Qu’Apelle River Valley (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.) SOLD!

29 May finds us driving narrow, winding highway 56 along the north shore of Echo Lake, one of the chain named “Fishing Lakes” on the Qu’Apelle River in Saskatchewan.  We have just left the town of Fort Qu’Apelle where we crossed the small Qu’Apelle River on a rather insignificant bridge, and followed Hwy 56 up along the side of the steep valley in the rain.  The lake was so grey with rain that we could hardly see the distant south shore.  Below us on the south side the roofs of houses peek from among the tops of trees on the steep slope down to the lake, and above us on the north side the pleated hills rise up against the clouds with patches of willows and aspens in their pockets and bushes in their creases.  A few homesteads nestle in the upper valley folds, luxuriating in the rampant growth of bright green grass, fed by the generous rains of the past week, and before that, from two heavy spring snowfalls.

We have pulled into the access lane of a property that is for sale.  I paint from the passenger seat this time, setting my easel by my feet and opening the window, as the rain is blowing from the other side.  The arms and shoulders of the valley are velvet, a slight green and golden nap over the brown earth.  I underpainted with a soft reddish terracotta and delight in how the weave of the canvas accepts a soft slanted stroke on the  high points – a velvet stroke.  As I paint, I live here – with each stroke this becomes my place.

A Mockingbird sings his double repeating, ever varying repertoire into the evening rain, and I paint until I lose the light.

28 May finds us at Dad’s favorite parking spot – Hansman Lake near Provost, Alberta – a little to the south and west of New Battleford, Saskatchewan.  This part of the lake curves in a semi-circle, and from the access road, you can choose any of three views.  I chose this one, in the teeth of a rainy wind – or is it a windy rain… and paint from the window at the table.

I take a quick foray to the waters edge when the rain lightens a bit, but still must clutch my journal to my chest and shield the lens of the camera with my hand, as “not very much rain” iss still pretty wet and windy.  A pair of Avocets are feeding, swishing their elegantly upcurved bills through the water to sift out tiny invertebrates.

The rain becomes heavy again, and I retire to the motorhome to continue my painting.  On the slope of the grassy bank I step past large flowered purple Violets with narrow spade-shaped leaves.

27 May finds us pulled over to the edge of a gravel sideroad just off Highway 509 in the rolling Alberta landscape just east of Red Deer.  They use hedges of the fast-growing, vigorously twiggy legume Caragana as windbreaks, and it gives the countryside a quaint pastoral touch.  As we searched for a view for a painting, slowing my parents’ big RV at every rise watching for both a pull-off that offered an open view of the distant hills, so often one of these big Caragana windbreaks would be in the way.  This one is about 4 metres tall, and just coming into bloom with large yellow pea flowers.

There are Magppies everywhere, swooping across the road in black and white elegance – such an extravagant bird!  We see Blacktail Deer grazing on the roadside grass and blending into fields of stubble, still in their grey-brown winter coats.  The sloughs and dugouts are brim full from recent rains, and swarming with ducks and terns.  I look forward to more prairie as I finish this painting in Dad’s driver’s seat and wash my brushes in the sink as we begin to move north and east toward our next camp at Provost.

Click here for my closeup photo of Caragana in bloom – and for a photo of me painting in the drivers seat.

I prefer to paint outdoors, but I appreciate a mobile studio on a wet or windy day.  Here I am in the drivers seat of my parents’ motorhome.

My canvas is propped on the steering wheel, steadied by my left hand, which also serves as a quiver for my brushes as well as holding a crumpled paper towel for wiping.  My palette tray is on my lap, and the narrow glass jar of water is in the cup holder (these are water-mixable oils).

I find the wooden canvas stretchers convenient for handling the paintings, as there are sides to the edges, and space for my fingers at the back as I hold the wooden side bar of the stretcher.  The edges are never painted until after the oil paint is well dried, and then I use fast-drying acrylic for the sides, so that the paintings may be hung unframed.

