11 September 2009
Canada: Ontario: Ottawa-Carleton Region: Ottawa: Carlingwood parkinglot. 31G/5, UTM 18T 439703 5024464 45.37106N 75.77040W. TIME: 1828-1945. AIR TEMP: 18 ca, clear, calm, sunset. HABITAT: urban mall parkinglot. OBSERVER: Aleta Karstad Schueler, Frederick W. Schueler, Adam Zieleman. 2009/227/l, visit tinted ink drawing of scene looking E. 18:30 We have parked the “rig” (2001 Mercedes ML, hauling Boler trailer) here while Fred and Adam take Adam’s car to deliver the hatchling Painted Turtles from Algonquin Park to the Storeys for a filming project. After the rush of packing from home, it is nice to have a “breather” in which to look around me with the eyes of an artist.
At first I thought I’d be searching for a scrap of something wild. The young Maple trees that have been planted for future shade didn’t look terribly interesting at a distance, but before I got around to investigating one of them, a movement caught my eye. A woman in a pink coat was waiting, rather restlessly, for a bus, standing here and there in and out of the long glass bus shelter, reading the sign that lists the busses and times, so I thought that if I began a sketch of the scene, with a grocery store and apartment buildings in the background, that perhaps I could capture the lines of her as she paused again at the sign.
As I laid out the lines of cars and buildings, a gaggle of girls appeared at the bus stop, talking and gesturing, leaning on the newspaper boxes, so I sketched them into the scene in ink, before turning to the cars.
19:45 I was just about finished with the white car when it drove away, my eyes running after its tail lights. Just as Fred and Adam returned, with chinese food, the sky suddenly became suffused with pink streaks and a hazy purplish blush, so I got out my watercolours, and the sketch became a painting. . . partially. I stopped short of trying to capture the three or four minutes of glory for the apartment building as its windows glowed orange at the quickly sinking sun, as it would have distracted from the colours of what is happening at the bus stop.
10 September 2009
Canada: Ontario: Grenville County: Oxford-on-Rideau: Bishops Mills, Middle Creek bridge. 31B/13, UTM 18TVE46 442.7 690 44.87423N 75.70516W. TIME: 1830-1945. AIR TEMP: 22 ca, clear, calm. HABITAT: riffles of slow creek at bridge in rural village. OBSERVER: Aleta Karstad Schueler. AKS09Sep101830/a, visit first daily oil painting of the 30 Years Later Project. 18:30 Arriving at the bridge, the sun low in the northwest, my scene, chosen in advance of seeing, it, does not offer any strong contrasts that would help with composition, so I choose a tall thin Poplar, arching high over the creek, to brace against the otherwise gentle, traditional scene. I choose yellow ochre for underpainting.
The creek is lower now than it’s been all summer, though only a few stones are exposed. It used to dry down to isolated pools every summer, with Orconectes virilis (Northern Crayfish) huddling in the moist, air-filled “rooms” they’d made under the large flat stones. This has been the third wet summer in a row, and the wettest of them all, with spring freshet levels in mid-summer. The riffles upstream reflect the evening sky, and a thin lazy trail of bubbles winds its way toward the bridge.
There must be a barbeque at the Robinsons’ new house. A blend of laughter and happy chatter floats down the street to me – the sane music of voices young and old that filled summer evenings of my childhood. As I paint, the Lousleys walk their old Border Collie across the bridge heading southward. A woman who looks familiar greets me as she walks home from the barbeque. A Ceryle alceon (Belted Kingfisher) rattles and swoops low over the creek, rising steeply to my arching Poplar. . . a few moments later its call and dive is reflected by a second Kingfisher and the two fly off together. No sound or sign of other birds, and no frog voices either.
19:45 My light has gotten dusky. The sun has left the tree tops, and I’m painting fast, putting the dark values in the creek, and noting the sky-reflecting lily pads nearby. As I wrap up my wet brushes, the Lousleys return, sympathizing with my loss of daylight for painting. I will have to put a few finishing touches on it at home.
