#2200 "Wet Day in November"

It was pouring rain outside. The windows were streaked with rain. I wondered what I could do looking out the studio window across the field to the Laurentian forest on the Long Reach. There was only one way to see.

This is the view toward the southeast and the adjacent marble ridge. Marble ridges of rock are dominant in the Singleton Lake portion of the Frontenac Arch Biosphere. The ridges all run from southwest to the northeast where they submerge and transform the landscape into farmable soils. This granite and gneiss and schist bedrock dates to nearly a billion years ago when shifting plates of the earth's crust collided and pushed an enormous range of mountains into existence. These mountains ran southwest to northeast. Over hundreds of millions of years, the softer rock of the mountain peaks weathered away, leaving only the "roots" of the mountains; the durable rock that cradles Singleton Lake today. The northeast-southwest trend of the ridges and valleys belies the orientation of the long-eroded mountains. The shape of the lake is molded by the pattern of the slopes and valleys of the old mountain roots. While glaciers gouged and rounded and deepened and broadened the old valleys over millennia, the topography today is not unlike that of hundreds of millions of years ago.

The hardwoods have cloaked the slope. I liked the way the deciduous tree trunks mixed with the afternoon shadows. I had to be careful not to overwork this little canvas. I liked how the paint was going on the canvas. I typically try to make my art “perfect” but the perfection really lies in the imperfections and the bold strokes. Let them be. Perfection is something I strive for but never attain so I use that word with a huge grain of salt and a smirk.

For this and much more art, please click on Pixels. Thank you!