I can’t paint in the van as it rocks with the passing of each truck, so I sit on a folding stool beside the open door with my subject on the seat and my water bottle in the armrest. While he waits for me to finish with the flowers, Fred gets the Peterson wildflower guide to look up the name of this plant. It turns out to be Hairy Willowherb, with no mention its occurrence in the Maritime Provinces, so he plugs in our internet stick and does a web search on “Epilobium hirsutum” and “Nova Scotia”. The top hit is a Facebook page calling for pictures of rare Nova Scotia plants for an electronic field guide. He writes to them and the Nature Nova Scotia list, from which Christopher Majka replies that our record is 15.4 km from the northeasternmost of four known Nova Scotia records of this plant.
25 September finds me in the Halifax Public Gardens with three participants of my plein air painting workshop. Shaded by a Robur Oak tree planted by King George and Queen Elizabeth in 1939, a statue of Ceres, goddess of grain stands poised with hand out as if she were once holding a sheaf of grain, and attracts my attention as her slight form is an understatement in all the diversity of shapes and colours in the garden. Diana and Flora complete the set of three statues which were bequeathed by Chief Justice Sir William young in 1887.
It is a mild misty grey day with a few drops of rain that had us packing our paintings away temporarily in an attempt to shelter in the large Victorian bandstand, but its gate was locked. The afternoon is lightening somewhat and the sun comes out for a while, pleasing the wedding parties that have come here to have photos taken. Every time I notice a group of people it is a different wedding party, with brides maids in a different colour than the group before them.
The citizens of Halifax seem to enjoy promenading in their Public Gardens just as much as they did when it was opened to celebrate Confederation in 1876. There is a pond and a brook and a fountain and ducks which no-one is allowed to feed, so that they are more cute than nuisance – and a special plot of labelled Dahlias and a collection of Rhododendrons, and a tropical collection and a Horticultural Hall. I didn’t see a vegetable garden, however, which the earlier citizens had been very proud of, storing their produce in the Hall for the winter.
I would like to store some of this balmy seaside air for the winter – fresh, moist and gentle. I raise my brush to take a deep breath of it and savour an afternoon of painting in the Halifax Public Gardens.
23 September finds us having new tires installed on both van and trailer at Miller Tirecraft in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. While we wait I sit on a pile of cement curbing at the back of the lot to paint the bridge to Halifax past a pile of big old tractor tires at the brink of a steep slope above more industrial park and the harbour.
I can see vehicles crossing the bridge with their windsheilds twinkling in the sun. My eyes are shaded by a hat and everything is brightly backlit. The surface of the harbour glares brightly to the right of my view.
Painting the worn surfaces of the huge tires reminds me of some boulders that have been a prominent part of some of my paintings – boulders moved by glaciers and left there as part of the landscape for a long time. But here the moving force is vehicular, and it leaves piles of things as massive as boulders. When I mentioned this comparison to Fred, he said that from what he could see from the face of the slope, this place was established on a moraine of buried tires, interlaid with crushed rock and gravel. The current pile, however, is probably waiting to be picked up for approved environmentally safe disposal.
It is a breezy day, and the wind at my back feels cold when the occasional cloud covers the sun. Queen Anne’s lace and Goldenrod are finished blooming, and so is the Black Knapweed whose heads are dark and bristly in the foreground to the left, but it and the White Sweet-clover have a few residual blooms. A Tansy flower is still knobby and bright yellow in the lower right of my painting. The rest of Fred’s plant account is as follows:
21 September finds us looking up into the crown of a 400 year old Hemlock tree in Kejimkujik National Park, Nova Scotia. Lying on my back with my head propped against the railing of the boardwalk, this is the first time I’ve painted up into a tree. The top of the trunk fades into a blur of grey branches in the halo of soft sunlit needles against a blue sky. I am guessing that the tree may be 40-50m tall. Its branches are stout, curved and twisted more like an Oak than a Hemlock,
Higher twigs are whispy with Usnea lichen, moving with the breeze like downy feathers. Lower on the trunk the bark is ‘painted’ in patches and splashes with softly weathered grey-green crustose lichen. There is none of the frilly Lobaria lichen that festoons the trunks of some of the other trees. Most of the lower branches are broken, and a section of broken branch as thick as my leg hangs in crotch of another branch and sways in the breeze. A Blue Jay flies soundlessly overhead to one of the upper branches, and then away again.
