Winter Breakup (oil on canvas, 8 x 16 in.) Sold
18 January found me standing on the bridge at the dam in Oxford Mills, Ontario, admiring the wonderful diversity of forms and textures of ice and water during a mid-winter breakup. Most of our visits to Kemptville Creek at the Oxford Mills dam are nocturnal, as each Friday night through the winter we monitor a population of giant aquatic salamanders, Necturus nebulosus the Mudpuppy. We have been doing this for 15 years, and invite the public to join us in the count . The diversity of forms and textures of ice have always excited me, and I'm pleased with the idea of painting ice and water as a subject in itself, with no view of the surrounding scene. This allows the painting to approach the abstract while maintaining enough realism to engage the mind in exploring the lights and textures as real. My eyes and brushes play about the swirling foam over the brown and golden depths and shallows, and distinguish between golden submerged ice and milky translucent old ice, and the pi