Crooked Creek Rocks and Water (oil on canvas 11 x 14 in.) Sold

-
14 August finds me on the west bank of Crooked Creek, in the Caledonia Gorge Protected Natural Area (PNA) north of Riverside Albert, New Brunswick. I am fascinated by the flat-sided water-smoothed gray-green rock cutting the water like a dorsal fin, and in contrast, the rusty-coloured rock lying beside it like the head of a mastiff. The colours, shapes, and textures of the rocks in Crooked Creek are so diverse that it merits another painting!
 I am on the same side of the river as the rock I painted in June last year, but this time the wooden "first bridge" has been rebuilt so I can walk across and get a different angle on things. The idea of the second year of these two-year all-taxon inventories run by the New Brunswick Museum, is to revisit in a different year's weather, the territory that we became familiar with in the first year, and to fill in more of the gaps. It feels good to be back!

Comments

  1. Kay L. DaviesAugust 16, 2012 at 12:40 PM

    Beautiful, Aleta. This reminds me of the photos of BC rivers in my father's Living Rivers of British Columbia books. Rivers and streams were his favourite things in life, not counting my mother, of course who was his lifelong love, and perhaps not counting us, although we didn't really want to find out if we came before or after rivers.
    K

    ReplyDelete
  2. Fred SchuelerAugust 16, 2012 at 12:58 PM

    This creek is has astonishingly few of the organisms we specialize in and even very few fish, but I'm going to try to walk long stretches of it to see if there are "hidden pockets of Unionid mussel diversity" - or "Unionid mussel presence," as the case may be.

    ReplyDelete
  3. KarenAugust 16, 2012 at 7:25 PM

    Beautiful! This is a hot contender for my very favorite of all your "30 Years Later" paintings!
    Karen

    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