#0239 "The Birch"

A big, old and twisted white birch in December 1989, looking west on the Environment Canada property just south of the King City Radar site.

White birch is also known as the paper birch or canoe birch. Betula papyrifera is a short lived tree surviving sometimes only thirty year. Trees in colder climates can last a hundred years and I presume that would include this tree and the white birch in the Mowat Cemetery.

White birch prefer well drained and dry soils. It is a medium-sized deciduous tree typically reaching 20 metres (66 ft) tall with the largest white birches reaching to 130 feet (40 m) with a trunk up to 30 inches (76 cm) in diameter like the one I painted. Trees in a more open landscape like this one tend to develop multiple trunks with branches close to the ground. Trees within a forest are more likely to be straight with a single trunk. The yellow leaves of autumn had already been stripped from this very exposed tree on the Doppler Radar site.

I went for a walk after lunch and before I had to report back to a seminar. I was at the site to help with the training of staff. I invented some unique ways to look at Doppler Radar. Pattern recognition simplified the often complex Doppler signatures so that a meteorologist could deduce vertical profiles in wind, thermal advection and stability along with other important processes. Art can be a science and vice versa. Never stop learning...

This painting has gone missing and I have not been able to track it down... until now. I am not sure if this grand old birch tree is still surviving. I also painted these birch trees in #0242 "Gray Day Beech" and #0243 "January Birch".

#0140 "The Blue Boat"

From 1985... some people wonder how I paint so much. Don't let TV get in the way...
It was a quiet, foggy winter day at Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia. This is another favourite boat before it got radar tied up at the government wharf during lobster season in 1985. There was no advection fog over the land which was a treat but it was certainly clagged in just offshore. Nothing was moving. Even the birds were walking. The seagull on the top of the post was grounded by low ceilings and visibility - just kidding.

It was a beautiful day on the land and we were out for a drive and a meal at the Sou'Wester Restaurant in the AC Era - After Children. I painted exactly what I saw.

This would have been painted in the basement studio of our home in Fall River.

Bedford and the Atlantic Weather Centre was my fifth meteorological posting. We moved around a lot in the AC Era in order to see and experience as much of Canada and its weather and climate as possible before we put down roots. If you really wish to learn about the weather, go east young man. The weather was always changing and the art of a careful analysis of the science and the observations were key to understanding the meteorology and the concern of the day. I wish I had a few of those early analyses on hand plotted maps with coloured terrain. The weather of the eastern seaboard taught me a lot. I am still learning.

The Sou'Wester is celebrating its 50th Anniversary in 2018 and still going strong. We always return when we get back to Nova Scotia.

#0200 "The Watcher"

From March 1989... a long time ago in a place not so very far away...

This is Issie, my brother's Chesapeake Bay Retriever, out duck hunting on the opening day of the 1987 season, at the favourite pothole south of Kaladar, Ontario. Chesapeakes love the water and it doesn't matter how cold it is along as it is not frozen. They are strong minded and very intelligent creatures. Our own Chesapeake could tell where I was going by the clothes I was wearing. The wardrobe that she liked best were my play clothes which meant that she and I were going to muck around the farm and maybe even paint.

It was overcast with almost continuous rain and/or drizzle ... but it was still great to be out and we all had a great time watching the birds!

#0049 "Road to Phillipsville"

From Spring 1977...
The road between Toledo and Phillipsville, Ontario, is shaded by old maples on both sides for about a quarter mile section. The leaves were just beginning to unfurl in the spring of 1977. I wonder if that fence line is still there?

I had been painting for a year after the passing of my friend and mentor Mario Airomi. It was challenging to find any time to paint but it was an importnat effort for me. I was finding my way after marrying in 1975 and graduating from Queens and Honours Physics (Nuclear 1976). Life was very good with the new science and occupation of meteorology firmly underway as well. I was on a brief leave before reporting to my first posting at CFB Shearwater in Nova Scotia just east of Dartmouth on the Atlantic shore. I was driving down in the 1975 Malibu with just enough stuff to setup the apartment. Life was very good.

#0108 "Summer in Lunenburg Harbour"

From the fall of 1981...

This is one of the bays in Lunenburg Harbour, Nova Scotia during the summer of 1981. The cirrostratus was coming at us and the fair weather was not going to last.

Nova Scotia is one of those truly beautiful places with fresh paintings to be found around every corner. We loved the place and the people and the weather. I learned a lot of meteorology from those skies. The concept of three dimensional vorticity swirls and pervasive deformation came from those clouds although it took me several years to put those fluid dynamics into terms that I could teach.

I tried my very best in my Studio under the basement stairs. The few strokes required to paint the outboard motor on the small boat where fun. The kids were typically playing around me in my cramped quarters. My Dad really enjoyed this painting.

#41 Golden Daisy Mums

A blast from the past and the spring of 1976... I was into photographic realism at the time. It is a good way to learn.

