#3025 "Cousin Island with Light"

#3025 "Cousin Island with Light"
10 X 9 inches, oils on stretched canvas.
Started 12:15 pm Monday, June 29th, 2026

Trees, rocks, water and clouds comprise most of the subject matter that I enjoy painting. Each one is unique and a new challenge. The raw elements speak to me of the nature of Canada. 

There are a lot of these inspirational scenes around Parry Sound. I could spend several lifetimes within the Parry Sound Archipelago.  Those 30,000 islands comprise the world's largest freshwater archipelago, on the eastern shore of Georgian Bay. The islands are all that remains of a billion-year-old mountain range which once matched the scale of the modern Himalayas. There are dozens of those islands already recorded in my art, leaving only about 29,950 islands to go. I had better get busy!

The meteorology of this particular painting was described already in #3024 "Cousin Islands Flags". I will focus more on the history of the area, which I find equally fascinating. 

The body of water that gives the town its name was surveyed and named by Captain Henry Bayfield while his crew surveyed the area between 1822 and 1825. In geography, a "sound" is a large, wide water inlet that is deeper than a "bight" and wider than a "fjord". Captain Bayfield wished to honour the Arctic explorer Sir William Edward Parry.  

In 1857, the modern townsite was established near the Ojibwa village of Wasauksing ("shining shore") at the mouth of the Seguin River. The developing town assumed the name of the surveyed "sound". Frankly,  I prefer the indigenous name for the area. 

Parry Sound slumped a bit in economic activity shortly after World War I, when J.R. Booth built the rival town of Depot Harbour on nearby Parry Island. An accidental fire destroyed that town on August 14, 1945. Parry Sound recovered. 

The Georgian Bay area is spectacular. I paddled it a lot in the 1980s and 90s but not nearly enough. Tom Thomson and members of the Group of Seven painted in the area around 1914.

Now, back to some interesting meteorology from a different point of view - looking eastward instead of southward, as in #3024 "Cousin Islands Flags". 

This painting was looking in the same direction that both the trees and the clouds were tipped.  As a result, the lean of the pines and the arch of the upwind flank of the cumulus are not obvious in this composition. The gravity waves included in the upper right are within the anticyclonic companion portion of the deformation zone and are sufficient to place the scene within the weather. I had better describe those cirrus bands in more detail. 

This graphic is rotated so that the orientation
of the deformation zone matches that displayed
 in the Water Vapour image below. The gravity
waves would be oriented southwest to northeast, 
and perpendicular to the deformation zone. 

Parry Sound was under the anticyclonic companion of the warm conveyor belt. That portion of the deformation zone downstream from the col is associated with weaker ascent or even descent, especially if the flow has a southward component. The cirrus cloud tends to be less extensive and thinner, making the gravity waves more apparent. Note that the upper winds become more parallel to the linear confluent asymptotes, further away from the col. The gravity waves must be perpendicular to the linear deformation zone. Bands of clouds separated by blue sky tend to be obvious even to the casual observer. Similar gravity wave patterns within the thicker layers of cirrus associated with the cyclonic companion would be hard to see - cloud bands within layers of cloud...

Subtle cloud features allow an accurate placement of the scene within the weather pattern of the day. The story and interpretation must always be true if you paint what you see. Nature is always right!

For this and much more art, click on Fine Art America or go straight to the Collections. Here is the new Wet Paint Collection. Thank you so very much for reading, and stay well!

Warmest regards, and keep your paddle in the water,

Phil Chadwick