Grandmother Maple at Sunset (oil on canvas 11 x 14 in.) Sold

-
14 June finds me painting at the foot of a venerable Sugar Maple near Eadie Road, North Russell, Ontario. A Red Squirrel chase explodes, close and urgent, around the base of this tree and up another, launching onto the zig-zag tree-top paths in a territorial dispute. This old Maple and its neighbours are over a metre in diameter, perhaps 200 years old. They look like they may be the first generation after the original woods were cut down, and left as shade trees in a pasture. In 1981 the pasture was
planted around them in White Spruce, leaving the Maples to begin their own grove in the centre - which they did. Now slim young Maples complete the canopy of sun-dappled green.

The tangle of branches at the foot of this tree are from a neighbour that fell, perhaps in the 1998 ice storm. Brush in hand, I glance up from my palette at a slight movement along one of the fungus-blackened fallen limbs and it's a Chipmunk, pausing between broken ends to make some adjustment in the contents of its cheek pouches, but when it notices me reaching for my camera, it's off with a squeak, under, over, and away. I have an image in my mind, which I will paint right - here!

The tree is massive, and I feel inspired. As I apply big strokes in a race with the advancing sunset and the gathering mosquitoes, Fred explores, finding scattered patches of Viola pubescens past flowering, and a few scattered patches of Trout Lily leaves. We passed through one patch of Enchanter's Nightshade at the edge of the Spruces today, and last time we were here Fred found a tiny patch of Spring Beauty in bloom, but all the distinctive spring ephemerals of Sugar Maple woods are missing -  Bloodroot, Trillium, Hepatica, Wild Ginger, Cohosh, Dutchman's Breeches, the list goes on and on. It takes more than old trees to make a mature forest! There is plenty of fallen wood and rotting logs, with a diversity of little mushrooms and bracket fungi, food for the grey Arion slugs that we haven't identified yet - but most of the forest floor is a thin layer of last fall's leaves. The forest is waiting for its floor to fill in with understory shrubs and herbs. The next time we visit, we will bring some local Wild Leeks as a contribution to forest floor biodiversity.


Comments

  1. Fred SchuelerJune 17, 2012 at 5:49 PM

    Those flames of colour on the trunks of the trees are the sunset shooting through the northwestern edge of the stand. Old pasture trees embedded in young woods are a regular feature of eastern Ontario, which was nearly deforested, except for some sugar bushes, before fossil fuels began to be used to heat houses in the 20th Century.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Fred SchuelerJune 18, 2012 at 10:47 PM

    facebook commenters have remarked that this painting is spectacular, and it was spectacular as soon as Aleta started to put in the background trees to the left of the grandmother. The advantage she had over the conventional forest interior, with its darkness and bright sky, was that the sunset was coming in horizontally through the edge of the stand, and lightening things up, though when we finished it was still a lot brighter outside than it was in the woods (it's a Sugar Maple stand in a year when a long cool period encouraged the generous growth of leaves).

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

What do you think of this painting, and what do you know about the subject that I have painted?

Popular posts from this blog

Sturgeon Chute, Upper Rapids (oil on canvas, 12 x 16 in.) Sold

-
Image
1 October finds me painting at the upstream rapids of Sturgeon Chute on the Wanapite River, 6.7 kilometres northwest of Hartley Bay. To get just the right angle on the rapids, screened by flaming leaves of an overhanging Red Maple, I'm standing on a narrow grassy ledge, the small of my back leaning against a cold wall of smooth granite, with the feet of my easel only a few centimetres from the edge. About two metres below, courses the fast deep water,
Read more

Outfall at Nuclear Beach

-
Image
Outfall at Nuclear Beach (oil on birch panel 11x14 in.) 24 January 2024 finds me starting a plein air painting on the icy shore of Lake Ontario, near Pulaski, New York, looking east across Mexico Bay toward the cooling stack of the Nine Mile Point nuclear power station.  I have set myself up to paint on a low ice shelf close to the water, near a bank of amazing ice cobbles tumbled smooth in the waves of a recent storm. At my feet a creek is running free from beneath its silent sheets of ice, along a high barrier of storm-piled frozen wave-spray mixed with ice cobbles. The gentle swells moving in from Lake Ontario splash against ice covered boulders where it finally meets the lake. After I took my initial reference photos, cousin Delos who had guided me here to his favourite spot for photographing sunsets, departed to prepare supper.  By the time I had decided on a painting spot and arranged my plein air studio, the dark clouds on the horizon had lightened, spreading across Me...
Read more

Little Marsh in Limerick

-
Image
"Little Marsh in Limerick" (Oil on birch panel, 6 x 6 in.) 26 December 2023 finds me capturing sunset colours through a tear in the clouds over a small Cattail marsh on Forsythe Rd, 2.3 km E of McRoberts Corner, in Limerick Forest, Grenville County, Ontario. It is 7C after rain, and the road is muddy. We’ve had a rainy Christmas with temperatures well above seasonal average. Cheryl is in the driver’s seat, watching me paint my annual birthday plein air in oils on a   6 x 6 inch cradled birch panel, trying to get it covered with paint before we lose the light and go home for supper.   This little marsh, only a few minutes from home, is a familiar scene. There are observations in Fred’s database over the course of 40 years from this spot, of Muskrat, Beaver, Snapping Turtle, Painted Turtle,  Green Frog, Great Blue Heron, and Red Squirrel. This is a few hundred metres from “Site F” where we listen each spring to monitor Wood Frogs, Gray Tree Frogs, and Spring Peepers....
Read more