26 May found me heading west, high above my favorite part of Ontario – the Bruce Peninsula.  There, to my delight, lies the Bruce – like a living map of itself, as familiar to me as the back of my hand.  I can even see the tiny sliver of white that is the ferry docked in Little Tub Harbour at the tip of the peninsula.  Cove Island stretches out beyond the tip, and the other islands are there too.  I name each of them like picking out tiny familiar faces in a group photo.

Manitoulin Island lies in the distance, with a beautiful cloud formation stretching along the northern shore of Lake Huron.  I can see the slight curvature of the earth, and the setting sun makes a coppery sheen on the water far below and to the west, under the nose of the jet. Thin scarves of cloud stream past not far below us, and as we fly farther west, thick carpets of crenulated cloud are brushed with rosy light.  Where they are torn the shadowy landscape can be seen far below, with lakes and rivers dully reflecting the darkening sky as we fly on in perpetual sunlight, chasing the westering sun.

I write in my journal that there should be someone assigned on every daytime flight to write continuous poetry about the land and water and cloud formations.  When we took off from Toronto, our jet-shaped shadow leapt across the highways and buildings like a giant grasshopper, diminishing rapidly to the size of a dragonfly and then we tilted and turned and the horizon dropped like the edge of a tipping bowl.  Trucks became dinky toys and the huge round mouth of the fuselage behind my window seemed ready to engulf the whole miniaturizing world.

It will still be only just dusk when we descend on Calgary, my parents there from Westbank, British Columbia, to meet me and drive me in their motorhome to celebrate the birthday of my favorite aunt in Yorkton, Saskatchewan.

24 May finds me back out along the path behind our house in Bishops Mills, to finish the painting of the twin Ashes that I started yesterday.  Setting up to finish it from my photos, I realized that it is impossible to see the richness of colour in the contrast of light and dark that speaks of the evening along the path “Out Back.” But  more importantly, the photos could never transmit the joy that I share here and now with the dragonflies.  I am glad that I have returned!

After a scorching day of 34C, the evening is warmer than yesterday, and the very earth seems relieved, exhaling the warm scents of tender growing leaves and spring flowers.  I paused with brush raised, soaking in this scene as the nearly full moon rises into a sky just beginning to blush behind the woods.

The dragonflies course back and forth like miniature helicopters, tails slightly tilted and wings ablur.  I can see them dart and swoop, though I can’t quite see what they’re catching.  I suspect they are hunting mosquitoes.
A deer fly followed me here, but lost interest in bopping about the brim of my hat once I settled to paint and became still.

All is peaceful, but eventually the mosquitoes find me, sitting here behind a low spreading Juniper bush, and in short order the dragonflies gather, 7 or 8 of them swooping very close – then no more mosquitoes for a while.  About 15 minutes later I am distracted from my painting again by whining stabbers intent on blood, and back come the dragonflies in force.  I feel one hit me in the back as it picks off its prey.

Revelling in the rich luminosity of the evening light on the woods behind the Ash trees, and the ethereal ascent of the moon, I am flooded with a tremendous sense of wellbeing, and I imagine that the lilting, darting dragonflies must be joyful too.  Some time after 20:00 a Whitethroat sings “Sweet Canada Canada Canada before retiring.  Suddenly it’s dusk and the mosquitoes attack with confidence, no dragonflies in sight, and I pack up, my painting finished.

20 May finds me “Out Back” of our house in Bishops Mills, to see what Buckthorn flowers look like – tiny yellow stars where each bunch of oval leaves emerge on the twigs.

Buckthorn is the most widespread invasive alien shrub, displaying amazing variation in leaf and branch shape and texture, depending on where it is growing.  Some bushes have long thorns, and some have none at all.  On our land this variability is mostly the result of how recently Fred has cut it down, as the thorns grow more on older branches, especially the shrubs that are out in the out in the open.  We have a campaign of suppression, cutting and feeding to caged Rabbits and Goats in an attempt to mimic the natural herbivory that Buckthorn lacks in our North American landscape.  Elsewhere it grows rampant, filling fencerows and replacing the natural understory in some forests.