Not shown in my painting, a large side branch juts out horizontally and then rises vertically in the shape of a conventional Conifer on one side of the crown.
Other old Hemlocks stand spaced about 15 – 20 metres from each other, but the smaller Maples and Birches grow closer, crowded by Spruce and Pine which actually push at their trunks with needled branches. Moose Maple seedlings spread their flat leaves above the forest floor. Pillows of dry fluffy moss cover old dead wood and Wintergreen raises its hard shiny leaves in clusters.
As I paint Fred discovers three Redbacked Salamanders and a few very small slugs, Arion and the native Pallifera in the process of turning flakes of Hemlock, rotten branches, and curls of Birch bark. He replaces all cover turned and does not disturb the rotten logs. He reports that everything looks very well processed here – slug droppings, and tracks gnawed into the cap of a Russula mushroom – but we would have to come during or after a rain to meet the larger slugs and snails.
19 September finds us enjoying the panoramic view from the viewpoint on Nova Scotia Highway 358 that is locally named the “Blomidon Look-off”. The road climbs fairly steeply and without switchbacks, along the south east side of the backward-hooked Blomidon Penninsula jutting into the Minas Channel, and now we look over a flat patchwork of woods, fields, roads and buildings as evening darkens the landscape and the moon rises, nearly full.
I paint quickly, sitting on my caddy against the guardrail, heavy sweater and jacket against the cold breeze to my back. underpainting red ochre for the landscape, a complex greenish purple for water, and bands of dull purple cloud and pale evening sky colours above that. Stroking in the dark patches of forest and skewed rectangular fields, I realize that I will again have to finish my painting from photographs, as lights begin to twinkle in the distance and I’m having difficulty in distinguishing the colours on my palette. Strangely enough, after I’ve packed up and return to the van, the colours in my painting, as I hold it up, still match the scene, which has darkened even further.
15 September finds me admiring a lush meadow of autumn wildflowers and a Hawthorn bush that overhangs the east side of the brook downstream from Bev’s place near Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia. This is a Bailey bridge of steel girder-style railings, and the thin asphalt paving is cracking over the diagonal boards of the roadbed.
The brook is wide here, slow flowing as the high tide in the Annapolis River pushes back against it. It’s as still as a mirror – only under the bridge can we see the water move. The forest on the west bank is mostly deciduous, the Ash, Maple, Cherries, and Birch crowding down the bank as if to view their reflections.
The textures are rich, begging to be painted, and the colours glow in the evening light which breaks through after our afternoon rain storm. Out in the middle, near the Hawthorns is a reddish patch of Black Knapweed, dark, narrow-leavered and rusty-headed. Blue Jays call across the creek and a young Song Sparrow practices a partial song. A single Spring Peeper pipes out a series of clear calls.
Now it really has gotten too dark to paint. Just as we cross back over the bridge, a Beaver drags two spreading threads of silver wake across the black reflection of dark trees on the downstream side.
For sale at Burlington Art Centre $425 framed
10 September finds us in the quaint town of Annapolis Royal, in a parking lot overlooking the Annapolis River beside the historical Fort Anne.
The tide is going down, revealing red mud flats and turning the river pink under dramatic evening clouds. Buildings are visible across the river in the town of Granville Ferry which serves a military base, under the long silhouette of the richly forested hills.
I am having fun with this painting, as the river is making long smooth strokes of dull purplish pink with hints of pale greenish-blue. I must work quickly though, as every time I look up from my painting its appearance is changed. When we arrived the river was strikingly striped by mud-pink, foam, and strips of slick upwelling, its appearance changing every few minutes and I have had to paint fast, but as the Sun sets and overcast moves in, the water becomes more unicolor. My photos will help me to finish it.
Fred comes back from the boardwalk where he had been poking about at the top of the mudflats as I sit painting in the front of the van where I can get the best view. He reports that he “found the top of the tide was a fine drift of grassy bits, then there were piled broken rocks liberally dotted with Littorina littorea, and a slope down past many Mytilis shells to a level where living ones are abundant, blackening the surface, with little Crepidula and more Periwinkles. Then there was a mudflat onto which it didn’t seem wise to venture. The whole slope is dotted with Mya shells.
Arriving at Bev’s place yesterday was much like driving into her blog – in addition to actually being able to hear the high-piched voices of her collies from the house, and feel the cool soft grass of her lawn, and stand in the shade of the towering Locust trees.
