Group of 7 day

After a very poor showing of snow this winter we finally got a bit of a blast of white stuff, enough to make the trees outside my window look like a painting from the Group of 7. It's somewhat fitting in that I am reading a fascinating little book "A Painter's Country", the autobiography of A.Y. Jackson. Jackson was one of the founders of the Group and though I knew his paintings I confess I knew little about him as a painter or simply person. I highly recommend this book if you can find it or get it from a library (my copy is a used paperback from the '60's); it is one I can hardly put down.


And so to wake up this morning and see the pines and spruces outside my window as were they painted by A.Y. or his colleagues makes me feel like I fell into and woke inside the book. A very pleasant feeling indeed.

Tofino Long Beach 06 / 10

With the games on in Vancouver, my thoughts go a bit further out the coast to the other side of Vancouver Island, to Tofino and Long Beach. I've been fortunate to get out there many times over the years, the last being 06 when I did this sketch of a sunlit log on Long Beach. I wasn't satisfied with it and it remained in a pile of papers until today when after an email from a friend out on the island I came across it again. With nothing to lose except perhaps the memory I threw paint all over it trying to get the feeling of the day when the sky would break open and shafts of sunlight would hit parts of the beach. So what started on the beach in 06 got finished in snowy Guelph in 10. Not bad. I've been slower. (so now I want to get back out there!)

River walk today

Today was one of those glorious winter days with brilliant sky and luminous shadows that makes you love winter. As I walked our dog along the banks of the Speed River here in town this morning I was captivated by the beauty of the shadows under the pines; the way the colour changes from cold to warm blues as shadows pass under the trees to the open fields beyond; and how the water, where it still flows openly in the place where the Speed meets the Eramosa it has an elusive darkness in a colour that still eludes me.

When I got home I took some scrap strips of watercolour paper and played.

Bernini at the AGO - pencil studies

Yesterday at the AGO my fascination once again with Bernini's crucifixion. It's not the religiousness of it, rather the poetry of his form.