It is a day of changing weather, and I risk losing the afternoon sunshine and having my painting rained on – but I set my stool in front of a low hanging branch and paint fast.  I have a violet gray underpainting and most of the leaves in place before the sky darkens and the wind rises, tossing my twig about – so I must rely on the photos I took on my arrival, to finish the painting…

18 May finds me rejoicing in Lilacs in Bishops Mills.  I am struck by the contrast of the weathered branches of the old dead Sugar Maple and the cascading billows of sweet fresh Lilac bloom.  The scent is exhilarating, especially at night, when it sweetens the soft spring darkness to the tune of whining Mosquitoes.  Every spring I feel a little sad at Lilac time, because it passes so quickly, but at least this year I am commemorating it with a painting. Some day the old dead Maple will be taken down and cut up for firewood, so I feel satisfied to have painted that too, at its most picturesque, glorious with Lilacs.

All across eastern Ontario the landscape is now illuminated by blooming Lilac bushes – where they have been planted by people in towns and villages and around farm houses, and also where they have been propagated in bird droppings.  In the wild these lovely introductions from Europe persist in shallow soil over bedrock where there is not too much competition from other bushes and trees.

17 May finds me at the “Long Reach”, the longest stretch on the Rideau River without any locks.  The old Highway 16 north of Kemptville, Ontario, crosses the Rideau at Becketts Landing, and I’m at the north end of the bridge, backed into a vehicle track beside the guardrail on the east (downstream) side, painting the reflected sunset as the western sky behind me glows in even more vivid pink and orange.

I’m laying down the colours of the sky and river, having taken photos to paint the Basswood tree and its vines of Wild Grape, which join two trees like a necklace.  The river bank is lined with Basswoods here, with Honeysuckle and some other shrub with small white flowers at their feet – and more Grape vine of course.

A Great Blue Heron flies westward over its reflection, and suddenly the tail of a huge Carp lifts lazily out of the water and wags back and forth as its owner grubs the bottom, as unconcerned as a dabbling duck.

15 May finds us on Highway 101, north of Temiskaming, Quebec.  Fred has just marked the waypoint # 248 on the GPS, and Adam glances at me in the rear view mirror.  I am actually doing this painting in the back seat as we drive, knowing that there will be no time to stop to paint today – we’re on our way home. I have to raise my brush when the road gets too bumpy, but for the most part I’ve developed a technique of bracing the corner of the canvas on my lap board and one of the fingers of my painting hand on the edge of the canvas while holding the back of the stretcher firmly with my left hand – and applying paint between the bumps!  I am referring both to the real scene and to a photo I’ve downloaded to my laptop.

We have been making regular stops, however, to take specimens and mark the locations of stands of the tall reed Phragmites whenever we see them along the roadsides.  Fred hits the “mark” button, Adam stops the van, Fred gets out to collect a sample and Adam follows him with the camera while I write the habitat description.  Most of them appear to be the native type, with dark reddish nodes or joints along a smooth stem and a smaller, thinner banner of seed “glumes” than the rough stemmed invasive kind.  Some day the natives may be recognized as separate species, but for now they are all called Phragmites australis.  Despite the invasive having been in Canada for over 100 years they are only considered subspecies although they don’t seem to hybridize.  When we went west in 2000 before the difference between the natives and the invasives was formally recognized we saw differences among the natives which may require taxonomic recognition, and it’s going to be one of the goals of our summer travels to gather specimens so this situation can be studied.

There is no Phragmites in my scene – just a pleasantly curving, ordinary-looking stretch of road.  It was exciting to pass from the clay belt onto the shield. The first sign of that were peoples’ houses.  Some were built with round granite stones shaped by the glaciers, and some with flat broken pieces.  As I was still wondering where they had brought the stones from we passed over a height of land and there were granite outcroppings and erratics by the roadside.  More than enough rock for everyones’ houses!

It was also exciting as we came far enough south for the Sugar Maples to survive and saw hillsides pink and fluffy with flowers and young leaves.  I haven’t yet painted them, but their stout trunks and gnarly character made them worthy subjects for the Group of Seven.