This is a group of potted mums borrowed briefly from friends. The background is the blurred pattern of our university sofa. We needed something on the walls of our married student's apartment on Van Order Drive just north of West Campus, Queen's, so I painted the only thing I could find. This is one of Linda's favourites. We still have it.

#0061 "Deserted Dwelling"

Oils on canvas board - 18x24 - Winter 1977-1978

This was an abandoned homestead near Primrose on the King's Tour, Prince Edward Island during the fall of 1977. This is one of my favourite works - it just kind of flowed into place... At one time this was a proud homestead surrounded by fertile land. I wonder what happened to the generations of family that were raised there. The rough line was still straight and strong but no one lived there anymore.

A deck of front lit stratocumulus filled the sky. Pale blue sky peeked through holes in the cloud revealing no layers of system cloud above. Some virga wafted downward from the more vigourous cumulus elements.

#2065 "Summer Cirrus"

I was out for a mid summer paddle in my kayak. The camera was almost in the water in order to get this ultimate in very low perspectives. I was holding the camera over the side of the kayak and guessing that it was being held horizontally. Ripples along the far western shore and in the western basin of Singleton Lake caused most of the reflections from the sloped sides of those tiny waves to be directed from the sky. The cloud colours can be seen in this rippled reflection but not the shape of the individual clouds. The lake in the shelter of Point Paradise within the eastern basin of the lake was calm. This mirrored surface reflected the tops of the trees on the distant shoreline as well as the clouds in the sky. The taller white pines left of centre along that shoreline identify the point of land that is almost an island in the west basin. This is the point that Farmer Singleton rowed from twice a day to milk the cows that ranged in the pastures of our property. I painted that point in #1714 "White Pine Island" which was based on #1713 "December Morn". The tall white pine on the far right supported the nest of the Singleton osprey.

The clouds always have a story to tell but this time it was enough just to enjoy them. However here is what little that I know for certain. Their were several layers of cirrus in this sunset sky but I could not even be certain which layer was higher or lower than the other. I made an educated guess if the cloud elements were assumed to be the same size but in truth, I cannot be certain. With a knowledge of how the wind changes direction with height one can deduce whether (pun intended) the temperature the next day will be warmer or colder. If the winds turns clockwise with height the next day is apt to be warmer. If the winds turn counter-clockwise with height then temperatures will be colder. The spacing of the cloud bands are also directly related to the wind speed within that layer. Wider spacing means bigger gravity waves and stronger winds just like the waves on a lake.

I forget what really happened. In reality it is just another beautiful sunset that I felt needed to be painted. If I had to make a guess though I feel that the winds were backing with height. The winds seemed to turn counter-clockwise right from the northerly breezes over Singleton to the level where the jets fly. Note that the east basin of Singleton stays calm in a northerly flow while the west basin is stirred up by the wind funnelling down Lyndhurst Creek. This would indicate that the next day was going to dawn just a bit cooler.

The graphic that I made has the red cirrus and winds at the lowest level followed by the yellow level wind. The brown winds where a bit higher and the southwesterly purple winds were the highest. Regardless what I happened I had a lot of fun with this painting.

#2067 "Big Joe Mufferaw Pines"

This is based on #1784 "Mattawa Pines". I really liked the smaller painting a lot and thought that it deserved a larger format. When one starts a new painting you need to feel aspirations of making it your new favourite - better than anything else who have ever done before. You hope that every brush stroke you have made in your life up to that point, were all just steps to this new canvas and the brush strokes you would soon be applying to it. It is good if not essential to have these dreams. Sometimes dreams come true. Sometimes the canvas can become a nightmare. Every canvas puts your credibility as an artist on the line. That's OK. This canvas went really well and I had a lot of fun with the very thick and buttery oils.

The story behind this scene follows:

My son and I and a group of new friends were paddling down the Mattawa like Big Joe Mufferaw in mid June 2016. This view was from the first day is in the eastern end of Trout Lake outside North Bay. It had rained hard the night before but the dawn brought overcast stratus and some light drizzle - perfect. We took the southern route and had the time of our lives! There was enough water to run all of the rapids except of course for the major falls.

Big Joe Mufferaw was a French Canadian folk hero from the Ottawa Valley, perhaps best known today as the hero of a song by Stompin' Tom Connors. Like Paul Bunyan, he made his living chopping down trees. The name is also sometimes spelled Muffero, Muffera, Muffraw, and Montferrand. The last spelling is more common among francophones; anglophones who had trouble with it used one of the other spellings.

In addition to being the subject of many Paul Bunyan-esque tall tales, Mufferaw is sometimes enlisted as a defender of oppressed French Canadian loggers in the days when their bosses were English-Canadians and their rivals for work were Irish-Canadians. In one story, Big Joe was in a Montreal bar, where a British army major named Jones was freely insulting French Canadians. After Big Joe beat the major, he bellowed, "Any more insults for the Canadians?" I would have liked Big Joe a lot!