Tinkle like gold coins
Through the Canada Plums.
The raspy castanet of the Wren clears them all away,
And then the August Sun rises to flicker
Dappling gold coins
on the tent fly.
A Mourning dove’s low wood wind begins,
A soft slow pendulum for the day.
31 August, 07:30 Bishops Mills, Ontario
Sitting on my paint box in front of the tent, looking into the tangle of Buckthorn and Canada Plum that thicket about the twin trunks of a tall Manitoba Maple this morning, at about the time that we heard the Goldfinches swarm through yesterday morning and I wrote my poem.
No Goldfinches this morning. A brown and white striped bird chips once or twice and peers at me from within the shady tangle, muted against the sharply contrasted background of bright green-gold backlit foliage and the crisp dark filigree of the twigs and shaded leaves among dark sinuous branches.
Pondering the colour of the underpainting for a while, I decide on a misty, shady blue-green. So the cool dawn shadows will be a base for early morning illumination among the leaves. When the trunks and stems are all discovered and drawn in sepia I stop to take a photo to record this early stage. Then I lay in the brightest, clearest backlit yellows and yellow-greens – some as areas, some as individual points of light.
Fred comes up the path, bringing my morning tea, stands beside me for a while, and points at a Redstart on a dead branch to the left of my scene. I have never seen a live Redstart! Mine have always been hypothetical and potential Redstarts, improbably black and red on the pages of field guides. Looking up at it, the undertail coverts are a bright buffy yellow and the rest of the pattern of red-orange and black is too complex for my mind’s eye to capture.
Later, as I toil away, deciding how leaves may be allowed to obscure certain branches, the Redstart appears in the “livingroom” of my thicket, flips its wings, cocks its sharp black head and is gone. I almost never include birds or mammals in my plein air paintings – unless they become a living part of the scene as I paint it. This bird did, but the painting remains a view of the thicket and I hope it’s obvious to the viewer that the Redstart was there for only a moment.
There’s no two ways about it – I just have not done a journal page recently enough to post. But I have been sketching in nature – an oil sketch, on a 4 x 6 inch canvas. On Thursday, August 13, my husband Fred and I returned to the “Schoolhouse Bridge” over the Tay River, about 20 kilometres west of Perth in eastern Ontario, so that I could do a quick oil sketch, looking upstream beneath the bridge. This is one of the 27 spots along the Tay River that we surveyed last week for crayfish and fresh water mussels – and hope as I might, I didn’t find any time for painting or sketching except this hour and a half in the early evening of the second-last day.
The pink flowers in my painting are the blossoms of Decadon, our favorite river-edge bush, that sends arching branches into the water to root their tips and spring up again – watery branches swollen and spongy and fringed with roots. During the course of my painting, a Muskrat made several trips from behind the far corner of the bridge, across the scene, carrying large bunches of bright green vegetation to the Decadon bush, and backed in beneath it.
This is one of my favorite plein air oils, painted in the fall of 1992, while sitting in the moss in a bog south of Cochrane, Ontario. It took two afternoons. We were camped nearby on a closed loop of the old highway.
Bogs are exhillarating places for me – the sharp acidic smell of the sphagnum, the clean cushiony texture of it, the rich contrasting reds, oranges and greens of the moss itself… the visual excitement of the tracery of Cranberry over the sphagnum. The micro-topography of a bog is interesting, in contrast to its flat aspect from a distance – it is always hummocky, and the little pools of black water are like reflective jewels in settings of brocade and filigree. The stunted aspect of the trees, and to realize that they can be centuries old and no taller than myself, is very personal somehow. I admire the tenacity and hardiness of the few plant species that can survive in bogs – and that most of them are evergreen. The plants that survive in the sterile acidic matrix of Sphagnum can only do so by special adaptations, like those who keep microrhizal fungi on their roots, to digest the moss and release nutrients – and the exotic-looking Pitcher Plants which collect their own food by drowning insects. The simplicity of there being so few species that I can know them all, is also personal. Where else can you be and know the names of everything you see around you?
