim in Lake Huron. It was a perfect end to a several days of some very fun painting. The water was also warmer than I remembered! Medium burnt sienna oil tinted 8x10

Michigan Convection

Finally we had some clouds. These were convective clouds that seemed to soar upward over Michigan. When the thermal moved over the cooler waters of Lake Huron they fizzled. The process of decay happened before our eyes in the matter of tens of minutes. I locked my sketch in at the very peak of cloud intensity. The one area of cloud actually looked like it could produce an anvil and then it all fell apart into cirrocumulus. By the time I was finished (37 minutes) the cloud area had almost dissolved into oblivion and was well to the northeast of Southampton. It was a good exercise in trying to catch a cloud – plus it was fun! Medium ultramarine blue oil tinted 8x10

Before the People

The early morning light is always the best. There were almost no people on the Southampton Beach so the gulls kept me company while I painted.  I wanted to get the colours right and had to revert to phthalo blue to do so. The literature says “Phthalo Blue: Warm blue first made for printmaking ink (cyan) to replace Prussian Blue in the 1920's. With clean, pure masstone and transparency, Phthalo Blue, like all modern colors, has high tinting strength.” Some artist call it a “stain” but I needed it today. There is always something to learn!

The ridge of high pressure was still dominating the weather but there was a hint of cloud on the western horizon emerging through the pollution contained within the marine inversion. Medium burnt sienna oil tinted 8x10

Mouth of the Saugeen

Another 37 minute experiment intermixed with offering assistance to my fellow participants in “Making Waves in Oil” This view is looking across the harbour mouth toward Chantry Island and the famous life saving light. The composition was a group consensus and we all had a go at it before the sun started to glare into one’s eyes. The sun was strong in the cloudless skies. I used more paint! Medium burnt sienna oil tinted 8x10