It is October 22. I haven't made a blog entry since early August. Mostly I've been working in the studio which isn't too exciting for anyone but me.

In August Olex and Igor Wlasenko and I made a canoe expedition to Tom Thomson Lake in Algonquin Provincial Park.

Because our journey was on short notice we were unable to acquire a permit to camp on Tom Thomson Lake both nights of our three day, two night homage. We paddled to and stayed at Little Doe Lake and set our first camp. Igor combed the shore for far wood.

We spent the second night on Tom Thomson Lake. The young men had paddled ahead to scout. I met an old man, 10 years older than me, he is 73. We paddled slowly and made our second portage into Thomson Lake. He told me about a memorial on Opeongo Lake about 20 minutes of longitude east and 5 minutes north latitude of where we were.

It read, he said, "One violent act of nature, then God."

I don't expect poetry in the back country paddling in parallel but I am pretty sure he capitalized god.

 

On the way out, at Canoe Lake, we stopped at the art nouveau plaque of the Tom Thomson memorial.

 

SPACE

 

 

Later in August Mary and I took the caravan to Pennsylvania.

I found a bridge to sketch. It isn't a sketch of the bridge, it is a sketch of decay and repair and decay of repair for a difficult passage of LandSea07. The renewal of old structures and sometimes the re-functioning of them is important to my vision of civilization.

I liked the arch of the bridge and the reflection of the arcs in the water. I painted flowers and foliage to reflect the reflections of arches but, it isn't plain to see.

In early October I took the caravan north to the La Cloche Mountains and set up a base camp.

Three days later, on schedule, Tony Cooper and Todd Tremeer arrived. We had a fire, rested, and the next day paddled, hiked, and scrambled with our sketching gear to a vista above Lumsden Lake.

I'm not too proud of the India ink and mixed media sketches I did but they show some improvement within themselves (left to right). They are not finished products but, making them kept me in the places I wandered off to by myself, getting a feel for it.

After Tony and Todd left, I hung around for a couple of nights, got bored with my own company and returned home and retired to the studio.

I got back to work on LandSea07 which I started painting (click "back" below) on August 8. It's about 2/3 done and even in this uncompleted stage it has taken me longer to paint than anything I've done before.