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#2970 "Georgian Bay Smoky Sunset"
20 x 16 by 3/4 depth stretched canvas (inches)
Started 9:30 am Monday, August 11th, 2025 |
The smoky sun was still about 25 minutes from sinking below the northwestern horizon. Sunset for Parry Sound was listed at 8:45 pm on Sunday, August 3, 2025 (EDT) when my friend Cam captured this inspiration. The Boreal Forest was still an inferno during the hot and dry summer of 2025. Smoke was encircling the Northern Hemisphere like a crown of thorns. The visibility was further reduced, and I could almost smell the smoke in the image. The reality of the fumes was just outside the Studio.
Artists can record reality so that the truth might be less perishable for future generations to appreciate. The
Little Ice Age, a period of cooler global temperatures between 1300 and 1850, is well-documented in art, particularly in the form of landscape paintings from the Netherlands and Belgium. These paintings, often depicting winter scenes, offer a visual record of that era's extreme weather conditions and their impact on daily life.
Researchers deduced that a sudden spike in volcanic eruptions, combined with a prolonged reduction in solar activity, caused temperatures to drop by as much as 2 degrees Celsius. Reports of "dust veils" hovering over the Northern Hemisphere made the sun glow a pale red.
It was already a different world when Tom Thomson painted those skies around Parry Sound in the summer of 1914. The impacts of the Industrial Revolution were clearly evident. Newspaper clippings even warned of the dangers. The following March 1, 1912, article in Popular Mechanics linked coal burning to global temperatures.
Sadly, the article was overly optimistic that the impacts were still "
a few centuries" away in the future...
Just a century later, the Earth is well into the verification stage of those early predictions of global warming. Global average temperatures had already surpassed 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels in 2024. "One Point Five" had been a line drawn in the sand by world scientists as being something that humanity dare not cross.
Innovations, including carbon capture, EVs, windmills, recycling, solar panels, living off the grid are simply greenwashing to make those implementing them feel good. The Keeling curve (left below) shows that efforts to abate the increase of atmospheric carbon have been quite ineffective.
Current atmospheric carbon levels (
right above) were last witnessed 16 million years ago. Humans are racing toward annihilation with Global temperature increases of 3.1 Celsius likely by
December 31, 2100 - the end of this century - the
Century of Fire.
As I completed painting another observation of the smoky summer of 2025, I heard "I'm A Stranger Here" by the Five Man Electrical Band from my vintage 1977 Radio Shack stereo. Those telling lyrics were released in 1973.
Don't you know?
You had it made.
You were living in paradise.
But take it from one who knows.
Who knows the gates of Heaven can close.
I only pray that you take my advice
Because Paradise won't come twice."
The group released an updated version of "Signs" in 2014, titled "Signs 4 Change", to highlight the ecological problem of climate change, partnering with Friends of the Earth (FOE) for that release.
All kinds of artists, and not just writers and painters, were well aware of what humans were doing to the planet. The impacts were observable and as obvious as the science.
I had already decided to paint this skyscape on Tuesday, August 5th, 2025, which would have been the 148th anniversary of Tom Thomson's birthday in Pickering. I needed to loosen up my brushwork again after painting two very detailed birds, the Wood Duck Drake and a male Eastern Towhee!
The colour of the "clear-blue" Georgian sky was tainted brown. I was very careful to accurately depict that colour, although light can play tricks on the eye. Subtle shades can be fleeting, although a similar colour was outside my Studio for reference!
Some of the steps in creating #2970 "Georgian Bay Smoky Sunset" are included in the following collage of images.
Note that northerly flows behind "
cool fronts" bring the smoke plumes to the surface, where they reduce both the air quality and ground-level visibility. The impacts of the Boreal Forest fires tend to stay "
closer to home" in those northerly, descending flows. Southerly flows ride the isentropic surfaces to higher levels, which keeps the smoke aloft where the stronger winds quickly distribute the pollution around the Northern Hemisphere. For more science behind how air moves in the atmosphere, see
Isentropic Surfaces - Science and Art Merges. The breeze had to be northerly in #2970 "
Georgian Bay Smoky Sunset" for the horizontal visibility to be reduced as depicted in the painting.
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| #2970 "Georgian Bay Smoky Sunset" about halfway done on the Studio easel my Dad built. |
The science of global warming has been known since the 1800s, but those with real power are willfully not listening. There is still a lot of money to be made from carbon by the powerful few.
Abraham Lincoln's famous 1863 Gettysburg Address phrase summarizes the ideal of "
government of the people, by the people, for the people". But democracy can be easily perverted, even bought. The only requirement is simple criminal greed and a huge lack of empathy for everything on the only planet we will ever know. Replace "
people" with "
corporations" or, more simply in Canada, "
Big Oil". Then ponder why so many Canadian Senators have additional lucrative careers on the board of directors of multi-national corporations. Also wonder where nature and a clean and healthy environment fit into this picture. Spoiler alert: Nature is not even considered in our greed-based, extractive and exploitive economy.
We are now experiencing the significant first stages of the new norm in the climate change world:
wildfires; glacial runoff and melt, fresh water scarcity, changed synoptic weather patterns, ocean current disruption, ocean acidity, sea level rise, etc.
Unless significant de-growth starts now, the "overshoot" of continuing to consume the remaining fossil fuels will cause cataclysmic human suffering, starvation, wars, etc. Not to mention the impacts on nature and the Sixth Mass Extinction. The timing of such events may be unknown, but certainly by 2100; and maybe several decades earlier.
See https://www.facebook.com/reel/625160130650610 for a very illustrative animation on how CO2 is distributed in the atmosphere. The layer that protects life on Earth below the Kármán line (about 100 km high) is comparatively not even the thickness of the skin of an apple
The facts could not be clearer. They are obvious in the colours of the sky. Having presented and written about this many, many times, starting in the 1980s. I must return to my easel and attempt to remain surrounded by nature. I will try not to bring this up again, although the criminal and political crimes against Earth and all therein are concerning.
Warmest regards and keep your paddle in the water,
Phil Chadwick
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