I Recommend…

July 15, 2013July 21, 2013 | drawandshoot

I recommend leaving the world behind for a while. Taking along light canoes and heavy packs and paddling to a new campsite every day. A campsite with a warm lake and a crackling fire.

I recommend sleeping in a tent under the stars, watching the fireflies light up the velvet night and then waking to early morning birdsong you can’t identify.

I recommend morning coffee, evening tea, and daily swims.

I recommend traveling with a diverse group of people and having a (borrowed) 6-year-old in your canoe at all times. One that tells jokes and sings songs and just might be smarter than you.

I recommend changing pace.
The pace of a paddle, a canoe, and some wilderness.

[All these images were made this past week at Killarney Provincial Park in Ontario.]

*Note: I also recommend bug spray and short portages!

Long Days and Tall Grass

June 21, 2013August 8, 2014 | drawandshoot

(Untitled. Oil, graphite and Conté on Mylar)

It’s the first day of summer here and it feels like a true summer day with gently swaying grasses in the sunshine and strange insects in the garden.

[The first image is a painting/drawing in progress (I never know whether to call my pieces paintings or drawings – I guess they are both) and the other two images are photographs made with camera movement.]

The Dunes

June 3, 2013September 16, 2014 | drawandshoot

This is one of my favourite places. There is a little sliver of Lake Ontario in the first image, and the sand and dunes you see here are part of the worlds largest freshwater sandbar. I remember clearly the first time I put my feet in this sand. It was the summer I was 16. That’s a while ago.

Moving and Still

May 23, 2013 | drawandshoot

What Water Does

April 19, 2013 | drawandshoot

“If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.”
― Loren Eiseley

Above and below: Seedheads covered in ice from freezing rain – the patterns develop as the ice starts to melt away and break up into smaller pieces.

FrostFeathers Frost flowers develop when it is very cold and the air is quite moist. The ones pictured here formed on thin ice at the edge of the river near open water, on a night when the temperature dipped to -25C.

Above: A tiny branch with phantom ‘leaves’ on a cold winter morning.

Below: A small frost formation on a window.

The Ottawa River shifting through the seasons.

I sometimes find it difficult to shift my visual thinking/creativity away from the winter landscape in the spring. For me it holds a bit of magic like no other season. The key to these transformations is water. From raindrops to snowflakes, to ice and frost, is there anything with more imagination than water?

The landscape is mostly shades of brown now with small bits of green trying to emerge through the damp earth. The river has lost its ice. Most of the photographs here have been posted on these pages before, some even from the previous winter, so I guess this is a bit of a recap (or an ice cap), but together they attempt to illustrate, and to let go of, the season that has just passed.

Also, on Monday April 22nd it will be Earth Day! In 2013 the focus is on climate change and how it is impacting people, creatures and environments the world over. You can learn more (and participate) by going to the Earth Day website. It is our collective voices and actions that make changes.

What are your plans for Earth Day?

Residuals 2

April 14, 2013 | drawandshoot

A little extra winter here the past few days but I don’t think the remainder of ice on the river can last too much longer. The coming days look to be shifting into real spring.

The footprints made by a black bear who has been walking near the river were quite distinguishable in the fresh snow. It’s not too often a bear would be wandering in this area so close to the city but there are corridors of greenspace and waterways that are well used by wildlife. It’s one of things that makes this city so interesting.

Residuals 1

April 11, 2013 | drawandshoot

Marbled meltwater.

Sweeping Gestures

March 25, 2013 | drawandshoot

Dissolution

March 16, 2013 | drawandshoot

Taking things apart.

Above are the two separate images I had combined in the previous post. The duck is cropped to make it less central. It still feels very familiar to me this particular bird-in-flight form.

It twigged a memory of watching the herons in flight during the last days of Autumn, just before migration. It is such a different form.

[Thank you to everyone who joined in the discussion for the last post. It was very interesting!]

draw and shoot

Shooting photographs, drawing lines…

Landscape