7 September finds me perched atop a white granite boulder, near Crawford Bridge, Nova Scotia, my knees and paint box crowding a Chokeberry bush, to paint a little Spruce tree in the lee of another boulder. It has a mop-like crown of little branches each competing to be the new leader, and at its feet are several younger Spruces doing their best to grow straight and true with lots of light but very little nutrient.
I had at first thought that the clearcut was pretty recent, but the wood is very weathered, suggesting that it’s a least a decade old. The exposed soil, barren wood, and trampled ground have not been re-covered by moss. In a rich soil the birch and Maple sprouts would be only a couple of years old, but here, with so much rock and so little soil, the forest was its own nutrient bank, and between the removal of nutrients in wood, and the massive effux of dissolution and erosion that accompanies logging (there is no original organic soil present) those nutrients are gone, and the plants are growing very slowly.
This is a challenging painting, as there is so much happening – so much chaos and disorganization and shapes coming and going every which way. I underpainted it in burnt sienna to provide immediacy and contrast, to enhance the appearance of busyness and confusion… and now I have to pull the painting together in spite of it. That’s partly what’s challenging! I find that I’m often choosing the hardest route to completion of a painting by my choice of colour for underpainting, but if I can pull it off, I’m glad I did it that way. It would be boring for both me and you if I just did easy paintings.
There’s so much grey and green here that if I just made the underpainting one of my purplish or blueish greys, with the other dominant colour being that undernourished-spruce green, I’d have to try to find all the bits of burnt sienna in the scene to give it some life. I’ve chosen instead to start with the burnt sienna. All the way through the process of painting this scene, the hot, lively colour of the underpainting is still here to provide excitement, and it’s my job to cover it up with spruce and bark and wood and rock colours until the painting works.
When the sun comes out full, it’s very hot out here on my rock. As the afternoon progresses most of the cloud that I first painted behind the main Spruce, lightens, and the day becomes “partly cloudy”. This place is only about 3 kilometres from the woods at Brandy Spring, but it feels to me like a different world. The word for world WAS forest….
Fred notes: “Coming up from our old-bridge campsite is a track up the clay, gravel and rock slope into a clearcut with Black Chokeberry and Low-Bush Blueberry (both of which seem to have had their tops bitten off by Bears earlier in the year), and especially Kalmia angustifolia (Sheep Laurel), springing up around the white granite boulders. There’s a scattering of bracken and various weedy herbs, as well. I later collected a tiny Alnus (Alder) just below the boulder from which the painting was done. I had scouted this slope earlier, and been impressed by the pavements of crushed wood among the boulders, the sparseness of the shrub cover, and the upspringing Birches, with evident hybridization between Betula populifolia (Gray Birch) and Betula papyrifera (Paper Birch)”.
For sale at Burlington Art Centre $425 framed
6 September finds me gazing up into a steep forest of mossy boulders, stout Yellow Birch, Red Maple, Spruce, and Hemlock. Some of the larger boulders are the size of a small house, and all of the smaller ones are entirely carpeted with moss. Exposed tree roots are also mossy, as are the huge trunks of fallen trees and the mounds of nurse logs. Dark green, leathery fronds of Polypody feather the sides of mossy boulders, and yellow-green Dryopteris ferns grow knee-high where they can find a bit of well-rotted wood between mossy rocks. This scene continues all the way up the slope.
We pulled into a short loop of old highway that parallels Nova Scotia #357 yesterday at dusk, and when I stepped out of the trailer this morning I walked along the edge of the woods to identify a trickling sound, and found water flowing from a dark space beneath a large rock which is hand lettered in weathered red paint, BRANDY SPRING.
The water falls into a depression too shallow for dipping, but after a brief sparkle over pebbles it collects in a small pool and trickles from that into the grassy ditch, spongy with Sphagnum and laced with Cranberries, where it shortly sinks into the ground. The forested slope continues on the other side of the highway, down to a slow reach of the Musquodoboit (pronounced “Muskadobbit”) River.
Water from Brandy Spring is clear and pale golden – the colour of watered-down brandy. It tastes fresh, clean, and cold – not soft on the tongue, but with a sort of mineral edge to it, a rocky sharpness. The colour will be from rain that has soaked through leaves and moss and the spongy web of tree roots over granite. I filled all of our water containers.
We have not disturbed the forest here by turning any cover, so we don’t know what slugs or salamanders may be here, but Fred noted “autumn calling” by Green Frogs and Peepers.
